The Golden Rule & Christian altruism

Steve at Right Reason offers up his reasons for how Christianity inculcates a Golden Rulesque altruism.

First, Steve is focused on textual evidence. References in the New Testament. The key issue is this: text can justify behavior, but can it bias it? I am agnostic on this issue at this point. All I would ask for textualists is this: if an alien had only religious texts of various cultures to assess the natures of said cultures, would they be able to make good predictions? I'm not so sure. In many ways textualism seems to me to be post facto abduction. Abduction is great, but it needs to treated with skepticism.

Second, the response doesn't satisfy me for this reason: I have already acknowledged that religious universalism extends the range of who is a member of your "tribe" below, which is why I pointed to the treatment of the pagan Balts by Christian Crusaders and examples of how non-believers still remained inhuman. The way black slaves were treated in both Islam & Christianity was barbarous because they were the heathen.¹ Muslims were not to enslave fellow believers, and neither were Christians to enslave other Christians. Steve's quote of Rodney Stark is exactly apropos of my point: in the Balkans Christians & Muslims (and Catholics and Orthodox) had no problems with bestializing those who were not of their confession. Christianity, in other words, is simply and expanded form of tribalism, "brotherhood." It simply builds and abstracts what is already there!

I wanted to probe whether Steve believed that the manifestly universal altruism of Christian churches today is something special to Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church, though still active in mission work, does engage in a great deal of altruism toward those who do not believe, those outside the tribe, with relatively minimal inducements toward conversion. But, this is a historically new development, and, I would argue that it is a product of the particular nature of the modern West today, with its extreme affluence and idealism. And it is not limited to just the West, there are now Buddhist charities in East Asia which engage in the same sort of work as Christians (sometimes explicitly in imitation of Christianity), and Japan is an enormous foreign aid donor (though it is minimally religious). Finally, there are also Christian churches, such as some evangelical groups, who do not focus greatly on remediation of suffering as much as the more traditional "Great Commission" of conversion of the pagans. This shows that the exemplary altruism of modern Roman Catholicism, and some of the more mainline traditions in Protestantism, is not universalized within Christianity, and in fact it is the "literalists" who seem less concerned with universal altruism (of course, once a group is Christian in the sense than evangelicals consider Christian, they are moved to act, as in Sudan or China).

My overall point is not to confuse causes here, the extreme altruism of some Christian groups in the modern world which does transcend any perception of ingroup-outgroup sensitivities is a feature of Western European Christianity. One might as well say that Western Europeans are genetically coded toward being more altruistic (as some do). Or, one might say that sufficient affluence and security naturally results in the channeling of altruistic energies outwardly as a sign of strength, power and virtue. There is evidence that some East Asian religous groups are now mimicking this tendency, just as in India some reformist Hindu groups modeled themselves upon Christian missionary organizations in their attitude towards inter-caste charity. The fact that you are seeing the spread of this tendency outside of its Western European ghetto suggests to me that it is not necessarily a product of Christianity per se, as much as that Christianity was the channel for this impulse naturally because the culture in which the circumstances favored exorbitant outgroup altruism happened to be Christian.

Addendum: To bring it back to Steve's original point, "But she, like me, is a skeptic whose sensibilities were thoroughly shaped by growing up in a community that was itself thoroughly shaped by a hard-fought and hard-won Christian consensus. Take away that consensus, and...well...who can say, for sure?" Who can say? We can say though that Christian charity tended to be strongly biased (if not totally) toward fellow believers for the vast majority of the history of the religion. The trend toward giving to those who do not believe with only minimal expectations of conversion is a relatively recent phenomenon, perhaps the last few decades. And, these last few decades have been those very decades when Christianity no longer has pride of place as the defining element of what became the West in its transition from Christendom. But I will not to try to claim a causal relationship :)

Addendum II: Wiki has a list of Golden Rule maxims from various religions. I knew of the Confucian one, not the others. Just to reiterate: the idea of the Golden Rule is pretty common, the key is to 1) expand its purview, 2) actually live it. Western Christian culture has been more successful than most in doing this, but I think I have given my reasons as to why I do not think Christianity is necessary for this (it is empirically clearly it is not sufficient).

1 - Steve is wrong when he implies that charity outside of the family-tribe does exist within Islam. Charitable foundations are common throughout the Islamic world, and some of them are of broad scope. Zakat, the 5% charity tax, has long been a feature of Islamic cultures. Because of the local nature of communication it has by definition been narrow disbursed, but less so today. And of course, I know it from my personal experience, my family members give to the poor and needy explicitly pointing to "Islam."