Christianity Makes the World Better for Non-Christians
The rule of law, the presumption innocence until reasonable proof of guilt, and the enforcement of rights like freedom of speech and personal property do not just arise in a vacuum. Read ancient history: These things are not universal. They are fruits that have grown on the Christian tree.
Contrast the Constitution of the United States or the constitution of your state with the legal structure of Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, or North Korea. Legal structures and governing structures that bud from Islam or secularism are of a very different quality from those that develop out of Christian assumptions. If you enjoy the rights of the individual that America currently provides, rights ranging from not being jailed for critical words about the head of state to receiving a trial by jury if charged with a crime, you are enjoying fruits that only grow in Christian soil.
It is only the firm dedication to the reality that individuals are made in the image of God with equal worth and dignity that provides for and protects individual rights. The Communist Party of China does not honor the rights of individuals at all in many cases and certainly does not honor them equally in almost any case; this is a natural outworking of its atheistic, secular, Communist conviction that human beings are not made by God with equal worth and dignity. The convictions of the Chinese government are thoroughly secular and Marxist, and since, in its governing assumptions, human beings are merely the current top of the Darwinian food chain, humans have no intrinsic, inherent rights that China must honor. Additionally, since Communist governments like theirs deny the existence of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who made and makes all humans, there is no agency above the government that can command it conforms its laws to objective standards of justice. In the secular Marxist worldview, justice is whatever China or Cuba or North Korea says it is.
Likewise, the god of Islam is not the God of the Bible, and so laws and governments arising as consequences of Islam will not have the flavor of human dignity you find in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Allah does not provide for or command the individual justice or rights we see in America’s founding documents and institutions, imperfect as they are. Islamic societies produce Islamic laws, natural results of the assumptions the Quran makes. Since the unitarian god of Islam is not the Trinitarian God revealed in the sacrificial crucifixion and triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ, the laws and policies and structures that flow from Islam will not carry the gracious and righteous character of Christian ones.
It must also be said that governments and legal societies built upon Christian assumptions also carry within themselves the tools for their own reformation and reconstruction. The Biblical conviction that men and women and children are made by God with equal worth is what underpinned and fueled the crumbling of American chattel slavery. It is also what I pray will found American repentance for and the destruction of legalized infanticide.
The god of secularism, which will do no more philosophical grounding than to concede that human beings are biological realities currently walking the earth, will certainly not produce and protect individual rights, freedoms, or fairness. Neither will the god of Islam or the pantheistic god of more New Age or Eastern religions. The fact that we are not put in internment camps or that we are not beheaded for illegal speech, the fact that personal property is a legally protected right and that the individual has as much stake as he does in American society, these are the natural consequences of Christian truth employed and enshrined in the public square. We are all benefiting from the natural outworkings of Christianity.
I pray much of the rest of the world will soon.