Philanthropy, science, secularism, rationalism are all Christian inventions. In Why I was wrong about Christianity, the renowned historian Tom Holland made an honest confession that, for years, he had failed to acknowledge the defining role of Christianity in the West.
The Gospels and the Epistles of St. Paul, Holland claims, are the most impactful writings in human history.
Secularism is a Catholic invention, scientific rationalism and universal human rights comes from medieval theologians, and modern philanthropy is founded on Christian concerns. These are some of the statements found in Holland’s bestselling book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.
The defining role of Christianity in the West: He argues that Christianity was the most revolutionary movement in history because it universalized an unprecedented ethical standard rooted in the belief that all human beings have intrinsic, sacred worth as creatures made in the image and likeness of God, writes published author and Substack writer with broad international experience and a lifelong interest in history, Simon Vincent at Substack.
So valuable is the human being in Christian dogmatics that the Son of God Himself came to earth incarnated in human nature to redeem it. Upon this radical belief, the Western civilization came forth.
The principles of Christianity were so triumphantly penetrating, Holland argues, that they can now be traced in virtually every ideology or movement that has since emerged from the West: from communism to feminism to the world of science.
The defining role of Christianity in the West: The 2016 article raised eyebrows in Western academic circles. Holland began doing tours as a keynote speaker, podcast guest, and lecturer, to enthusiastically announce his sudden epiphany.
He styled himself as a Christian in the cultural sense and claimed modern liberals, gay rights activists, and even Darwinists like Richard Dawkins, are equally bound by Christendom as he is.
There is nothing “self-evident” about Christian ethics, Holland argues in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. Take, for instance, our contemporary belief in universal, human equity – in the ancient world, it was preposterous to claim that there was anything “equal” between free men and slaves, between men and women, divine lineages and plebs. Humans had no intrinsic worth – their value was measured only by their social utility.
The weak were deplored as people who weakened the tribe, and so ought to be marginalized, exploited, or even discarded. This was a common Greek and Roman attitude, both cultures practised slavery without ethical reflection.
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The defining role of Christianity in the West: Holland, who has dedicated most of his life to the study of the ancient bronze age, gives multiple specific examples. He observes no real ethical code in the pre-Christian world. Instead, there were power structures. Ancient Persians, Egyptians, and Greeks shared an understanding that all creation is hierarchical – the gods and the mighty on top, followed by the aristocratic lineages, then the free men, and finally slaves, women, and the weak at the bottom – and it was right to maintain this hierarchy.
Men of noble birth were supposed to dominate those beneath them, the same way the gods dominated them, that is, as they themselves pleased. Ancient gods had no love for men (such a notion was unheard of) – they deceived, mocked, killed, and raped men and women at their own whim. This made them all-the-more fearsome and praiseworthy, because it was divinely-sanctioned evidence of their belonging at the top of the hierarchy.
In ancient Sparta, boys and girls who did not satisfy the physical standards of the elders, whether it be bodily dimensions or mental faculties, were killed as part of a policy to breed a genetically advanced race of men. Elsewhere in ancient Greece, it was normal to kill unwanted infants by throwing them in the sewers.
This happened especially to girls, the deplorable sex in Greek mythology, and so pimps would scout for infant females and raise them as lifelong prostitutes, or as child sacrifices to pagan gods in public rituals. Slaves were considered cursed by the gods and by Nature and deserving of their inferiority – a belief championed by Aristotle, among many.
Slaves could be exploited at will. Boys and girls could be raped, beaten, or even killed for sport. The institutionalized killing of slaves in gladiatorial arenas are prime examples of how normal this was.
There was no meaningful dichotomy between “civilians” or “combatants” either: Alexander the Great butchered thousands of civilians in Thebes and Tyre to accomplish his goals, and he was worshiped as the son of Zeus not despite such deeds, but because of such deeds. Julius Caesar boasted that a million Gauls had been massacred at his direction – and this made him a hero to the public, again not despite, but because.
Achilles, the great mythical hero of Romans and Greeks, is introduced in the Iliad as the divinely blessed son of Peleus who is raping and butchering whole villages as proof of his own glory and fame. This is the way the ancients understood heroism: as belonging to a powerful race, with the ability to do exactly as he pleases in a relentless pursuit of his own glory. The deities of their universe were the ones who inflicted punishment on others, not the ones suffering it. The ancients worshipped power and order, on which altars burned human flesh as easily as cattle. This worldview is found not only in the Greco-Roman world, but in virtually all pre-Christian, pagan cultures.
The defining role of Christianity in the West: What Christianity did is that it took this hierarchy and inverted it with a radical set of beliefs that shook the Greco-Roman world to its core, Holland argues in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.
Christians controversially believed:
- All the gods are false – meaning, they are deceitful spirits (demons) who promise fortune but perpetuate evil. There is only One God, Christians proclaimed, and He does not share His sovereignty and nor is He false, for He is “Good”.
