Tom Holland does not claim to be a believer. He does not follow what once was called The Way, yet his sprawling history of Christianity is populated with a host of historical tidbits that could easily win nonbelievers over to the cause. His book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, begins in ancient Greece with how the emerging Western culture was, indeed, primed to receive a narrative whose focal point is the son of God on high and ends in our current era of woke in terms of how some ideas are rejected while others are zealously embraced according to a rubric that was built by Christianity yet retains none of its guideposts. It is, in other words, to be decent – whatever that is – without Christ, without the Ten Commandments, without the turning over of the tables of the moneychangers. It is a moral compass that only affirms and never, ever challenges. One might even say that the age of woke is the easy and, I hasten to add, misunderstood parts of Christianity without Jesus. Holland tells his readers how we got there: an unthinkably long sequence that began with the words of a Jewish carpenter over two-thousand years ago.
Holland takes us to the bloody Roman arenas and the lions, and he also gives us a tour of the early days when purchase was gained bit by bit until Constantine the Great converted to Christianity and, in doing so, elevated the faith to an unprecedented level. Readers also get a glimpsed of the Crusades and how Christianity was politicized in order to curry favor. Along the way, various councils convened and properly codified Christian doctrine so that believers were, in effect, all reading from the same sheet of music. Until the arrival of Martin Luther. He initiated a different conversation – one that led to the Protestant Reformation – and from there, the fallout only continued to build. Henry VIII, a contemporary of Martin Luther, had and divorced many wives. Over a century later, the French philosopher, Voltaire, who openly disdained Christianity ignited yet another powder keg. He, Holland writes, “viewed Christianity with a hatred that bordered on fixation.” Voltaire endeavored to wrest from Christian intellectuals the heights of European culture. The Enlightenment – a clear reference to Plato’s famed “Allegory of the Cave” -- was to pull the ignorant out of the dark catacombs of Christianity and into the so-called light of man’s ability to, on his own, reason and give structure and sense to the world.
What Martin Luther did to the Catholic Church in questioning many of its long-held doctrines, Voltaire and his ilk questioned the faith itself, causing many to wonder about the worth of a belief system next to modern advancements. Why look up anymore when the real work was before us?
Holland can be commended for his even-handedness in detailing the history of Christianity because on the heels of the Enlightenment, the world bore witness to at least two bloody revolutions – the American and the French – after which came industrialization on a scale never before seen accompanied by a spiritual malaise that pushed many to the edge. And then a world war. And then a second. Two atomic bombs. A genocide. I am sure, dear listeners, you could take it from here.
Yet Christianity persists. Indeed, many prominent thinkers believe we are on the cusp of a revolution – one that returns Christianity to its roots by utterly rejecting its critics. Thanks to Christianity, we have hospitals. Thanks to Christianity, we have universities. Thanks to Christianity, we have a notion of human rights. To whom do we owe thanks for the destruction we see in our world? Marriages? The unborn? Civil discourse?
We should judge a belief system by its fruits. While nobody would claim that followers of Christ are without blemish, doesn't Christianity make more sense? It has, after all, built and sustained an entire civilization never mind the many attempts to eliminate it.
