For 364 days of the year, newspapers report what goes wrong in the world. On Christmas Day, we celebrate the birth that inspired so much of what’s right. Consider how many instances of enlightenment, progressivism, humanitarianism, and charity are rooted in Christianity. Many of this nation’s most prestigious universities were founded by Christian clergy.
Harvard was formed by Congregationalists to train its church’s ministers.
When some of the faculty decided the school was ecclesiastically lax, they formed Yale as a more stringent alternative. Baptists established Brown University; Presbyterians started Princeton. Columbia University — originally King’s College — was founded by the Church of England.
Hospitals traditionally have been ministries of various Christian denominations. Even today, 85 percent of hospitals in the United States are nonprofit institutions, many retaining their church affiliation. One out of every six is sponsored by the Catholic Church because long before anyone thought of health insurance and managed care, Catholics built hospitals staffed by nuns to care for the sick and the wounded.
Faith fueled the individuals responsible for many of society’s greatest improvements. Jane Addams’s creation of settlement houses laid the foundation for modern social work.
Her crusade on behalf of the poor and the disenfranchised, for which she won the Nobel Peace Prize, was motivated by her Christian faith.
Dorothea Dix changed the way mentally ill individuals are treated — a cause she adopted after teaching Sunday School at a jail and finding the mentally ill housed as criminals.
Recall that it was not a politician but a Christian minister — Martin Luther King Jr. — who led this country’s civil rights movement.
Some of the world’s greatest scientists were driven by their religious ideas. After developing the laws of planetary motion, Johannes Kepler considered his greatest accomplishment that “through my effort, God is being celebrated in astronomy.”
Sir Isaac Newton’s extraordinary achievements in science and math did not dim his passion for the Bible and the early church.
Sir Francis Bacon viewed his work establishing the scientific method of experimentation and reasoning as a service to the church, saying, “Depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” Gregor Mendel’s contributions to the studies of genetics began in the garden of the monastery where he was a monk.
Arguably the greatest artist in Western civilization, Michelangelo saw his work as a sacred calling. “My job is to remove the excess marble that surrounds God’s beautiful creation,” he explained.
Johann Sebastian Bach, considered by some to be the greatest composer, was a devout Lutheran whose musical compositions represented — in his words — “a harmonious euphony to the glory of God.”
Certainly, nonreligious people can possess great talents — just as a house has the same structural soundness when it’s dark as when it’s lit from within — but work performed as a sacred offering has a distinct but ineffable quality.
Can anybody examine the lives of individuals such as Mother Teresa and Albert Schweitzer and define them as mere humanitarians?
Their goal was to model the behavior of Christ, and their ministries reflected that.
Yet the real miracle of Christianity is its impact on the lives of the unremarkable and the inconspicuous — those individuals not noted by history, but shaped profoundly by faith.
For millions of people in the past 2,000 years, the events of Bethlehem have provided hope: that light can infuse the deepest darkness, that glory can be born among the humble, that life’s greatest blessings can come from the most unlikely bearers.
The miracle of Christmas is that the miracle at Bethlehem was not a one-time event.
The baby in a manger always has and always will continue to bring joy to the world.
Examiner columnist Melanie Scarborough lives in Alexandria.
