It is therefore no accident that nearly all of our first universities were created by Christians, often as divinity schools. Almost every hospital was created by Christians. That's why they are called St. X and St. Y and you will never find a hospital named after Charles Darwin or any of his ilk. Indeed, all of western civilization likely has Christianity to thank for its existence, with the monasteries and Christian institutions stepping in as Rome disintegrated. Love them or hate them--no one can accuse the Jesuits of being insincere in their faith AND people of inaction. I can list example after example.

C.S. Lewis, again, put it best: "If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next." [Mere Christianity; be sure to read the rest of the quote.]

It was precisely because Christians were doing the most for the present world that the Progressives in the early 1900's were so outraged. Their complaint--for real--was that Christians were being TOO generous and were TOO sentimental. Christians were devoting their time and resources to the wrong people.

You had remarks such as this, by that famed Progressive, President Theodore Roosevelt:

"...society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. Yet we fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stock, physically and morally, while it encourages or connives at the cold selfishness or the twisted sentimentality as a result of which the men and women who ought to marry, and if married have large families, remain celebates or have no children or only one or two. Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world! and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type." (1913)

Some of you might know a certain Margaret Sanger. In her 1922 she dedicates a whole chapter to "The Cruelty of Charity." This might give you the flavor of it:

"Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease.

Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the "failure" of philanthropy, but rather at its success."

She proceeds to lay out in detail the actual financial figures of charitable giving, the costs of keeping alive the unworthy, etc. Riveting reading. She argues that the State, freed from sentimentalism and guided by science, should become the prime administer of social programs. She has other nice ideas, too, such as concentration camps and compulsory sterilization.

I'm sure the reader can place that recommendation in its historical context... two decades later, guided by the same ideas and principles, other people infamously would do just that, AT SCALE.

And no, I don't mean that other famous Roosevelt, who put Japanese Americans into concentration camps and whose administration gave us red-lining to make sure the "undeserving poor" did not mix with the "deserving poor."

Though it is not the purpose of this post, it is worth noting that Lewis's quote has a secular corollary, something like "those who believe there is no heaven, but seek to make heaven on earth, tend to make earth a hell."

I could discourse on the progressives and their mentality and the actual consequences of their "actions" for hours--and have--but my point with the above quotes is to illustrate that prior to the 1950's, the charitable efforts of Christians was undeniably real and genuine and staggering in its scale... and had TO BE STOPPED.

And it was stopped. And it was stopped with a large support of Christians themselves, who with their big hearts could not say "no" to the increasing involvement in social matters by governments, big and small. I mean, its for the children, right?

As the governments became the prime administrators of social programs, the scope (or shall, I say, 'scraps'?) that was left to Christians became less and less, such that we can now fast forward to today, and see that putatively educated secularists believe that those who pray do nothing else... ignorant of the fact that less and less has been allowed for the Christians to DO. This is why Planned Parenthood can get all the money it wants from the government, but just watch what happens if they even TALK about taxpayer money going to help crisis pregnancy centers! "Not allowed" is part of it, but the larger part is just that secular humanists, through government agencies, now do what the churches used to do. And again, this transition occurred with CHRISTIAN support.

I suppose Christians in the 1930's thought that they were doing good when they supported this transition. Perhaps there were non-Christians at the time that looked at that support and said, "Well gee, those guys are compassionate. I want what they have" and so perhaps came to Christ because of it. But in the long term, the exact opposite has been the result. Today's non-Christians know nothing about such things and only see Christians supporting the small slice of things left that the government does not, or will not, do... yet.
All the matters that had mutual support between Christians and non-Christians were enacted decades ago, before most of us were born. The only issues outstanding (ie, things that people want to have the government do) are the issues where they disagree rabidly. Thus, these non-Christians think Christians are 'doing nothing' because the things the non-Christians want to do are increasingly terrible and malevolent.

Lest my point is too subtle: in the long term, the Christian witness has been SEVERELY harmed and hamstrung by throwing in on government social programs. Our support for these social programs HAS HURT our evangelism. It has LOWERED our regard in the eyes of the world almost to NOTHING. No one remembers anymore that Christians supported all these programs and no one cares if they do, today. It's not an earth shattering affirmation of the Gospel that we support the things the non-Christians support, too.

A Christian today might say "Ah, but all that is needful is to preach the Gospel." This attitude is at odds with historic Christianity as recent as the 1940's and rejects the actual practice of Christians all the way back to the ministry of Jesus.

This is worth defending at length, but let me highlight it by telling you about Julian the Apostate. Despite Christians being constantly persecuted in the first 3 centuries (ie, beaten, tortured, killed), their ranks continued to swell. When the Julian became emperor of Rome, he wrung his hands about the effectiveness of Christians in emptying out the Roman temples. This was his complaint:
"Whilst the pagan priests neglect the poor, the hated Galileans devote themselves to works of charity, and by a display of false compassion have established and given effect to their pernicious errors. See their love-feasts, and their tables spread for the indigent. Such practice is common among them, and causes a contempt for our gods."

His response to this was to enact secular charity programs to compete with the Christians, and this succeeded for him marvelously. (His wielding the sword helped, too.) He blunted the ability of the Christians to show that they really believed the Gospel they were preaching.

Did 20th century secularists have the same intent? It doesn't matter. It has been the effect. The irony is that the Christians during Julian Apostate's reign did not praise God "because at least SOMEONE is doing it" but Christians today say exactly that. They don't know that up until the 1950's, give or take, SOMEONE was doing it: the Christians.

The current trajectory does not look good on this. All signs point towards continued support (by Christians) and expansion of the government into every nook and cranny of human experience. The Gospel will be completely neutered, because the Gospel is for the sick, and it will be forbidden to tell people that they are sick. The signs are all already there. Most of us won't see this happen. It will happen to our children and grandchildren. But a large share of the fault will be ours.

In my experience, no one wants to hear any of this. Somehow, it is 'political.' But it is only 'political' because the secularists have made EVERYTHING political and then conveniently demanded that religion stay out of politics, and Christians have largely acquiesced to this demand. I stand by my statement that to pray is to take action at the highest possible level, as it is appealing to the maker and sustainer of the entire universe.

But I do understand why it is that secularists think this is a meaningless thing and further that to them, Christians don't seem to do anything else besides pray (or sing, or judge people, etc). That isn't true in the slightest. It's just that our paradigm for action is different. And, on top of that, as I've argued in this essay, the scope and range for our action is getting smaller and smaller. And many of us are directly helping that happen.

I don't know what you will do with this information. I know what I'm doing with it, so if someone wants ideas, I guess they could ask me. But its going to take a lot of us to step back and examine how we got where we are, and make the necessary adjustments, to change the trajectory of things. I am doubtful it can be changed. I expect America to go the way of Europe and Africa and perhaps Asia to become the new center of Christianity on the globe.

I did write a long essay on this and put it on Amazon. It can be a starting point for more research, if you wish.

https://www.amazon.com/Julian-....Apostate-Defeated-Ch