Our hope, as Christians, is not in “the West.” It’s not in Holland’s secularized version of Christendom, but in the one, eternally true God, who is love, and who historically lived, died, and resurrected. The power of that message will never lose its draw, for it truly is “good news” and will prove true when history comes to an end on Judgment Day.

Tom Holland is a brilliantly successful fiction author, non-fiction author, podcaster, TV producer, playwright, translator, and more—he, in short, is a man of the humanities. He is a “secular humanist” in that sense, but, in Dominion, he wrestles with what he admitted in 2016:

Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was…[Christianity] is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

In Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019), Tom Holland has a monumental task: Take the breadth of Western history, from Ancient Greece to the 21st century, and show that Christianity, not Greece or Rome, formed the bedrock of Western society.

He accomplishes this aim in a remarkable fashion.

What is Dominion, by Tom Holland, about?

Dominion is readable, well-researched, honest, and witty. It’s not without flaws, but this work ranks alongside Carl Truman’s magnum opus, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, as foundational for understanding the West and our current upheaval of traditional values.

Holland is an accomplished novelist, so although long (500 pages or so), Dominion is a breeze to read. Although he covers most major turning points of history, what he chooses to analyze is almost philosophical.

Tradition and reform, progress and conservatism, violence or love—Holland navigates both sides of every historical coin through the lens of Christianity. What he shows is not that every good thing in the history of the West comes from Christianity but that the very idea of morality as we understand it arose from radical Christian principles of love.

The West’s Christian foundation of morality.

The idea that every human is equal before God and deserving of universal rights is a direct result of the radical nature of Jesus and his followers’ claim of love, kindness to the marginalized, and universal morality.

Did some justify slavery or racism by referencing the Bible? Yes, but only through the teeth of painfully obvious hypocrisy. Just as the Constitution endowed people with “unalienable rights,” many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves. Of course, the anti-racist and anti-slavery movements have always been fundamentally Christian. Before Christianity and, generally, outside the West’s influence, slavery and xenophobia were facts of life—not evils.

So, while atheist humanists have always pointed out that religion causes some of history’s greatest evils, the fact that we call those things evil is itself Christian.

In the concluding paragraph of Dominion, he writes,

“[Many Christians] over the course of this time, have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake. Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change.”

This is his conclusion. How does he argue for it?

Dominion’s scope—an impressive 2,000 years.

Holland examines dozens of major movements of history, split into three sections: Antiquity, Christendom, and modernity. As he covers the history of the early Christian martyrs, he points out how bewildering and unintelligible the idea is that dying a lowly, shameful, criminal’s death, could bring immeasurable heavenly glory. The weak and lowly honored and lifted up is incomprehensible without Christianity. Holland hammers the radicalness of this claim, in contrast to other ancient civilizations.

That flipping of values on its head echoes throughout Western history.

Read More