Christians have a long history of putting themselves at risk to help others during plagues. For example, the Plague of Cyprian (251–66) is estimated to have killed two-thirds of the population of Alexandria, Egypt. And yet,

During the Plague in Alexandria when nearly everyone else fled, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying.

Many Christians will point to medieval hospitals to argue that they were pioneers in giving us the medical system that we know today. Let’s consider that claim.
(Part 1 considered the similar claim that Christianity is responsible for modern universities.)
Health care in the Bible
We can look to the Bible to see where Christian contributions to medical science come from.
We find Old Testament apotropaic medicine (medicine to ward off evil) in Numbers 21:5–9. When God grew tired of the Israelites whining about harsh conditions during the Exodus, he sent poisonous snakes to bite them. As a remedy, God told Moses to make a bronze snake (the Nehushtan). This didn’t get rid of the snakes or the snake bites, but it did mean that anyone who looked at it after being bitten would magically live. So praise the Lord, I guess.
This is a “hair of the dog” type of treatment, as is homeopathic “medicine.” Just as bronze snake statues are useless as medicine today, Jesus and his ideas of disease as a manifestation of demon possession was also useless. To those who point to Jesus’s few individual healings as evidence that Jesus cared about public health, I ask why Jesus didn’t eliminate any diseases or at least give us the tools to do so.
The Father of Western Medicine was Hippocrates, not Jesus.
Medieval hospitals
Without science, a hospital can do nothing but provide food and comfort. Palliative care is certainly something, and let’s celebrate whatever comfort was provided by church-supported hospitals, but these medieval European institutions were little more than almshouses or places to die—think hospitals without the science.

Christian medicine did not advance past that of Galen, the Greek physician of 2nd century who wrote medical texts and whose theories dominated Western Christian medicine for over 1300 years. Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance) did the physician Andreas Vesalius surpass Galen in the area of human anatomy.

Let’s also be cautious about how much credit Christianity gets rather than simply Christians. People planning a hospital in Europe 500 years ago would’ve been Christians, not because no one but Christians were motivated to build hospitals but because in Europe at that time, pretty much everyone was Christian.
Hospitals of that time in other regions of the world would’ve been built by people who reflected those societies—Arabs, Chinese, and so on, and India, Greece, and Rome were trying to systematize health care long before Christians.
Christianity’s poor attitude toward learning
Christianity had an uneasy relationship with any ideas that didn’t directly support the Church. The 1559 Index Librorum Prohibitorum listed books by 550 authors that were prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, though prior lists had prohibited books almost since the beginning of Christianity. The list is a Who’s Who of Western thought and included works by Sartre, Voltaire, Hugo, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Bacon, Milton, Locke, and Pascal. The List was abolished only in 1966.
Dr. Peter Harrison says, “From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeen century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice.” For example, Augustine compared physical lust to “vain desire and curiosity … of making experiments with the body’s aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.” Martin Luther said, “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.”
This aversion to knowledge is ironic because when the Church was motivated, it could accomplish great things. My favorite example is the thirteenth-century explosion of innovative cathedrals that still stand today.
A modern look at Christianity’s medieval hospitals
We can get a picture of medieval Christian hospitals by looking at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity hospitals. They have minor comforts, and at best they are comfortable places to die. They’re not meant for treating disease and often lack even pain medication. This isn’t for lack of funds—some estimates claim that the charity took in $100 million per year, though we can only guess because the finances are secret.
One critique noted the mission’s “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.” Christopher Hitchens said, “[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.” Mother Teresa’s own philosophy confirms this: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”
This is the opposite of the approach of modern hospitals.
Hospitals and medicine today
Let’s return to the Malcolm Muggeridge quote with which I started this post series: “I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.”
Maybe the humanists were more focused on curing the problem than simply addressing the symptoms and having a good old pray.
I’d like to give credit where it’s due. If the medieval Church catalyzed human compassion into hospitals that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, that’s great, but don’t take that too far. The Church was largely in charge at that time. If the Church deserves praise for its hospitals, does it also deserve some condemnation for the social conditions that forced people into those hospitals? Did Christianity retard medical science with its anti-science attitude? We forget how long a road it was to reach our modern medical understanding. The book Bad Medicine argues that “until the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.” Christianity might have set modern medical science back centuries.
How many diseases has faith cured? How many have reasoning and evidence? Smallpox killed 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. Today, zero. Thank you, science.
Catholic hospital systems are today busy gobbling up independent hospitals in the United States. This appears to have nothing to do with providing improved health but rather to be an opportunity to impose Catholic moral attitudes in areas such as abortion and euthanasia. And note that “Catholic” hospitals are publicly funded, just like all the rest.

