The Children of the World vs. the Conscience of Humanity

by Sammy Attoh / December 23rd, 2025

On a night when much of the world turns its attention to the image of a child placed in a manger, it becomes necessary to confront a reality that contradicts the season’s sentimentality. While hymns are sung and rituals are performed, countless children lie tonight under rubble, under hunger, and under fear. The children of Palestine—who bear no responsibility for the circumstances into which they were born—are subjected to levels of suffering they neither initiated nor deserved. Their cries rise into the same sky that once received the cry of an infant in Bethlehem, yet the global community, equipped with sacred texts and moral traditions, often refuses to acknowledge them.

Palestine is not the only site of this abandonment. Children in Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Yemen, and across informal settlements, reservations, refugee camps, and neglected communities worldwide carry injuries that expose the ethical failures of humanity. They enter a world that confuses power with virtue, wealth with legitimacy, and domination with divine approval. Their suffering is not the result of personal wrongdoing but of global systems that prioritize strategic interests, economic gain, and political convenience over human life.

And so we must ask, with the sobriety of scholars and the anguish of prophets: What conception of God would elect one people for favour and abandon the rest to desolation? What deity would crown one tribe with celestial privilege while permitting millions of children—equal in innocence, equal in breath, equal in sacred worth—to perish unheard?

This question is not rhetorical. It is the moral fault line running beneath our world.

If God is understood as the Creator of all, then the idea of a “chosen people” collapses under the weight of universal creation. A God defined by love cannot simultaneously be defined by partiality. A God defined by justice cannot simultaneously be defined by exclusion. A God who is the source of all life cannot endorse or sanctify the suffering of any child, in any place, under any circumstance.

The tragedy, therefore, is not God. The tragedy is religion—or rather, what human beings have done in its name. For religion, fractured into sects and slogans, has too often become a weapon rather than a wellspring. It has justified conquest, sanctified inequality, and baptized violence. It has proclaimed choosiness where there should be compassion, superiority where there should be solidarity, and dogma where there should be dignity.

This is the hypocrisy that must be named. This is the blasphemy that must be confronted.

For if the divine is truly present in every child, then every bomb that falls on a child is a desecration. Every policy that starves a child is a sacrilege. Every theology that excuses the suffering of children is a betrayal of the very God it claims to defend.

If the divine is present in every child, then any act of violence against a child is a violation of the sacred. Any policy that deprives a child of food, safety, or shelter is a moral transgression. Any theology that excuses the suffering of children contradicts the very principles it claims to uphold. A society that tolerates such suffering cannot claim moral legitimacy, regardless of its religious heritage or political rhetoric.

The birth of a child in Bethlehem, commemorated each year with ceremony and devotion, carries a meaning that extends beyond religious tradition. It symbolizes a universal truth: every child is Bethlehem. Every child represents inherent value. Every child embodies the potential of humanity when dignity is recognized and protected. The child remembered at Christmas was not born to establish a religious institution. He was born to articulate a principle: that the divine is present wherever a child suffers, and that the authenticity of any moral or spiritual tradition is measured by its response to that suffering.

Yet the crisis before us is not only a crisis of geopolitics or theology. It is a crisis of conscience—a global moral paralysis that has normalized the unacceptable. Images of wounded or displaced children circulate daily, yet they rarely produce meaningful action. The world debates the legality of wars while ignoring the illegality of suffering. Complexity is used as a shield against responsibility, even though a child’s pain is never complex. It is immediate and absolute.

The children of the world are not asking for ideological alignment. They are asking for humanity to remember itself. Every society is judged not by the strength of its armies or the wealth of its elites, but by the safety of its children. Moral courage today requires confronting the structures that normalize cruelty, challenging governments and institutions when they betray the vulnerable, and acknowledging that traditions and sacred texts have been misused to justify what should never be justified.

The children of Gaza, Congo, Sudan, Haiti, Yemen, and beyond are not merely victims of circumstance. They are mirrors reflecting the fractures in our collective conscience. They expose the hypocrisy of nations that preach human rights while profiting from arms sales. They expose the contradictions of religious institutions that speak of compassion while remaining silent in the face of suffering. They expose the moral bankruptcy of a global order that assigns value to a child based on geography or political utility.

Their suffering also reveals the possibility of a new moral horizon. Their resilience demonstrates that the sacred is not found in temples or doctrines, but in the breath of every child. To defend a child is to defend the future. To protect a child is to protect the foundation of human dignity.

The question before us is straightforward: Will humanity choose its children? Will we build systems that nourish rather than exploit? Will we create a world where no child is born into predetermined suffering? Will we dismantle the hierarchies that privilege some lives over others?

The answer to these questions will determine the future of our species. A world that cannot protect its children forfeits its moral authority.

Let this season be more than ritual. Let it be a turning point. Let it be the moment when humanity recognizes that the manger is not a symbol of nostalgia but a reminder that vulnerability demands protection. Our response to that vulnerability is the true measure of our integrity.

The world must be free—free for every child, in every nation, under every sky. And a Merry Christmas to all creations.

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Sammy Attoh is a Human Rights Coordinator, poet, and public writer. A member of The Riverside Church in New York City and The New York State Chaplains Group, he advocates for spiritual renewal and systemic justice. Originally from Ghana, his work draws from ancestral wisdom to explore the sacred ties between people, planet, and posterity. Read other articles by Sammy.