MeToo is, the author suggests, even more obviously the result of Christian influence and assumptions: the human body is not an object, a commodity for the use of those with more powerful bodies or minds. Two thousand years of Christian history proclaimed it and Harvey Weinstein felt the impact of disregarding that belief. But in the sophisticated pre-Christian world his behaviour would have been entirely unremarkable. Holland races across the centuries with breathtaking speed. There is no sensational debunking of heroes like Abelard or Francis for the sake of novelty; they are seen as the scholars and heroes they were – suffering loss and injustice like the rest of us, but still giants in whose debt and around whose feet we creep unknowingly today.

And as we get to Nazism, the problem of Christian good vs. evil worsens. The Nazi regime is seen as the work of one evil man, Hitler, who hated Jews and Christians. We are led straight from discrimination against the Jews to the gas ovens as if this was the only logical progression and as if such state-sanctioned racial discrimination did not exist within the British Empire or the US. Links between the Ancient World’s practise of infanticide and Nazi Germany are made explicit, while the fact sterilization of mentally ill was also common practise in non-Nazi countries, such as Sweden, is ignored. By focusing on Hitler and casting the Nazi’s as a complete “other”, he ignores the terrible truth of Nazism- that it many of its features just represented more extreme forms of the governments of its day.Refreshingly, in the chapter ‘Jerusalem’ Holland gives due emphasis to the emergence of monotheism as a cultural force, something which Harari singularly fails to do in Sapiens. Before Troy was founded, in Mesopotamia Abram made the startling discovery ‘that there existed, unique, intangible and omnipotent, just the single deity’ (34). Along with the Jews’ uniquely revered scriptures, this concept of a single god not only gave rise to the world’s greatest religious influences but also allowed the Jews a continuing existence despite their repeated exiles. Wherever they went, their scriptures and their God went with them. The impact of such a belief on the world’s history can hardly be exaggerated. Though those scriptures chronicled rebellion at least as much as submission, the God of Israel ‘was a deity with whom it was possible to have a profoundly personal relationship’ (43). The impact of Christianity on the way we live, think and speak has been extraordinarily pervasive, and not only in the West, Holland concludes. Whether we like it or not, we live in a ‘society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions’. We could not even rebel against this heritage without resort to Christian vocabulary, Christian ethical tools and Christian notions of rebirth and renewal. It is not for nothing that Nietzsche came up with the notion of the Ubermensch: to unlearn Christianity would take nothing less than a superhuman, quasi-divine effort. Only by obscuring and hiding large portions of history can he present Christianity as a unique moral advance on a world, which, lest we forget, had already conquered from Greece to India (Alexander), invented the steam engine (Hero of Alexandria), built good roads across continents (Rome), calculated the circumference of the earth (Eratosthenes) and improved the lives of millions of its inhabitants, including the slaves that Holland portrays as little more than helpless victims. This was a world which since the Greeks had developed much of what we would recognize as modern law, mathematics, philosophy, science and engineering. The majority of the Western mind is therefore clearly Graeco-Roman rather than Christian. The Making of Dominion: An interview with Tom Holland". University of Reading. 23 February 2021 . Retrieved 12 April 2023. Some of Christianity's enemies recognize this, and Holland cites the likes of Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade. Others of Christianity's enemies rebel against Christianity by using the very tools given by Christianity. As Holland points out, even when John Lennon sings "All You Need is Love" he is building that song on Christian assumptions.

We may no longer think of ourselves as brides of Christ like Catherine of Sienna did, but the divorce is still a long way from being finalised. Even as Holland’s book draws to a close, ideas seem to cascade out of it. The sexual revolution, which the author can see has presented the churches with agonisingly difficult choices; Martin Luther King’s role in Civil Rights, ‘An orator of genius with an unrivalled mastery of the Bible and its cadences’ (474); a brief discussion of Empire (with a welcome understanding of the abyss between what the missionaries – including Livingstone – were trying to do and their white, plundering, commercially greedy compatriots); Mandela’s realisation that forgiveness might be the most devastating but constructive tactic of all. There is also a fair assessment of the threat from Islamism and how the West responded. Dominion: how the Christian revolution remade the world". WorldCat. OCLC 1125323915 . Retrieved 12 April 2023.

The rise of Christendom

Quinn, David (10 January 2020). "Two liberal humanists battle it out over the Christian legacy". Iona Institute . Retrieved 12 April 2023. This is the latest, and probably the most accessible, book in the genre of "Christianity in modernity" - the attempt to uncover how (Western) modernity is radically indebted to the tradition of (Western) Christianity for its values and modes of thinking. Living, as we do, in A Secular Age, it is easy to think such a project silly or partisan - but it is perhaps the greatest coup of such histories that secularism itself, and all the claims to universality and neutrality that come with it, are a conceit; that, implicitly, they reveal the sheer dominion of Christian ideas. Also interesting was the way Christian ideas have influenced other faiths. The idea of religion as separate from culture, law, ethnicity, and heritage is largely Christian and the Germans managed to encourage a Jewish schism in their attempt to integrate Jewish communities by drawing a firm line between nationality and religion, embracing reform Jews as both German and Jewish, which was anathema to those who saw no division between the nation and religion. On the other hand we have Indian Rajahs manipulating the English into opposing or supporting practices like Suttee, by presenting them as religious or cultural.