- This One God created all seen and unseen. While Zeus is portrayed in Greek mythology as having to fight with sea monsters (Typhon), the One God is served by them, and by all creation. He is supremely sovereign.
- This One God loves His creatures (a god that loves mankind, for love’s sake, was a nonsensical and unknown concept at the time).
- God (the Son) was incarnated in humanity and suffered by the hands of his creatures for the sake of their salvation, freely enduring crucifixion as a humiliated criminal for the sake of this love (Christ).
- The salvation prepared by Christ is open to all regardless of ethnicity, social rank, or background – that is, it is universal, not tribal or exclusive.
- All human beings have equal intrinsic value, not only the free and mighty – “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3:28).
- All humans have free will. They are not bound by fate, but are free to choose their own path in life. This is the precondition for love – all love is free.
There had never been anything quite like Jesus Christ before. Holland writes: “that the law of the God of Israel might be read inscribed on the human heart, written there by his Spirit, was a notion that drew alike on the teachings of Pharisees and Stoics—and yet equally was foreign to them both. Its impact was destined to render Paul’s letters—the correspondence of a bum, without position or reputation in the affairs of the world—the most influential, the most transformative, the most revolutionary ever written. Across the millennia, and in societies and continents unimagined by Paul himself, their impact would reverberate. His was a conception of law that would come to suffuse an entire civilisation.”
Christianity was insultingly strange in the ancient world. As St. Paul acknowledges in his Epistle to the Corinthians: “we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness” (1 Cor. 1:23). Romans reacted with disgust, calling this faith perverse, superstitious, and atheistic (for their denial of the pagan gods). So repulsive were these concepts to the Roman worldview that they instigated severe persecutions multiple times for 300 years to thwart it. Strangely, the opposite happened.
The defining role of Christianity in the West: The Christians, helped by their belief in forgiveness, redemption, and evangelization, continued to grow, converting even former persecutors. In 312, Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, and some decades later under Emperor Theodosius I, Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the Empire. At that point, the world was set on a new course.
Christianity came with absolute truth claims. Whereas pagans treated the concept as truth with philosophical curiosity, Christians treated it as a matter of salvific importance. “The truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). They cared deeply about distinguishing truth from falsehood, and good from evil. And so, morality gained a rigorous definition rooted in Christian ontology. The moral ambiguity that had enabled powerful men to dominate without any religious restraint was curtailed.
From now on, mankind would not be judged on social utility or show of power, but on the goodness of their character – a goodness defined by Christ. And the Gospels made it very clear what was necessary: to deny, not gratify, oneself,; to have compassion, not contempt, for the weak; to suffer in love for the sake of others, not for the sake of self-love; to share one’s wealth with the less fortunate, not hoard it for oneself.
Christ, as God, had taken his seat among lepers, criminals, traitors, paralytics, and harlots to restore their divine image and likeness. Empires and kingdoms could therefore not treat such people as expendables, but as precious beings in the divine image. “Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.” (Matt. 25:40).
There was never a human life so wretched it did not bear the image of God, and on that belief arose a flurry of reform rooted in Christian ethics and charity. The newly Christianized Roman Empire banned gladiatorial games, bestowed legal rights and protection for women, children, criminals, and slaves, built free hospitals open for all, stopped infanticide, institutionalized philanthropy, and placed limits on state authority in defence of civilians and the innocent.
In light of the Virgin Mary, women were given far greater freedom, including property ownership rights, legal agency, freedom to choose who to marry (or not marry at all), divorce protections against abusive husbands, and inheritance rights.
The Christian emphasis that the body is sacred (a temple of the Holy Spirit) meant that the human body deserved dignity and chastity. A sexual revolution occurred: the bar girls, the painted boys in the brothels, and the slaves previously “used without compunction by their masters” received strong legal protection against sexual exploitation.
All this introduced great tension into the world, for it problematized many practices and institutions that the world was already heavily reliant on. Slavery, for instance, was the economic labor force for most of human history, but was now greatly inconvenienced by the Christian emphasis on ontological, universal equality. Early Church Fathers either condemned it or advocated at least for the merciful, brotherly treatment of slaves, which produced a drive to improve their condition everywhere, ultimately until abolition. Another example is war – killing a human person made in the image of God was not a glorious deed, but a spiritually damning one. Out of this tension arose a great insistence within Christendom that war is only permitted defensively as the last resort, and that there is an obligation on all rulers to seek peace at all times, and, for God’s sake, spare the lives of civilians.
Although there are too many fascinating chapters to recount in a single article, one of the most important moments Tom Holland brings to our attention in his bestselling book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, is the Reformation. But not that of Luther, but of Pope Gregory VII. In the 11th century, Pope Gregory seized effective control of all clergy in Western Europe and used this power to raise medieval Europe to a new, ethical standard rooted in Christian teaching.
