Tom Holland’s book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, is a remarkable account of how the Christian story has liberated the Western world.
Holland, an award-winning novelist, historian and podcaster, has now come to see Christianity as the story of power willingly spent on behalf of the vulnerable; strength deployed to protect the weak. The story of the strong choosing to play the victim on behalf of the oppressed, to spare them from ignominy and shame.
He has come to see it is a story about how Christ’s sacrificial dominion, mediated through the Church’s sacrificial dominion, has liberated, and is liberating, the western world.
The Liberating power of Christianity: As early as 2016, he had already admitted to being wrong about Christianity, writes Theopolis Institute.
Holland had become a believer in the necessity of Christianity. Far from seeing Christianity as a grey breath, he had come to see Christianity as the fount of all that was good and laudable in the western world—the sanctity of individual life, respect for women, racial equality, fairness, care for the poor, and—most significantly—protection for the victims of oppression. What many secular historians naively granted to the Enlightenment, Holland had come to see as the true gifts of Christianity.
The Liberating power of Christianity: Holland began going to church again, as he had done with his mother as a child. He has described some of his experiences with the church, one such experience:
“R. S. Thomas, in one of his poems, writes of how once, “in the darkness that was about / his hearers, a preacher caught fire / and burned steadily before them / with a strange light.” That was how it seemed to me. The preacher was the Revd Anna-Claar Thomasson-Rosingh. Everything she said that early morning seemed lit by a pentecostal fire.
The readings had been on the Baptism of Christ in the River Jordan, and her preaching on it was visionary, scholarly, emotional all at once… My eyes were opened that morning as they had not previously been to this great tradition of Christian preaching—a tradition that has always been particularly fundamental to Protestant Christianity. I had been reading a lot about the Spirit and the experience of grace. That morning I felt that something had descended on me—like a fire, like the dove.” End quote.
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The Liberating power of Christianity: Holland became increasingly cognisant of the profoundly divergent moral assumptions that governed his own modern Western world and that of the ancient Greco-Roman world. In the Roman world, the weak were brutalised and oppressed; in the contemporary Western world, by contrast, the weak are deferred to and cared for.
This was not executed flawlessly, naturally; however, but it was at least the ideal. And ideals matter. If the ideal in a culture is acceptance for corruption among its elites, corruption will sift through the layers of society and everyone will accept corruption. If the ideal that is hailed as socially acceptable is to be honest and trustworthy, individuals will strive to be just that, knowing these are the attitudes that are considered socially good.
In ancient Rome, the concept of victimhood was not an accepted attitude. Indeed, those who were perceived as victims were met with disdain rather than admiration. Within the Greco-Roman world, the principle of might is right prevailed. The concept of power was employed for the self-protection and self-promotion of the powerful. The act of generosity was extended solely in anticipation of reciprocity.
Within the context of the ancient world, the sexual predation of vulnerable women by men in positions of power was widely accepted as the prevailing social norm. Women and enslaved persons lacking the protection of influential men were considered vulnerable and susceptible to capture. No one even bothered to look away, because none of it really mattered.
Christianity brought with it a vastly different ideal, that of protecting the weak. Marriage was instituted as a protection for the woman, and exploitation of women hailed as a vice.
The Liberating power of Christianity: “Throughout his work Holland attempts to answer a singular question about power—how did the totalizing and draconian power of the Greco-Roman world become the liberating and redeeming power of the modern western world? Holland walks his reader through more than twenty-five hundred years of western history—from Athens in the fifth century B.C. to the present day. And his answer—unexpected for one of Holland’s liberal atheistic orientation (unexpected even to himself, he admits)—is Jesus on the cross. Christianity, Holland writes, began a “revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on the cross,” Theopolis writes.
The fact that Jesus’s body was broken and that he suffered an unjust death on behalf of the victimised paved the way for the marginalized and the oppressed to be treated with dignity. Throughtout history, it has precisely been Christians who have fought for the oppressed and the weak.
The concept of power as it was understood in the Greco-Roman world has been superseded by the Christian conception of power in the context of the ancient Western world. Holland does not insist that contemporary Western culture always embraces a Christian use of power; much that we see today runs contrary to Jesus’ vision of power.
However, it is important to acknowledge the validity of the assertion that Western culture universally embraces Jesus’ ideal of power, which is to deploy power in service of the weak and vulnerable. Alternatively, the power should be utilised to remove the vulnerable from crosses, rather than adding them.
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