Tom Holland’s Dominion traces how Christianity reshaped Western ethics—from Paul’s radical monogamy and gender reforms to modern values like human dignity, now secularized yet fragile. Comparing Roman brutality (slavery, sexual exploitation) to today’s MeToo backlash, he warns that without Christian roots, moral frameworks risk collapse, as seen in Nietzsche’s fascist warnings or post-WWII anti-Nazism’s borrowed Christian condemnation of cruelty. A lapsed believer, Holland grapples with whether secular societies can sustain these ideals, citing "mutant" moral trends as proof of their unraveling, while figures like Murray urge reclaiming faith to preserve them. [Automatically generated summary]
So last year I read a book, one of those rare books that actually shifts the way you think about things.
It changes your perspective.
It gives you more depth to ideas you might have already had and also gives you new ideas.
And the book was called Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
I know I've talked about it half a dozen times on the show.
Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.
The author is Tom Holland.
He's the author of a lot of books on ancient and early medieval history.
And he has a podcast called The Rest is History.
I'm really happy that Tom is with us today.
Are you there?
I am.
There you are.
Very much for having me.
And thanks for your very kind words.
No, no, it really made a big difference.
And as I said, I know you did my son's show before mine, you know, and I don't hold that against you.
That's right.
But you did the Young Heretic.
And he and I have discussed this book endlessly.
It is a remarkable book.
I'd like to begin just by asking you personally, what drew you to this subject?
Well, so the thesis of the book basically is that we in the West, Europe and America, we're like goldfish swimming in Christian waters.
And we take Christianity and its inheritance so completely for granted that many of us, particularly those who may feel that they've emancipated themselves from Christianity as a kind of superstition,
don't realize the degree to which what we assume is just kind of human nature or the way that society is just organized or anything, that actually it's incredibly culturally contingent and that it derives from a very, very kind of specific intellectual, spiritual tradition that has utterly shaped us.
And this is a conclusion that I was surprised to find myself coming to because I'd always kind of, to be honest, much preferred the classical world.
And I'd viewed the coming of Christianity kind of like, you know, wintry drizzle descending and replacing the clear blue.
I'd kind of imagined the classical world as gleaming temples and blue skies and then the coming of Christianity as rain and drizzle and everyone, you know, the clear white togas going and everyone starting to wear sackcloth and ashes.
So it's like the kind of depressing development.
But essentially, it was the experience of writing about the classical world, the Greeks, the Romans, that just kept bringing home to me how utterly alien actually they were.
And it was really trying to live inside their heads, you know, for the process of time that I was spending writing about these books, writing these books, that kind of made me think, well, these guys are far more alien than I had properly appreciated.
And so what is it that changed?
What is it that explains the chasm of cultural difference between me and say Julius Caesar or Leonidas or people like that?
And I kind of came to the conclusion that it was Christianity, that Christianity had changed it.
So before we get into the details of that, which I would like to talk about, but before we do that, I lived in England for many years.
And it's a country where people do show up in church for events, for marriages, for weddings and things like that.
But there's a new kind of distance.
I mean, Douglas Murray has written about this.
It's becoming, if it's not already, it's becoming a much more secular country than, for instance, this country is.
So you make that discovery.
Does that have a personal effect on your life?
Well, I was raised in the Church of England.
My mother is a very devout member of the Church of England.
I love her.
So I've never had a kind of byronic rejection of Christianity.
I've always kind of quite admired it.
I just thought it was rather boring.
And to be honest, I think that that's probably the attitude of lots of people in Britain, is that it's just faintly boring.
I mean, I'm aware that it's far more a live kind of cultural issue in the United States.
But in a way, I think that one of the reasons why Christianity, people feel that they no longer need Christianity is exactly precisely that it's one. its core doctrines, its core assumptions have been so completely internalized that in a sense we no longer need the church.
I mean, in a way, that was kind of brought home for me very powerfully during the pandemic when people took for granted that sacrifices should be made.
