A recent poll by the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of
Americans who “think” that religion plays a role in solving important
social problems “has fallen significantly” in the past fifteen years.
In 2001, 75 percent of those polled said that religious institutions
played such a role in our society. By 2016, the percentage had dropped
to 58 percent.
Now what’s changed? There’s no evidence that religious institutions
have reduced their efforts in addressing the problems around them. Pew
suspects that the drop has something to do with the rise of the
so-called “nones,” the religiously unaffiliated.
I think part of the problem is that the religious contribution to the
common good is so woven into the fabric of American life that most
people these days just take it for granted and never stop to think about
how prevalent it really is.
So today I want to talk about one such contribution: religious
hospitals. As Wikipedia tells us “Greek and Roman religion did not
preach of a duty to tend to the sick.” The idea of the hospital grew out
of the “Christian emphasis on practical charity,” especially towards
the sick.
Thus, as historian Roy Porter wrote in his book “The Greatest Benefit
to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity,” “Christianity planted the
hospital.” Or stated differently, without Christianity, there would be
no hospitals, at least not as we understand the idea.
That’s why, again quoting Wikipedia, the Catholic Church is “the largest [non-governmental] provider of health care
services in the world.” How large? “It has around 18,000 clinics . . .
and 5,500 hospitals, with 65 percent of them located in developing
countries.” By one estimate, the Catholic Church “manages 26 percent of
the world's health care facilities.”
So unless folks don’t consider providing health care in the developing
world as “an important social problem,” the 42 percent who answered
Pew’s question in the negative could not be more wrong.
But in the off chance that respondents interpreted the question to mean
“important social problems” just in the U. S., well one in six hospital
beds in our country is located in a Catholic hospital. In at least
thirty communities, the Catholic hospital is the only hospital in a
35-mile radius. This doesn’t even take into account hospitals run by
other Christian bodies such as Baptists, Methodists, and especially
Seventh-Day Adventists.
Now for many progressives, this is a bad thing since these hospitals do
not, because of their “commitment to the sacredness and dignity of
human life from conception until death” define “women’s health” in the
same way they do. To them, the spread of Catholic hospitals just means
fewer abortions, and of course, that’s bad.
For someone actually sick and in need of medical care, this is completely irrelevant, if not perverse.
And speaking of perverse: many also have the strange notion that if
Christian institutions got out—or as some would prefer, were forced
out—of the health care business, government would just somehow pick up
the slack.
This highlights the foolishness of the pro-abortion ideological crusade
against Christian professionals and organizations in health care. As
we’ve talked about before on BreakPoint, Washington State is already
forcing Christian pharmacists (who by the way got no help from the
Supreme Court) to choose between their faith and their careers. If
states or the federal government attempt to force Christian hospitals to
perform abortions, and those hospitals close their doors, the results
would be catastrophic.
As I said earlier, the Christian commitment to caring for the sick, and
other acts of compassion, are such a part of American life they’re
taken for granted. So over the next few months, we’ll be talking a lot
about these contributions that Christians make to American life every
single day. You’ll want to stay tuned and share these stories with your
friends.
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