Few books in recent memory have challenged readers to reconsider the foundations of Western civilization as much as Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. In this conversation, Holland joins me to discuss how Christianity reshaped assumptions about power, justice, morality, and even our modern debates about progress and identity.
In his introduction Holland writes:
For a millennium and more, the civilization into which I had been born was Christendom. Assumptions that I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of “human nature”, but very distinctively of that civilizations’ Christian past. So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.
Holland's goal is to make the reader stop taking the Christian Revolution for granted, and I think he succeeds brilliantly. It's not just that as a classicist he can explain the jarring dichotomy between the Roman and Christian ways of thinking about the world around them. Holland can just as effortlessly explain the links of "wokeness" to Christianity, and why progressives and evangelicals are so similar.
Tom Holland is a classical historian, an award-winning and bestselling author of numerous books, a translator of Herodotus’ Histories, the maker of numerous documentaries—and co-host for a number of years of the best radio program on history, BBC Radio 4’s Making History.
As always, we’re interested in what you think. Are modern ideas about justice, equality, and rights really just Christian assumptions in disguise? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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