Christianity has been intricately intertwined with the history and formation of Western society. Throughout its long history, the Catholic Church has been a major source of social services like schooling and medical care; an inspiration for art, culture and philosophy; and an influential player in politics and religion. In various ways it has sought to affect Western attitudes towards vice and virtue in diverse fields. Festivals like Easter and Christmas are marked as public holidays; the Gregorian Calendar has been adopted internationally as the civil calendar; and the calendar itself is measured from an estimation of the date of Jesus's birth.
The cultural influence of the Church has been vast. Church scholars preserved literacy in Western Europe following the Fall of the Western Roman Empire. During the Middle Ages, the Church rose to replace the Roman Empire as the unifying force in Europe and is credited with dissolving traditional kinship networks. The medieval cathedrals remain among the most iconic architectural feats produced by Western civilization. Many of Europe's universities were also founded by the church at that time. Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries.Johnson, P. (2000). The Renaissance: a short history. Modern Library chronicles (Modern Library ed.). New York: Modern Library, p. 9. The university is generally regardedRüegg, Walter: "Foreword. The University as a European Institution", in: A History of the University in Europe. Vol. 1: Universities in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, 1992, , pp. XIX–XX as an institution that has its origin in the Medieval Christian setting, born from Cathedral schools. Many scholars and historians attribute Christianity to having contributed to the rise of the Scientific Revolution.
The Reformation brought an end to religious unity in the West, but the Renaissance masterpieces produced by Catholic artists like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael remain among the most celebrated works of art ever produced. Similarly, Christian sacred music by composers like Pachelbel, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Verdi is among the most admired classical music in the Western canon.
The Bible and Christian theology have also strongly influenced Western philosophers and political activists. The teachings of Jesus, such as the Parable of the Good Samaritan, are argued by some to be among the most important sources of modern notions of "human rights" and the welfare commonly provided by governments in the West. Long-held Christian teachings on sexuality, marriage, and family life have also been influential and controversial in recent times. Christianity in general affected the status of women by condemning marital infidelity, divorce, incest, polygamy, birth control, infanticide (female infants were more likely to be killed), and abortion. While official Catholic Church teaching considers women and men to be complementary (equal and different), some modern "advocates of ordination of women and other feminists" argue that teachings attributed to St. Paul and those of the Fathers of the Church and Scholastic theologians advanced the notion of a divinely ordained female inferiority. Nevertheless, women have played prominent roles in Western history through and as part of the church, particularly in education and healthcare, but also as influential theologians and mystics.
Christians have made a myriad of contributions to human progress in a broad and diverse range of fields, both historically and in modern times, including science and technology, medicine, fine arts and architecture, politics, literatures, music, philanthropy, philosophy, ethics, humanism,Davies, p. 477Löffler, Klemens (1910). "Humanism". The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. VII. New York: Robert Appleton Company. pp. 538–542. theatre and business. According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes, a review of Nobel Prize awards between 1901 and 2000 reveals that (65.4%) of Nobel Prizes Laureates, have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference.Baruch A. Shalev, 100 Years of Nobel Prizes (2003), Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, p. 57: between 1901 and 2000 reveals that 654 Laureates belong to 28 different religions. Most (65.4%) have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference. Eastern Christians (particularly Nestorian Christians) have also contributed to the Arab Islamic Civilization during the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods by translating works of Greek philosophers to Syriac and afterwards to Arabic.Hill, Donald. Islamic Science and Engineering. 1993. Edinburgh Univ. Press. , p. 4Ferguson, Kitty Pythagoras: His Lives and the Legacy of a Rational Universe Walker Publishing Company, New York, 2008, (page number not available occurs toward end of Chapter 13, "The Wrap-up of Antiquity"). "It was in the Near and Middle East and North Africa that the old traditions of teaching and learning continued, and where Christian scholars were carefully preserving ancient texts and knowledge of the ancient Greek language." They also excelled in philosophy, science, theology and medicine.
