Tom Holland says that we are witnessing a historical “great choke point” in Western culture, comparable to transformative episodes such as the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, or the Industrial Revolution.
“Essentially what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept of the secular. Islam is a totalizing way of leading your life. I think Islam is uniquely indigestible for a a secular mindset and people don’t want to admit that. People don’t want to admit that,” says bestselling author, Tom Holland.
Christianity and Western Civilization: In a recent interview, Holland explores the historically grounded effect of Christianity on Western civilization and the ongoing challenges Islam poses to secular liberal modernity.
He emphasizes the distinctiveness of Christianity compared to Islam, particularly focusing on Christianity’s concept of the secular — a separation between religious and civil life. Christianity has an institutional structure that provides an ideological framework allowing followers to criticize and judge evil within their culture, a framework Islam lacks.
Holland’s core thesis is that Christianity is the cultural background and fundamental worldview—“the soup we swim in” — of Western civilization. This Christianity-infused mindset profoundly differentiates Western Christian civilization from its pre-Christian predecessors, particularly in values, conceptions of humanity, and societal ideals.
Christianity and Western Civilization: Tom Holland’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World is described as “an extraordinary account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination. New York Times called Dominion “a galloping tour of Christianity’s influence across the last 2,000 years.”
The book has had an enormous success as the West is collectively realizing how important the Christian values were for as founding principles for Western civilization.
Holland writes: “Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion―an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus―was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history.”
“Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. As Tom Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the modern world.”
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Christianity and Western Civilization: Christianity’s emergence is placed in a complex historical matrix involving Jewish, Greek, Persian influences, and the Roman Empire. Rome’s imperial infrastructure was crucial to Christianity’s development. An emblematic example is the cross, which represented Roman imperial power and the brutal punishment of crucifixion—a horrific, agonizing death reserved for slaves and enemies of the state, accompanied by public humiliation and suffering.
The radical inversion of values in Christianity turns the crucifixion into a symbol of victory through suffering. Early Christians struggled with this idea; Paul’s letters reveal his awareness that the notion of a crucified man as divinity was scandalous—to Jews, a stumbling block; to Greeks and Romans, madness. The scandal lay not in divinity itself but in the divine status of someone who had endured the humiliating death of the cross.
Even after Constantine’s conversion and Christianity’s elevation to a dominant religion, representations of Christ on the cross remained idealized, avoiding the brutal reality of crucifixion.
It took nearly 500 years before realistic depictions of Christ’s death emerged, which then influenced medieval Christian culture to become intensely focused on Christ’s suffering. Today, this symbolic desensitization means many fail to comprehend the visceral horror the cross originally represented.
The pre-Christian Greco-Roman and Jewish societies upheld a worldview celebrating strength and viewing the weak as inferior or expendable. Christianity reversed this, holding up the weak and suffering as embodying holiness and triumph.
Christianity has multiple intellectual tributaries: the Jewish scriptural base, Greek philosophy (notably Plato and Aristotle), and Persian moral dualism (light vs. dark). Rome contributed the notion of universal order and empire without limit, which Christianity inherited and repurposed as the background for a universal gospel.
Christianity and Western Civilization: Paul’s transformative experience, his reinterpretation of Hebrew scriptures, and his shift from persecutor of Christians to advocate illustrate the redefinition of the messiah as a “man of sorrows”. This crucial reframing placed suffering at the core of salvation.
Greek and Roman gods were charismatic but petty and cruel. The Greek gods’ traits—violence, pettiness, favoritism—reflect a worldview more aligned with raw power and survival, contrasting sharply with Christian ideals. Christianity, influenced by Greek philosophical critiques of poetry and myth, rejects the ancient gods, suggesting a more transcendent and morally perfect concept of divinity.
It was in Tom Holland’s 2016 article in the New Statesman, that he shocked the world by admitting he was wrong about Christianity and has now understood how ground-breaking the Christian faith was for the formation of Western civilization, he says: “In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.”
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