Snippet: History's Most Prolific Justice Movement

Snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from Jonathan Tremaine in a recent Lectio 365 devotional:

“This week we’re exploring the person and work of Jesus as the leader of history’s most prolific justice movement.”

I know this, but the way he put it just struck me.

According to some historians and social scientists (thinking of Jonathan Haidt and Tom Holland, both atheists), there have been no other comprehensive justice and compassion movements inspired by any other ideology or religion outside of Christianity and Judaism.

A few years ago, Tom Hollard wrote an article titled “Why I was wrong about Christianity: It took me a long time to realise my morals are not Greek or Roman, but thoroughly, and proudly, Christian.” The title is the article in a nutshell. He writes that after years of study, “the founding conviction of the Enlightenment – that it owed nothing to the faith into which most of its greatest figures had been born – increasingly came to seem to me unsustainable.”

He continues, “Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents.”

As others have put it, Western society, in its pursuit of justice and the practice of compassion for the poor and powerless, is still living off the fumes of Christianity.