I mean, often very considerable sacrifices to help the sick, particularly to help those who were most vulnerable, the elderly, those who were medically vulnerable.
Never crossed anybody's mind not to do that.
And I think that that's a legacy of a kind of sense of concern for the weak that is not natural.
I mean, it's not a given.
It is something that emerges from a very distinct cultural context.
And I think that that cultural context is the kind of the Christian command that you should care for those who suffer.
And, you know, there was a terrible process of, you know, terrible cycle of plagues, of pandemics throughout the third century AD.
And in a sense, that was the making of Christianity, because suddenly people could see that, you know, even people who weren't Christians, that there were people who were willing to tend them, willing to care for them in a way that simply hadn't been done before.
And you can obviously completely understand the appeal of that.
And that was couched in theological terms.
But now, with certainly on this side of the Atlantic, you have socialized healthcare systems.
The state, in a sense, has taken over the responsibilities for healthcare from the churches.
So in a sense, the churches are no longer needed.
You know, one of the things you write about at length is the attitude towards sexuality, but most importantly, the attitude toward women that has been transformed by Christianity.
And this is something that I think we very much take for granted in the West, but it wasn't like this before Christ.
The way women are thought of now was not the way they were thought of before.
Well, the image of Christianity is among its critics is that it's a patriarchal system with a kind of long-bearded sky daddy wagging his finger and repressing women.
And in a sense, that's another example of the way in which Christianity has become a victim of its own success, because the patriarchal traditions in Christianity, which certainly exist, are judged by standards, I would say, that are themselves Christian.
And the foundational ideas that govern Christian attitudes towards sex and towards gender are kind of rooted in the idea that men and women are created equally in the image of God, which you get in Genesis.
And then it gets a further refinement with the New Testament, and particularly Paul, who says that in Christ there is no man or woman.
But what you also get in Paul is a kind of nervousness at the radical implications of that.
The idea that men and women may ultimately be indistinguishable in terms of their status.
And there's a kind of constant tension in Paul's letters between that radicalism and a kind of feeling, well, actually, I think that men should have a kind of responsibility for women and so on.
But having said that, This understanding that every human being, female as well as male, is created equally in the image of God, is so foundational to Paul's understanding of how people should relate to each other.
But he argues essentially that the only real way that a man and a woman can have a sexual relationship is if they map that relationship on the relationship between Christ and his church.
So again, you have that kind of idea that Christ is the head of the church.
So there is that kind of idea of the man as the head of the relationship.
But in the context of the age, this is unbelievably transformative.
And I think you could almost say kind of progressive, if you want to put it in those terms, because the context of the world in which Paul is framing these doctrines, so Corinth, the Roman colony, Rome itself, this is a society in which the binary is not, as it is for us, men and women, the two sexes.
It's about do you have power or do you not?
And the person who has power is the male citizen, the male Roman citizen.
And he has an absolute authority over everybody in his household.
And essentially, he has a license to use those who are his subordinates any way that he likes.
Absolutely any way.
I mean, he can rape them any way that he wants.
And that is a given.
So when Paul is writing to householders in Rome and saying that you have to, you know, you, the Roman male citizen, in your relationship with women, you can only have one wife.
You can only have a wife.
That's the only person that you can sleep with.
And that relationship has to be for life because that is how Christ is with his church.
You know, Christ is not going around sexually assaulting the page boy or the scullery maid or whatever.
You have to be strictly monogamous as Christ is monogamous with his church.
And this sets in train an absolutely kind of radical recalibration of the way that people understand sexuality.
And it's a long, long, convulsive process because essentially it involves training men to rein in their sexual instincts and to basically to treat a woman's body as though that body is the church.
And it's that idea that a woman's body, or indeed a man's body, and you know, all human bodies are sacrosanct, that we take so for granted now.
And yet it's not a given at all.
And this was really brought home to me.
I was writing the book and the Harvey Weinstein affair broke.
