Do the many reports of a failure of care in our hospitals have anything to do with the nation’s rejection of Christianity?
A GP friend is interested in the animal kingdom.
He says that for him human birth is part of what pushes him to think that we did not evolve from the apes.
For the apes, evidently, there is almost no pain in giving birth. Some of them can actually do it on the move. It is little or no problem. Why then would an ape evolve in a direction such that giving birth is not only very painful but actually can endanger the life of the mother? Why would that happen when reproduction is meant to be vital to the evolutionary process which is meant to result in a fitter more resilient creature? It doesn’t make sense.
What does make sense is that we were made by God, but have turned away from him. That is where the whole of Christianity starts, with our need for a Saviour. By our sin we have brought God’s curse and pain on ourselves and our world, from which we need rescue.
But that aside, thinking of the pain and danger of childbirth, now we have gynaecologists, midwives and the NHS and certainly we have prided ourselves on being a caring and compassionate society. But where did that come from? How come such medical skills are deployed for the good of all in our land? It’s not the case in many places in the world. That’s one of the reasons so many people want to come and live in this country, isn’t it?
Ida Scudder
Historically, a compassionate, caring society grew in Britain because of the influence of Christianity on our nation.
I don’t know whether there was a midwife present at the birth of the Lord Jesus, but the influence of Christianity in the direction of compassion was impressed on me recently as I read the story of a young American woman named Ida Scudder. Having finished her education, she went in 1892 to visit her missionary father in south India. One night a Brahmin (the highest cast of Hindu) man came to her and said that his wife was in labour and could she please come and deliver the baby? Ida replied: ‘I’m not a doctor. My father is a physician. Take him!’ But the Brahmin replied that he could not take a man to see his wife. That night two other men, one a Muslim and another from the fourth class of the Hindu caste system came and asked her the same question. Twice she offered her father to go, but again that was refused.
By morning, sadly, all three women were dead. That shook Ida. She believed God was saying something to her. ‘If these people won’t allow male doctors to see their wives, then there better be female doctors’, she said to herself.
She went back to America, trained at Cornell Medical College, and returned to India in 1900. From there she went on to develop the Vellore Christian Medical College. The result in the long term was amazing. 100 years later, there were more women doctors in India than in any other country in the world.
What people believe
Why did it take Christian influence to bring that kind of step forward in compassion? The answer comes back to faith, religion, to what people believe.
Folk from India are as clever and gifted as anyone else. It wasn’t because Ida Scudder was white Anglo-Saxon that she made the breakthrough. But what held back Indian medicine was what people believed. In Hinduism, there is a caste system. Only the lower castes were supposed to take on service and dirty jobs like nursing and clearing up blood. Then there was the belief in reincarnation and karma. A person’s suffering was believed to be the result of his or her karma (their deeds, good or bad) in a previous life. In other words, suffering was cosmic justice. To interfere with it by alleviating pain might actually mean more pain for the person in a future life. You can see how that might militate against a culture of compassion and care.
And, for similar reasons related to what people believe, medical care has been very slow to grow in both Muslim and Buddhist lands too and often the first hospitals in those lands have Christian missionary beginnings.
Seedbed of compassion
What is it about Christianity which seems to make it a seedbed for compassion? It comes back to the gospel. The Christian understanding of the world and who we are as human beings is that we are very special. We are all made in God’s own image. But we have all rebelled against God, and in so doing have put the world out of kilter, made ourselves dirty in his sight and let ourselves in for eternal trouble. But the good news of Christ is that God was not prepared to leave things like that. In his compassion, his love, he came to our rescue. Jesus, the Saviour, is ‘God with us’ (Matthew 1.23). He came to save us from our sins.
And that rescue wasn’t at all easy. It entailed Jesus being born as a human being that he might suffer on behalf of human beings, in agony on the cross, to pay for all our sins.
Now the logic of compassion is clear. If God so loved us, as to come and die for us, we ought to love another. If God is so compassionate, we should be too. If God so served us, then who do we think we are to think ourselves too high and mighty to serve others? If God didn’t think we were too dirty and offensive in our sins to come and at such cost do us good, then let me overcome what I might find difficult to cope with and what I might find offensive and help others. There’s the rationale.
Today’s outlook
There are two things to say. First, there have been many reports recently about the failure of care in the NHS. No doubt some of this has to do with financial constraints and the need for reorganisation. But I suspect there is more to it than that. Many people today say: ‘Well, yes, I can see that historically, it was Christianity which brought Britain to be a caring society. But we will just have the caring now. We don’t want faith and Jesus’. They want to be secular, with no God. But it’s becoming obvious that that is not working. Rejecting Christianity, people buy into another system of belief — usually that of atheistic evolution. But that is just as unhelpful regarding compassion as the extreme Hinduism which Ida Scudder confronted. Atheism tells us that there’s just this life so you had better enjoy yourself, and that this life is about survival of the fittest. As that idea gains increasing influence, people say to themselves: ‘Why should I want to spend my one shot at life looking after smelly old people and emptying bed pans!’ Carers are often low paid and feel unappreciated, and that atheistic worldview feeds their anger. Isn’t this a factor which relates to the kind of shocking reports we get about what goes on in many elderly care homes?
Second, this leads us personally to Christ. You see, deep down, of course, we know that compassion is right. Whether we realise it or not we are all made in God’s image. That’s why so many people who aren’t Christians (and perhaps work in the NHS) still do try to do a good job. But can you see that, though you know compassion is right, it only actually makes sense, it is only logical, given a Christian view of the world. We should encourage people to let that ‘rightness’ of compassion show them that not only is Christianity true, but that it means that God actually loves them and that they need to find a place in their lives for him that he might save them from their sins.
