One Sunday, I read a line that stopped me: What if Easter never happened? That question sent my mind down a simple but powerful trail — beyond the Sistine Chapel and grand cathedrals, how different would the world be without Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and the movement his followers built? Not just the salvation of our very souls, but also how the world would have evolved if left to its own devices.
To answer it honestly, we have to start not with what we’d lose, but with what we’d be left with — the world as it actually was before the gospel changed it.
Before Easter, there was Rome. And Rome, for all its engineering and philosophy, was a civilization built on brutality and indifference. In ancient Roman society, abortion was rampant, infanticide was commonplace, and women were treated harshly with little to no rights. Roman law literally required that deformed or unwanted newborns be killed. Killing babies soon after birth was a near-universal practice — they would be drowned, tossed into rivers, or abandoned on hillsides. In the Greco-Roman world, large families were rare, not because of poverty alone, but because of infant elimination.
The arena told the same story. Many Roman emperors made killing a spectacle — a form of entertainment — and gladiatorial contests flourished for nearly seven centuries. It ended only because of a single act of Christian conscience. On January 1, 404 AD, a Christian monk named Telemachus rushed into the Colosseum to stop a gladiatorial fight and was killed by the crowd — but his sacrifice so moved Emperor Honorius that the games were brought to a halt.
This was the world Easter interrupted. Anyone who wasn’t a nobleman — infants, women, slaves, and the poor — was a potential victim of ancient cruelty. Against this backdrop, the Apostle Paul’s declaration that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” wasn’t just theology — it was social dynamite.
It was the followers of Christ who first introduced the Roman world to disinterested benevolence — helping someone who couldn’t help you in return. Pagans were amazed to see that Christians not only cared for their own needy, but also provided for other people’s poor.
That impulse eventually became our very foundation. Beginning in the 4th century, it was decreed that for every church built, a corresponding hospital be built next to it. Before that, the best doctors only made house calls, which meant only the wealthy could afford to see a physician. The poor had to go without. So Christians — motivated by Christ’s teaching to “care for the least of these” — began building hospitals where the poor could receive care they could not afford. This was the birth of today’s hospital.
Without Easter, there would be no Red Cross, no Sisters of Charity, no Salvation Army, no YMCA — the rise of orphanages, homes for the aged, hospitals, mental institutions, and numerous agencies for the care of needy human beings can all be traced back to the Church.
The same moral energy that built hospitals built schools. Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries, and the university is generally regarded as an institution that has its origin in the medieval Christian setting, born from cathedral schools.
Christian monasteries preserved classical learning through the Dark Ages, copying texts and maintaining libraries. But Christianity didn’t just preserve learning — it democratized it. The Protestant Reformation emphasized literacy so that believers could read the Bible, which led to mass education movements.
No institution better illustrates the world-changing power of Christian conviction than the abolitionist movement. Slavery had existed in virtually every culture in human history — accepted, unremarkable, economically central. What is remarkable in the Western world is not simply that people opposed slavery for themselves, but the rise of opposition to slavery in principle. Among the first to embrace abolitionism were the Quakers, and other Christians soon followed, applying the biblical notion that human beings are equal in the eyes of God.
In 1957, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which assumed a posture of Christian nonviolence to promote its objectives. Without Easter, it is difficult to imagine where the moral vocabulary for universal human dignity would have come from, or who would have organized the political will to act on it.
The modern assumption that science and Christianity are adversaries is almost precisely backward. The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries saw many early scientists who were devout Christians and who viewed their work as a way to understand God’s creation more deeply. Johannes Kepler believed that studying celestial mechanics revealed divine order in the universe. Similarly, Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking work in physics was underpinned by his theological beliefs. As Kepler wrote, scientific discovery was like “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” They didn’t study the universe despite their belief in God, but because of it.
The same is true of democracy. At least 50 of the 55 signers of the U.S. Constitution were orthodox Christians. America’s foundational idea of the rule of law rather than the authority of man traces back to the Old Testament, beginning with the Ten Commandments. The notion that all men are created equal, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, is a biblical doctrine.
Thinking about a world without Easter isn’t only about fewer cathedrals or missing paintings — it’s imagining a world where the vulnerable had no organized champion, where the sick poor had nowhere to go, where children could be discarded by law, where enslaved people had no movement to demand their freedom, where the great universities never opened their doors.
As C.S. Lewis observed, the Christians who have done the most for this world were precisely those who thought most about the next. The Resurrection gave believers a boldness that turned moral teaching into lasting institutions and reforms. It convinced them that love was not a sentiment but a force with the power to remake the world.
The map of compassion and civic life would look very different without Easter. Not just dimmer — but in many of its most humane features, simply absent.