And I'd been writing a lot about how Christian morality had changed Roman sexual standards.
And of course, to a Roman householder, what Harvey Weinstein did was absolutely natural.
I mean, of course, why wouldn't he sexually abuse his subordinates?
I mean, that's why not?
I mean, everybody does that.
In fact, you're a bit odd if you don't do that.
And I thought that what was striking about the reaction to that wasn't just that women got together and set and trained the Me Too movement, but that so many men accepted the justice of what they were saying.
And that reflected the fact that this kind of cultural weathering has been around for a very, very long time.
The complexity of it is, of course, that it's become snarled up with, I think, particularly since the 60s, with a sense that Christianity is repressive, uptight, that, you know, St. Paul was a kind of blue meanie turning up and ruining the pepper land of ancient Rome.
But it wasn't like that at all.
And the measure of that, I think, the complexity of our present day cultural attitude towards Christianity is that when the women's marches happened in the United States just after Trump had been elected, they went through all the major states in the US.
And one of the most popular costumes that women wore on those marches were the red robes and the white bonnets of handmaids from the dramatization of Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale.
And that was written as a parody of Puritanism, of New England Puritanism.
But the paradox was that the women on those demonstrations effectively were demanding that men behave like Puritans.
In other words, that they show sexual continence and that they respect the bodily integrity of women, that they don't just kind of harass them, jump them, grope them, molest them, as people back in Roman age.
You know, this brings me back to what you were saying before.
We're talking about the book Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland.
Nietzsche's Rejection00:05:28
You said before that Christianity was a victim of its own success and that essentially its values have disappeared into our ordinary consciousness and into our lives.
So we don't even see where they come from.
There was a tragic comic moment when the State Department in America complained that the Taliban was forming a government that wasn't diverse enough, as if the Taliban would suddenly slap its head and say, oh, gee, you know, we forgot that diversity is one of our values when obviously it's not one of their values.
You mentioned after 9-11, George W. Bush saying Islam is a religion of peace, which aside from being meaningless in and of itself is also simply not true.
It does not emphasize peace and love the way Christianity does.
Is the fact that it's disappeared, does that leave us kind of exposed to losing the values that were given to us?
In other words, are they now permanent or do they stand on this rock?
Well, this is the great question.
And it was famously posed by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who said God is dead, but we haven't, you know, people haven't kind of woken up to this fact.
And Nietzsche's further argument was that you can't have Christian values without Christian belief.
And he was addressing socialists, liberals, communists, basically anyone who was kind of parasitic on the fundamentals of Christian teaching and saying that in the long run,
you know, your convictions say that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, or that all human beings have an inherent dignity, that these are unsustainable without the theology, without the sense of mystery that gave them birth.
And he further predicted that there would be a terrible age of convulsion when the implications of that were thought through and put into practice.
And of course, what we know that Nietzsche didn't was what form that terrible convulsion would take.
And basically, it was fascism.
Fascism was a conscious attempt to fuse a pre-Christian world in which the strong and the mighty, you know, in the best tradition of Achilles or Julius Caesar, have the power, and a kind of modernity in which there's no place for kind of squeamish compassion for the weak or, you know, which Nietzsche saw as kind of enfeebling, a slave morality.
And fascism, particularly in its Nazi form, was the most radical subversion of Christian assumptions since the time of Constantine, far more radical than the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, both of which absolutely thought that the last should be first and the first should be last, that at the end of days, you know, sheep and goat will be divided up, that a new Jerusalem will descend to the earth.
It was just that this had been secularized, but the Christian impulse for these teachings was absolutely clear.
And the reason that both the French and the Russian revolutionaries targeted the church was for deeply Christian reasons.
In other words, that the church was identified with oppression and that the church had become first and therefore it had to become last.
Nazism was far more comprehensive in its rejection of Christianity because it rejected the fundamental doctrines.
The two key ones, I guess, being the idea that the strong have a kind of debt to the weak.
Christ is crucified.
