In our study of world history and sociology, we summize that some ideas and practices are better than others.
For example, when the human sacrifice done to appease the Aztec gods was replaced by Cortez in 1521, a better culture followed, one that claimed the sacrifice of Christ was done to appease the Christian God.
When the Spanish emphasis of power hierarchies, based on blood lines and papal authority, was diminished by the Protestant work ethic, based on the equality exercised by a priesthood of believers, a better culture came to thrive. An entrepreneurial spirit of self governance, unshackled from the dictates of kings and bishops, gave birth to the USA.
When, in 1779, former slave trader, and then clergyman John Newton published his hymn “Amazing Grace”, and influenced the 1785 conversion of Parliament’s William Wilberforce to Christianity, a better culture resulted. Wilberforce was instrumental to ending the slave trade in the British empire in 1833. He forced the East India Company to allow Christian missionaries, such as William Carry, into India. This ended the 1000 year old practice of sati, whereby widows were burned to death on the funeral pier of the deceased husband. A better culture resulted. Carry translated Hindi works into English, sharing botany and other scientific knowledge of the Indian subcontinent with Europe.
Quakers, and other Christian abolitionists, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, influenced the Union to force an end to slavery in 1863. A better culture resulted.
When pastor Martin Luther King, shared his dream that one day people will be “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character”, he was sharing a vision for a better culture. His basis was in the theology that in Christ there “is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female.”
We could proceed to relate how better cultures resulted, such as from the collapse of the atheistic USSR in 1991, which had destroyed churches and killed hundreds of millions of its citizens.
The critical point is that the advance of biblical Christianity leads the betterment of culture. Thus, the sidelining of Christianity results in the worsening of culture.