How Christian Ethics Lead to Prosperity

We used to have such villages until they were destroyed by modernity and secularism.

A movie that I tend to like a lot more than other people is the Village by M. Night Shyamalan. I think the reason most people don’t like it that much is because the ending is a bit contrived and the twist that he’s known for doesn’t live up to the anticipation and kinda leaves you scratching your head like: does that make sense. But, I think the reason I like it so much is because I love the depiction of the village itself. I love the community they’ve built and the culture that they’ve embraced. I love how polite and respectful everyone is to each other. I love how they are there for each other. They celebrate together and they mourn together. Their movements are that of a true community whose fates are joined. As the movie goes on we discover that the village was established by a group of founders who were retreating from the larger and modern world because of the amount of evil and corruption they had personally experienced. So, they move to a remote nature reserve in the hopes of creating a peaceful and loving community, immune to the evils that had harassed them in their previous. One thing that always struck me as a bit curious about that premise is how the founders or elders decided on what set of ethics they would use to inspire their legal and moral code because by the time the viewer is introduced to them, their community is fairly well established and they seem to have a well understood and observed moral rule in place. And for all intents and purposes, that moral rule appears to be Christian except for the fact that we never see them attending Church or praying and nobody appears to be fulfilling a pastoral role, at least not an explicitly religious one. But they still embrace multiple things that could be identified with a Christian ethos. They don’t seem to allow dating without the purpose of courtship that would lead to marriage – which would rule out sex before marriage. They’ve also decided to embrace a time period and cultural context that would have been exclusively Christian. But if they weren’t, themselves, Christian, why would they do this and that’s what I found curious about it. Now it could just be a plot hole or a strange inconsistency, but it got me thinking about why it would make sense to do that even if you didn’t believe in the theological claims of Christianity.