For religious hospitals, 46 percent of all revenues came from Medicaid or Medicare, 51 percent was patient revenue from other third-party payers, such as commercial insurers, and only 3 percent was classified as non-patient revenues.
Of those non-patient revenues, the majority came from county appropriations (31 percent) and income from investments (30 percent). Only 5 percent derived from unrestricted contributions, such as charitable donations from church members. So, at best, charitable contributions made up a tiny faction of religious hospitals’ operating revenues. (Source: “No Strings Attached: Public Funding of Religiously-Sponsored Hospitals in the United States”)

The few billion dollars that religion spends on good works in the United States is insignificant compared to the nearly trillion dollars that we as a society spend on health care through Medicare and Medicaid.
I’ll conclude with an observation about Mother Teresa’s charity, a modern throwback to medieval Christian hospitals. Speaking about her stance against condoms, which replaced science with Catholic prudery and removed a barrier against sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, one source said, “More people died as a result of dangerous Church beliefs than Mother Teresa could ever have hoped to save.”
Related posts:

• “Christianity Is a Hospital, and Sinners Are Ill (Or Not)”
• “The Bible’s Confused Relationship with Science”
• “Why Does the Bible Have No Recipe for Soap?”

Do you know what they call alternative medicine
that’s been proven to work?
Medicine.
— Tim Minchin, “Storm”

There was a time when religion ruled the world.
It is known as The Dark Ages.
— Ruth Hurmence Green

Image credit: MilitaryHealth, flickr, CC

(Happy Groundhog Day! I’ve written about the religious foundation of Groundhog Day here.)
As the world’s superpower, the United States is sometimes criticized for its foreign policy, but we often forget one of America’s greatest gifts to the world, the secular constitution. Paul Kurtz of the Center for Inquiry has said that 94 national constitutions are explicitly neutral on religion, with the U.S. Constitution being the very first. It’s frustrating that the secular nature of the Constitution is now being second guessed, when that trait is the friend not only of the atheist and non-Christian but also of the Christian.
Don’t Like History? Rewrite It!
History revisionists like David Barton (whose 2012 book The Jefferson Lies was recalled by its Christian publishing house for historical inaccuracies) imagine that America was founded on biblical principles.
The Constitution is full of biblical inspiration, he says:

You look at Article 3, Section 1 [sic], the treason clause. Direct quote out of the Bible. You look at Article 2, the quote on the president has to be a native born? That is Deuteronomy 17:15, verbatim. I mean, it drives the secularists nuts because the Bible’s all over it! … [We Christians] think it’s a secular document; we’ve bought into their lies. It’s not.

The Constitution not secular? There is no mention of deities, and the only mention of religion is to prohibit religious tests for public office in Article 6. But let’s investigate Barton’s claims.
First, the treason clause. In another video he makes clear what “direct quote” he’s talking about:

On the testimony of two or three witnesses a person shall be put to death, but no one shall be put to death on the testimony of only one witness (Deut. 17:6).

Compare that with the Constitution:

No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court (Art. 3, Sect. 3).

That’s the great wisdom that the founding fathers had to consult the Bible for—that you need at least two witnesses for an important crime? And that’s hardly a direct quote.
Consider what the Bible is talking about in this chapter: if anyone worships a god besides Jehovah, you are to stone them to death, with the witnesses the first to cast the stones. Death penalty for worshipping the wrong god? Uh, no—that’s about as unconstitutional as it comes.
In Barton’s second point, he compares

Be sure to appoint over you a king Jehovah your God chooses. He must be from among your fellow Israelites. Do not place a foreigner over you, one who is not an Israelite (Deut. 17:15).

With

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States … shall be eligible to the Office of President (Art. 2, Sect. 1, Clause 5).

That’s not a “verbatim” copy. That’s not even a rough approximation. The United States is to pick a king that God chooses?!
Not … even … close.
No, David, what “drives the secularists nuts” is your blatant lies. Do you assume your audience is too ignorant to know the truth? Or that they’re too stupid to care about it?
What Would a Religious Constitution Look Like?
There are lots more false Barton statements, but he’s a waste of time. If the founding fathers had wanted America to be governed by Christian or biblical principles, they would have said so in the Constitution.
Compare it with the constitution of the Philippines, which implores the aid of “the Almighty God,” or Malaysia, which makes Islam the official religion, or Nigeria, which declares that it is a “nation under God,” or even the new constitution of Egypt, which makes Islam the official religion and Islamic Sharia the “principle source of legislation.”
The signers of the Constitution knew full well how to make religious constitutions since these same founding fathers helped to create constitutions in their states. Maryland granted religious protection for Christians only, New Jersey referred to “the inestimable privilege of worshipping Almighty God,” Pennsylvania required office holders to acknowledge that the Bible was divinely inspired, and Vermont required all men to declare “by the ever living God” that they will honorably carry out civic responsibilities such as voting.
That’s what the Constitution would’ve looked like if the founding fathers had wanted it to be religious. By contrast, the U.S. Constitution begins “We the People.” By not referring to God, it says volumes.
Related post: “The U.S. Constitution is 100 Percent Secular—or Is It?”

The likelihood that America is a Christian nation
is directly proportional to the number of occurrences
of the words “Jesus,” “Christ,” “God,” “Bible,” and “Christianity”
in the US Constitution.
— Richard S. Russell

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/4/13.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia