Nick Kristof: Faith Motivates People to Serve Those in Desperate Need

Last updated on: July 3, 2015 at 2:41 pm by Rebecca Florence Miller

Nick Kristof: Faith Motivates People to Serve Those in Desperate Need 2015-07-03T14:41:16-06:00 Rebecca Florence Miller

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I have heard previously Nick Kristof talk about his admiration for the way that people of faith frequently are the ones to go to really desperate places in the world. He has just done so again, and his column about Dr. Tom Catena, a Catholic surgeon in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan (an area I wrote about in my review of Beats of the Antonov) deserves your time. The people of the Nuba Mountains have been routinely bombed by the Sudanese government for four years. They have been virtually abandoned by the world. Barring the action of nations around the world, only people who are willing to put themselves at great personal risk, for little in return, can help.

Kristof is willing to criticize the Christian community when he disagrees, but he also respects people of faith greatly. Through his wide travels, he has encountered objective fact that people of faith are routinely the most likely people to go and serve in unsightly, dangerous places. This is not to say they are the only ones, but they are definitely the most numerous. This suggests to me an objective benefit that faith brings to the world. Even when we consider all the evils done in the name of God, what would we lost in a world without religion?

Kristof writes:

For his risks and sacrifices, Dr. Tom earns $350 a month — with no retirement plan or regular health insurance. …

He is driven, he says, by his Catholic faith. “I’ve been given benefits from the day I was born,” he says. “A loving family. A great education. So I see it as an obligation, as a Christian and as a human being, to help.”

There also are many, many secular aid workers doing heroic work. But the people I’ve encountered over the years in the most impossible places — like Nuba, where anyone reasonable has fled — are disproportionately unreasonable because of their faith.

Is there such a thing as a holy unreasonableness? A holy refusal to yield to persistent evil? A holy willingness to consider that since this life is not all there is, one is willing to sacrifice more readily for the sake of others? And is there a holy sense of being loved by God that enables one to treat other human beings also as beloved?

What would the world be like without that?

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