Latin lawyers subsequently wrote canon laws to formulate the moral conduct expected of all Christians – containing principles like sexual restraint, human dignity, and freedom of belief. The canon laws formalized a ground breaking idea: that almsgiving to the poor is not merely a charitable act, but an obligation for all Christians by natural law. The church collected vast sums for the orphans, the hospitals, travel hostels, and repatriate the shipwrecked. Here we can see entire systems of social security emerging, and the origin of welfare politics.
The defining role of Christianity in the West: It is also the origins of modern science. The study of natural law rested on the Catholic insistence on rationalism, namely that since God had endowed man with a rational mind, it was befitting of all Christians to make good use of their rational faculties. Rational inquiry into the order of the cosmos was seen in the Western Christian worldview as a way to glorify God. On this basis, the church funded so-called “universitas” across Europe – communities devoted entirely to the study of the sciences.
It is a myth that the Church actively suppressed scientific practice and critical study. Conversely – the Church platformed scientists, funded their study, and helped build intellectual ecosystems where new breakthroughs could emerge. Many forget that Nicholas Copernicus, the renowned astronomer who championed heliocentrism, was a devout Catholic who dedicated his study to Pope Paul III. Galileo Galilei was employed by the Church to investigate heliocentrism, and the feud Galileo later had with the Church was not so much due to a Christian unwillingness to acknowledge scientific observations as it was personal grievances between Galileo, who was infamously arrogant, and his partners in the Church.
It is, however, true that the Papacy became hostile to political dissent, and its excessive use of force to crack down on heretics, as well as widespread allegations of blatant corruption, eventually led to the Protestant Reformation, when central and Northern Europe broke off from Papal authority. The Protestant emphasis on individualism over corporatism, with doctrines such as sola scriptura and sola fide, made Protestant countries more receptive to private enterprise – though still strictly bound by Christian ethics. In practice, this meant that the Protestants continued the rationalism and legalism that had become so typical of the Catholic West, but a far more devolved, privatized way.
Christendom had always maintained a distinction between church and state (”render onto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and render onto God that which is God’s,” as Jesus pointed out). This was one of the many revolutionary ideas of Christianity in antiquity. But in the aftermath of the endless wars that followed the Protestant reformation, the question of the Church’s role in society became increasingly contested, both in Catholic and Protestant countries.
Many clergymen and Christian philosophers embarked on a vigorous self-critique, highlighting where Christian monarchies had failed Christ in their luxurious lifestyles and greed. In France, this self-critique was further radicalized to suggest that Christianity itself had failed to bring about the utopistic society many desired, culminating in the violent and bloody French Revolution in 1789 where the self-proclaimed atheists overthrew the monarchy and banned the Church, sending thousands of traditionalists to the guillotine under a new slogan: liberty, fraternity, and egalitarianism. The revolutionaries fought for the dignity of the poor, freedom from oppression, and the universality of “human rights”.
The irony, however, is that all of these concepts are deeply Christian in origin. Holland sees the French revolutionaries as nothing more than a radicalized Christian sect that critiques Christianity using language and ethics inherited from Christianity. The revolutionaries liked to think that they were honouring Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, but these ancient kings would have scoffed at them. This reveals the Triumph of Christianity.
Even the most aggressive and violent attack on the Christian Church since Emperor Diocletian (4th century) was done under the banner of Christian principles, the escalation of a critique the Christians themselves has started.
The only ideology that has truly been the most genuinely anti-Christian in Western history, Holland notes, is Nazism. And that is precisely why Nazism has become the most revolting ideology in our collective imagination – because Nazism behaves exactly like a pagan civilization, at least in the way we remember it today. Eliminate the weak, reward the powerful, build an empire, and build the Uber mensch through genetic breeding on Darwinian assumptions.
The defining role of Christianity in the West: Nazism is the most antithetical system to Christendom, as it proudly proclaims that there is a Jew and Greek, that it is the mighty, not the meek, who will inherit the earth, that the warmongers, not the peacemakers, who blessed. This is a true anti-Christian revolt, one that Diocletian, Caesar, and Alexander would have delighted in.
Holland gives us a reality check. Modern politics continues to rage on about identity, sex, capitalism, communism, refugees and welfare checks, and Christianity is often portrayed as belonging to a particular political group. It is used as a buzz word to advance one’s agenda or bolster an argument. Christianity becomes boxed in as a religion belonging to a particular “side”.
Holland, in Dominion, enlightens us with a new perspective: Christian concepts are found in (nearly) all these sides. We are, in fact, engaging in debates that are relevant only in a world built on the Christian conceptual framework. Holland calls it a “Christian civil war”, where many are ironically under the impression that there is nothing Christian about them. It is too late for that, Holland says. If you are a Westerner, you belong to Christendom. That is a fact of history, regardless of your personal convictions.