The cross becomes an emblem of the power of the weak over the strong.
Whereas previously for the Romans, it had been an emblem of the power of the strong over the weak.
The Nazis utterly rejected that.
They were all in favor of strength and they regarded the weak as people who had to be disposed of.
And of course, the Nazis rejected the idea that there was a fundamental human dignity and equality.
And Paul had said that there's no man or woman.
He also said there is no Jew or Greek.
The Nazis absolutely thought there were Jews and Greeks.
And the shock and the horror of that, when it kind of percolated out, and when the understanding of what it had done with news of the kind of Holocaust kind of entering public understanding really in the 60s, that oddly is, but I think, I mean, it may seem counterintuitively, but I think it's not entirely strange.
That is when Christianity in Europe, institutional Christianity, started to really go into decline.
And I think that one of the reasons for that is that the Nazis provide us in the West, and I would include the United States in this, with a kind of new mythology that is actually far more dramatic, far more vivid, and far more, it seems to many people, rooted in reality than the traditional Christian mythology.
So it's a mythology in which Hitler is the devil, in which Auschwitz is hell, in which temptation consists of being drawn to the doctrines that the Nazis had upheld, and that virtue is to be defined as standing proof against Nazism.
But I think that that mythology and the power that it has for us is itself still rooted in Christian assumptions, because we condemn the Nazis as evil because we're judging them by Christian standards.
But the effect of that is that whereas maybe before Hitler, we would say, you know, what would Jesus do and do it?
Now increasingly we say, what would Hitler do?
And we do the opposite.
Belief vs. Abandonment00:03:14
Now the question is, is that sufficient to maintain Christian ideals and values and teachings without Christianity?
And I think I'm not a prophet.
I don't know what the answer to that is.
My hunch is, based on the past few years, is that the hold of Christian theology on the imagination of the West, and particularly perhaps on Americans, is as strong as it's ever been.
But that although those values are kind of rooted in Christianity, they no longer anchor to them.
And so they're starting to drift off in all kinds of strange ways.
And we're getting all kinds of bizarre, mutant, strange Christian thought, chiefly because people don't recognize that they're Christian anymore.
I've only got a minute or two left.
I have to ask you this, though.
I've talked to so many people and read so many people.
Douglas Murray comes to mind.
Marcello Perra, the Italian philosopher who says we must call ourselves Christians or else our freedoms will fall apart.
Douglas Murray, who says, you know, we can't invent a new form of morality, so we really have to have some kind of relationship with Christianity.
But they can't believe themselves.
They cannot bring themselves to have faith.
Do you have that problem?
Well, I'm a liberal who's lost his faith.
I wrote Dominion in part because I wanted to stress test my fundamental values and to find out where they come from.
And essentially, I'd always kind of vaguely assume they came from the Enlightenment.
And the discovery that they didn't and that ultimately they come, they're deeply theological, they're rooted in a kind of sense of mystery was an eye-opener for me.
And I feel, let's say, that I'm on a journey because I don't want to abandon my belief in those.
So I, because a kind of abyss awaits, essentially, I think if you, you know, I don't want to abandon my belief in that.
And I slightly feel that I might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb.
So there's one side of me that's saying this is all nonsense.
There is no human dignity.
There are no human rights.
We're all just animals.
We're all just kind of bundles of atoms.
Who cares?
We can do anything we like.
And the other half is saying, no, of course you believe.
You know, these are so much a part of you.
And there are times where I can believe that.
And there are times where I can't.
And my skepticism and my belief are in a constant sense of dialogue.
And that may sound like a kind of weasel question, but I think that I'm not unusual in that.
I think that in a sense, our entire society, whether it recognizes it or not, is in a process of discussing this, whether our values are sufficiently believable that we can continue to believe in them.
And I like to think that we can.
I was going to say I've been there, so I'm not surprised at all.
I've got to stop you there.
Absolutely terrific conversation.
I'm so happy you came on.
The book is Dominion, How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland.