Many of the services Americans take for granted are provided by churches and Christian organizations. It is not hyperbolic to say that core areas of American life would languish or collapse without the contributions of Christian people and organizations. These enormous social contributions are frequently underappreciated, but would certainly be missed.

Perhaps the most important is health care. John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview, wrote in an article titled “No Christianity, No Hospitals: Don’t Take Christian Contributions for Granted”:

One in six hospital beds in our country is located in a Catholic hospital. In at least thirty communities, the Catholic hospital is the only hospital in a 35-mile radius. This doesn’t even take into account hospitals run by other Christian bodies such as Baptists, Methodists, and especially Seventh-Day Adventists.

Catholic hospitals are the largest single category within non-profit hospitals, which themselves account for about half of all hospitals.

. . .

At a lecture once in my college Catholic center, our priest said that if laws required Catholic agencies to place children in same-sex households, the church should suspend its adoption placements entirely. What about the children who won’t get placed in homes, I asked? Can the church sacrifice real people for its own survival? Of course it can, he explained; it is more important to preserve the integrity of the church for the future, because it is the church’s moral and spiritual integrity which inspires it to do social good in the first place. That argument may not be watertight, but it is one Christians must grapple with.

Orthodox Christians in America have gotten into the habit of bemoaning their inexorably shrinking political power and the rising hostility to religious freedom. But they actually possess enormous political power: the ability to grind to a halt the health care, educational, and social services infrastructure of the United States. Will they use it?

Jesus Shrugged: What if Christian organizations just went on strike?