When I was teaching English at a Chinese university a number of years ago, I had my students read this poem. One reason for doing so was that I wanted them to see how the Bible has influenced English literature (I also contrasted Eliot's poem with another work inspired by the Magi story, O. Henry's short story "The Gift of the Magi"). However, I did have another motive--I wanted to disabuse them of the notion that Christianity was somehow inherently anti-intellectual, an idea that I suspected many of them held due to their many years of indoctrination in atheism in a Communist state. Whatever else he may have been, Eliot, who earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Harvard and had studied philosophy and religion, was definitely an intellectual. Nevertheless, for all of his intellectualism, he did not disdain to embrace the Christian faith in the end. Whether in the end my students grasped this truth or not, I must say that I found this poem an excellent means of introducing Christian beliefs to those who might not otherwise have had an opportunity to learn about them.
Image: "Adoration of the Magi" by Leonardo da Vinci, from Wikimedia Commons