Rodney Stark writes that medieval Europe's advances in production methods, navigation, and war technology "can be traced to the unique Christian conviction that progress was a God-given obligation, entailed in the gift of reason. That new technologies and techniques would always be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships—although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies."
Christianity contributed greatly to the development of European cultural identity, although some progress originated elsewhere, Romanticism began with the curiosity and passion of the pagan world of old. Outside the Western world, Christianity has had an influence and contributed to various cultures, such as in Africa, Central Asia, the Near East, Middle East, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Scholars and intellectuals have noted Christians have made significant contributions to Arab and Islamic civilization since the introduction of Islam.
Politics and law
The relationship between Christianity, politics, and law is a complex, long-standing subject marked by diverse theological and philosophical perspectives. Throughout history, the church has navigated various roles, ranging from complete separation from the state to acting as a dominant political force, as seen during the Middle Ages or within the Roman Empire after Constantine’s conversion. Modern discourse remains divided, with some Christians advocating for active political engagement to promote justice, human flourishing, and public morality, while others emphasize a separation between the "kingdom of God" and worldly governance, warning against the potential for political power to corrupt religious integrity.BBC, BBC—Religion & Ethics—566, Christianity
At the core of this debate is the question of how biblical principles—such as the pursuit of justice, the restraint of evil, and the duty to "love one's neighbor"—should influence legislative and societal frameworks. Many argue that Christianity provides a moral foundation for law, asserting that human statutes should be subordinate to divine or natural law. Conversely, others caution against attempting to "legislate the kingdom," arguing that political systems are inherently limited and incapable of achieving perfection. Ultimately, the discourse balances the belief that Christians have a duty to contribute to the common good with the conviction that their primary allegiance remains outside the sphere of partisan politics.
Sexual morals Classics scholar Kyle Harper says that for a period of time
Both the ancient Greeks and the Romans cared and wrote about sexual morality within categories of good and bad, pure and defiled, and ideal and transgression. But the sexual ethical structures of Roman society were built on status, and sexual modesty meant something different for men than it did for women, and for the well-born, than it did for the poor, and for the free citizen, than it did for the slave—for whom the concepts of honor, shame and sexual modesty could be said to have no meaning at all. Slaves were not thought to have an interior ethical life because they could go no lower socially and were commonly used sexually; the free and well born were thought to embody social honor and were therefore able to exhibit the fine sense of shame suited to their station. Roman literature indicates the Romans were aware of these dualities.
Shame was a profoundly social concept that was, in ancient Rome, always mediated by gender and status. "It was not enough that a wife merely regulate her sexual behavior in the accepted ways; it was required that her virtue in this area be conspicuous." Men, on the other hand, were allowed live-in mistresses called pallake. This, for example, permitted Roman society to find both a husband's control of a wife's sexual behavior a matter of intense importance and at the same time see his own sex with young boys as of little concern. Christianity sought to establish equal sexual standards for men and women and to protect all the young whether slave or free. This was a transformation in the deep logic of sexual morality.
Early Church Fathers advocated against adultery, polygamy, homosexuality, pederasty, bestiality, prostitution, and incest while advocating for the sanctity of the marriage bed. The central Christian prohibition against such porneia, which is a single name for that array of sexual behaviors, "collided with deeply entrenched patterns of Roman permissiveness where the legitimacy of sexual contact was determined primarily by status. St. Paul, whose views became dominant in early Christianity, made the body into a consecrated space, a point of mediation between the individual and the divine. Paul's over-riding sense that gender—rather than status or power or wealth or position—was the prime determinant in the propriety of the sex act was momentous. By boiling the sex act down to the most basic constituents of male and female, Paul was able to describe the sexual culture surrounding him in transformative terms."
Christian sexual ideology is inextricable from its concept of freewill. The Greeks and Romans said moralities depend on social position which is given by fate. Christianity "preached a liberating message of freedom". It was a revolution in the rules of behavior, but also in the very image of the human being as a sexual being, free, frail and awesomely responsible for one's own self to God alone.
Marriage and family life
There has been some debate as to whether the Church has improved the status of women or hindered their progress.