It has become popular, as of late, to publicly criticize Christianity as that which poisons everything. This claim has been made repeatedly by the well-known atheist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens. The claim is of course silly and foolish, particularly when considered in light of Hitchens recent gaining of United States citizenship. It is a generally Christian worldview that led the founders of the United States to declare their independence from Great Britain. It was because they believed that all people had certain unalienable rights endowed by their Creator that they resisted the tyranny of the British crown. I am not claiming that the founders were all good and orthodox Christians. I am claiming that they wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution out of a worldview that was heavily and, perhaps, primarily informed by the Bible and the Protestant Reformation.
In contrast, Hitler advanced his genocidal agenda on the basis of Darwinian evolutionary theory. He saw himself as cleansing the human race of an evolutionary pimple. He was a champion of survival of the fittest. The rejection of a Creator and the adoption of a worldview in which people are mere accidents of chance is necessarily followed by a disregard for the sanctity and sacredness of human life.
So, which worldview poisons everything? The one in which all persons are affirmed as divinely endowed with the right to freedom and life or the one in which the man with the biggest guns always wins? The ideal of freedom for all people exists only because Christianity has so strongly influenced the culture of the West. If secular Darwinian evolutionary dogmatism reigns, we should all be gravely concerned about the danger to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Mr. Hitchens should take note that the United States, of which he has thought enough to take citizenship therein, was founded out of the very worldview which he so vehemently despises. The United States would not have been, if not for the Christian idea that all people are made in the image of the Almighty Creator God.
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