Christians Are Getting It Right

10 August 2026  2 Corinthians 9:6-10

Feast of St. Lawrence, Deacon and Martyr

“The one who supplies seed to the sower and bread for food will supply and multiply your seed and increase the harvest of your righteousness.” 

(2 Corinthians 9:10)

St. Lawrence, archdeacon of Rome, understood what was going on in A.D. 258 better than Emperor Valerian did.

The 250s were the high point of the Plague of Cyprian. No one knows what the pathogen was – maybe measles, maybe even Ebola – but whatever it was, it was incredibly deadly. A thousand people were dying from it in Rome every day; it killed off two-thirds of the population of Alexandria. Christians in Rome took care of the sick and buried the dead when no one else would, and so their popularity with the people grew. The emperor, however, saw Christians as a security risk. Valerian believed Christian refusal to worship the old Roman gods angered the deities and so caused the crisis. He ordered the Christians to hand over all their treasures to help pay the expenses of the plague. Archdeacon Lawrence brought him the poor, the widows, the sick who were recovering, the grieving whom Christians were helping, and said, “These are the treasures of the Church.” Archdeacon Lawrence knew the people were with him – and Valerian knew it, too.

The data don’t yet support the claim that a revival is going on. But if there were to be a revival, this is the way it would start. Secularists may hate us for it, but in one area after another, Christians are getting it right.

Lawrence was confronting the Emperor with his greatest weakness, and Valerian hated him for it. In his rage, he said he would kill Lawrence “by inches.” He strapped him to an iron grill and cooked him to death. But the Christians were getting things right, and they stayed on Lawrence’s side. They still are.

In our time, Christians are getting it right on the math and the science. The best scientists in the world are concluding that the emergence of life in the universe cannot have been a random event. The math simply doesn’t support it, and the encoded information deep inside every strand of DNA indicates the participation of Mind at the origins of life. The consensus of the best scientists (including scientists like Einstein) is that the universe is not, in fact cannot be, infinite in the past, indicating that the universe had a beginning, and so had a cause. Scientific and philosophical descriptions of that cause have made God a respectable hypothesis again.

Christians are getting it right on the morals. Tom Holland, in his best-selling and widely influential book Dominion, points out that when it comes to all the moral values we cherish most, we are all swimming in a Christian ocean. The emergence of values like civil rights, human rights, democracy, and religious freedom is unintelligible apart from the moral teaching of Jesus and the heritage of the Church. Critics of the Church’s many sins have to use Christian moral teaching to support their criticisms, and moral claims that try to avoid any connection to Christian moral teaching (e.g. men should play in women’s sports, groups like Hamas are moral exemplars) are being seen more and more as insane. Even arch-atheist Richard Dawkins calls himself a “Cultural Christian” because he can’t imagine a civilized civilization apart from the moral teaching of Jesus.

Christians are getting it right about meaning. The current “crisis of meaning” is evident to almost every observer, and is causing unprecedented levels of depression, loneliness and mental illness, particularly among the young. In response, Bible sales are increasing dramatically – double what they were in 2019, triple what they were a decade ago. Even in the U.S. and Europe, young people are being attracted again to the Church, supposing, hoping that people of faith had it right all along. In places like Africa and Asia the growth is even more astonishing.

The data don’t yet support the claim that a revival is going on. But if there were to be a revival, this is the way it would start. Secularists may hate us for it, but in one area after another, Christians are getting it right.

St. Lawrence, pray for us.