ArticleDo you want to be influential?
So do 57% of Gen Zs in America who aspire to be influencers, presumably lured by money and fame. But say you also want to make the world a better place. In that case, maybe the spiritual instruction you need emerges in the famous final lines of George Eliot’s 1871 novel Middlemarch:
…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
Eliot offers a bracing reality check: the spotlight needn’t be on you for you to live an influential life. A life might be “hidden” – a heresy in the social media era, where everything exists to be shared – yet still well lived. You can shape the course of history, even if you leave little trace on it.
This strange idea takes on added significance for me at Christmas. The story of Jesus’ birth is nothing if not “unhistoric” – in the sense of being ignored – even if today we live in the wake of his influence.
Maybe it’s cheeky to file Christmas under “unhistoric” when our times pivot on the life of Christ. BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) bear his trace, the latter meaning “the year of the Lord”. BCE or CE, the non-religious equivalents, sub out “Christ” for “Common Era”. Still, those terms are like the Aldi version of Arnott’s: they piggyback on recognition of the more established brand.
But nothing about the birth of Jesus predicted history’s interest in him. God in human flesh, goes the claim, yet he’s born in obscurity on the outskirts of the Roman empire. Angels announce his birth to nobody shepherds. Wise men bring gifts, but it’s a subdued baby shower. It must be: if jealous King Herod finds Jesus, his baby blanket will become a shroud.
Yet from this unhistoric beginning, big things grow. Early Christians reasoned that if God became a baby in Christ, then God, in a sense, shows up in every vulnerable life, and in extremes of distress and suffering (crucifixion, Jesus’ ghastly end, made a point of that). Discussing research for his 2019 novel Damascus, Christos Tsiolkias glimpsed the staggering implications of this idea:
God is not in the noble Olympian heights. God is not in the palaces. God is actually the man or the woman you step over. That is still revolutionary. That is still hopeful [today].
It’s as though Jesus’ birth also birthed a new way of seeing people. God becoming human enabled people to see how people resembled God. A crazy claim, but it levels the playing field like nothing else. Everyone has dignity. Everyone is regarded as equally valuable. The building of hospitals and charities, movements to end slavery, and efforts to relieve suffering have all flowed on from those convictions – to a point that, these days, we take human equality for granted.
Now, that once incendiary idea feels ordinary. Human rights and the question of human value, we conventionally believe, are a product of the Enlightenment and Western reason and have nothing to do with the baby in the manger.
Is it churlish to point out that the ongoing influence of Jesus, one of the most influential people to have ever lived, remains mostly unacknowledged today? The secular mainstream is shy about Christianity’s influence or (often with good reason) suspicious of it. No wonder historian Tom Holland felt nervous about publishing his blockbuster 2019 tome Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. He knew his was an unpopular thesis: that our belief in the moral equality of all people places us downstream of the Christian revolution.
We still struggle to see it. We can’t quite grasp how Jesus made human value unhistoric, just part of how people with WEIRD sensibilities (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) now operate.
Jesus may have given us new eyes to see each other, but we can’t look at our eyes while we’re looking through them.
Eliot gives us a place to start renewing our attention – by recognising that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts”.
If nothing else, the line doubles as a fitting description of Christianity’s lasting impact. That it was penned by a woman who shed her Christian faith, but largely retained its ethics, is even more ironic. Whatever you believe, Eliot’s is excellent advice: keep adding to the world’s growing good by small acts. Unhistoric on their own, perhaps, but that still prove generative, spawning possibilities long after.
I am left seeking the God who tends to conceal himself in obscure, half-forgotten places: a newborn baby, the rights we claim are universal (but don’t ask why), the neglected moral inheritance of the West. His humility seems surprising, given Christianity’s often brash public profile today. Regardless, I see in Christmas an invitation to see differently: God in the social outcast, life on the margins reimagined as the centre of gravity.
That way of seeing is the Christmas gift that keeps on giving.
Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. An edited version of this article was originally published in The Guardian.