Parfit, meanwhile, has been called the greatest moral philosopher of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Yet, in his Reasons and Persons – perhaps the most significant work of moral philosophy since the 19th Century – Jesus is not mentioned once, whereas the Buddha is mentioned repeatedly. Buddha’s view that the ‘individual’ does not exist, and that we are but a stream of consciousness (citta-santāna), is a profoundly anti-Christian one, but also a profoundly modern one, given that it is consciousness, not the soul, which takes centre stage in the work of Parfit and the other philosophers mentioned here. Of the “four horsemen of New Atheism”, it is Sam Harris who has done the most to articulate a clear alternative to religious ethics – one which is ultimately, however, essentially a rebranding of utilitarianism. And while Pinker includes ‘Humanism’ (which certainly has Christian roots, as Holland establishes) in the subtitle of his pro-reason, anti-religious polemic Enlightenment Now, it is utilitarianism that he goes on to praise in the text. In short, Faith is easy; the Rule is hard. Faith rationalises self-interests; the Rule subverts them. Historically and empirically, there is no relation between Faith and the Rule except as contradictions. Christian values are oxymoronic. Those principles of behaviour which constitute our cultural ethic come from elsewhere than Christian teaching; and they are obscured by that teaching.Sumption, Jonathan (31 August 2019). "Did Christianity make the western mind — or was it the other way round?". Spectator . Retrieved 12 April 2023. In the following chapters, we learn that less than two centuries after the Roman Empire had embraced Christianity, its Western half was in ruins, with Rome’s population at 2% of its height, and embroiled in ceaseless conflict. If Christianity was indeed, as Holland indicates, such a pervasive influence on society, and its values were the brotherhood of man and regard for the poor, then that is a damning indictment of those values and indeed the religion as a whole. But by overlooking the successful Christian Empire in the East of Byzantium, he is again only telling half the story. Christianity was not just a religion of crazed ascetics, depressives and martyrs, it was the religion of the state that codified Roman laws under Justinian and which was the largest and richest state in Europe. The Vikings traded with Byzantium and may have become Christian not just for the respect of Rome’s old glory, but also for ease of trading in the East. Of course Holland has plenty to say about the Protestant Reformation, its origins and impact. He reminds us that Luther (now so often remembered for his intolerant attitude to peasants in revolt and to the Jews) ‘had opposed the burning of heretics well before self-interest might have prompted him to do so’ (298–9). His fear and dislike of the Jews is not understated but is balanced by the fact that there were some who felt sympathy, even admiration, for this much-abused people. Holland also understands the central Christian conversion experience that Luther underwent. Namely, the fact that despite his helplessness and sinfulness, he was still loved by God: ‘Afire with the intoxicating and joyous improbability of this, [he] loved God in turn’ (302). The reverberations of this fundamental truth ‘detonated’ across Christendom. It did nothing however to prevent the ‘godly vandalism’ of figures such as John Knox; worse still it inflamed those outside the experience till in 1572, thousands of Protestants were slaughtered on the streets of Paris by fellow ‘Christians’. Thus, the city that 400 years before had seen the engagement of brilliant Christian scholars in the translation of Aristotle allowing the rational investigation of the workings of the universe on a free footing had become a place like Lyon in AD177. There, in the arena, thousands of Christians were butchered for the pleasure of the mob and because of the sort of God they believed in. Holland misses, or does not point out, the irony that the Paris massacre took place on the day of St Bartholomew, whose name was shared by the Catholic peacemaker Bartolomé de Las Casas, who wanted to save the Native Americans just because they were humans.

The last section of the book shows how many of the key cultural developments in the modern West owe their underpinnings to Christian values, even though they may have no obvious religious foundation. For example the successes of the struggle for racial equality in the United States in the 1960s, or the debt owed to Christianity by Communist values (the meek shall inherit the earth, after throwing off their chains and uniting etc). What’s it like to read?While this is the central argument of the book - that two thousand years of Christian teaching have so subsumed our thought process that we can no longer easily detect them - the message is delivered via a narrative “History of Western Christianity”. Ultimately, the clash between Protestantism and Catholicism—and the opening it gave for people to challenge all forms of authority—created the conditions that allowed for the Enlightenment to occur in Europe, but this can only be appreciated in hindsight. Had the Enlightenment occurred in the Islamic Middle East or even—had Charles Martel not triumphed in 732—in an Islamic Europe, there would no doubt have been an equivalent of Holland writing today explaining why the Enlightenment could only have occurred in an Islamic civilisation. Similarly, there may be a sophisticated explanation as to why it was predominantly Athens in which philosophy flourished in classical Greece, and not any of the other citizen-states. Or, as I suspect, it could be that cultures of learning and of ideas take hold in often unpredictable ways, and then begin to self-propagate, overcoming innumerable barriers (dogmatism, nationalism, and so on). To justify their actions they had to turn to Aristotle rather than the Church Fathers for authority. The very fact that they needed such authority shows an underlying malaise about their actions that would find expression, if not in the soldiers’ consciences then in those of some of their observers. Bartolomé de la Casas was famously one of these. ‘They are our brothers, and Christ gave his life for them’ (292) he wrote, drawing on a tradition originating with Christ and expounded by Aquinas. But to the opponents of Las Casas, those outside Europe, outside Christendom, who had usefully lost the meaning of ‘catholic’ the barbarians were no better than monkeys. [2] Protestant Reformation Tom Holland is an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster. His bestselling books include Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic, which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Persian Fire, which won the Anglo-Hellenic League's Runciman Award; Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom; In the Shadow of the Sword: The Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World; Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar; and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.