Jesus is very difficult to bring down. That’s the power of it.
Historian and podcaster Tom Holland’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World traces Christianity’s influence in the West from the Crucifixion to the present day. In the five years since its release, publications like The New Statesman have noted Dominion’s influence on a growing group of ‘cultural Christians’ who have come to realize how much their basic beliefs are conditioned by the West’s Christian past. I was able to chat with Holland about his connection to this movement and where he believes it is headed. (You can purchase a copy of Dominion here.)
Amy: “Your book Dominion has been credited by some with inspiring a growing trend in which Western intellectuals acknowledge the social value of ‘cultural Christianity,’ with some going on to embrace historic Christian doctrines and others not. Is this a reaction you expected or desired?”
Tom: “As I wrote the book, I had contradictory anxieties. One was that what I was writing was so far-fetched that everyone would just slaughter it because it wasn't a thesis that was particularly current at the time. It wasn't one that I'd read in a lot of academic works. So, I thought, ‘I'm going to be really exposed here,’ kind of tilting at a windmill. And the other part of me as I wrote it—it seemed so glaringly obvious that I thought, ‘I'm just pointing out something that is completely glaring.’ And I could never decide which caused me more anxiety. But to be honest, as I was writing it, I had the kind of people who would be writing reviews in my mind, and I know the caliber of opinion that reviewers tend to have. So that's what I was worrying about. I certainly wasn't expecting or thinking about whether it would have a kind of evangelical influence because although it is often described as being very pro-Christian, its tone is studiedly relativist. It's not a work that is arguing that Christianity is true or even that it is good. What it is arguing is that the understanding of ‘good’ that people in the West have derives from Christianity. That is, I think, quite different from saying that Christianity is actually good, although I think that's a nuance that is sometimes lost. I remember the first review I had. I think it was in The Times [of London], and the review was obviously very hostile. I mean, it wasn't just hostile: they couldn't believe that I was arguing it. They clearly regarded me as hopelessly naïve. He wrote something along the lines, ‘As I was walking here, I passed a beggar, and I reached in my pocket and gave him money, and that is an instinct that surely everyone would have.’ I mean, did you read the book? At least engage with the argument that you're doing that because of the culture in which you have been brought up. You know, the whole ‘surely everybody just thinks this, it's just human nature’ argument. It astounds me that people can read the book and think they don't at least have to engage with the case I'm making, but that was quite a common response when it was first published.”
Amy: “It's definitely one of those books where a lot of people will have made up their mind before they read it.”
Tom: “I mean, I've had the sense from what lots of readers have said that it has actually changed minds. Quite a few people have said, ‘I still don't believe a word of it, but I do now recognize the contingent nature of my beliefs.’ Equally, there have been lots of people who've said, ‘I've been baptized and confirmed, and I'm now fully in. Hooray for Jesus!’”
Amy: “So, in terms of the cultural Christianity trend, to what extent do you believe that your book has inspired this trend, or were you responding to something that was already taking place, or are you just one piece of a bigger puzzle? How do you see yourself regarding this trend?”
Tom: “I guess I'm too close to it. Of course, because I wrote the book, I tend to read what people say about it, and so I'm more aware of what people are saying about the book than I am about what they're saying about…Who are the other ones? Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Jordan Peterson, or whatever. I have less interest or stake in what they're saying than I do in what I'm saying, so I feel that my perspective would be completely skewed, and because of that, I suspect that it hasn't really played a part.”
Amy: “Do you ever have other writers or intellectuals reach out to you personally with questions about the Christian faith or about the argument you're making in your book as a result of this book coming out?”
Tom: “No, no. I mean, I know that there are people who have read it and been swayed by it who are in the public eye, but they don't come to me like I'm some guru who can answer their religious questions or doubts or whatever. I think everyone would recognize that is not what I'm about.”
Amy: “Okay, fair enough. You have also, as you said, been on your own personal journey over the past few years, and writing Dominion seems to have been an important point in the evolution of your thoughts. How would you describe your own beliefs at the present time regarding either specifically Christianity or just religious faith in general?”
Tom: “Well, I've always been, I suppose, skeptical and materialist and rationalist—at least I think I was. At the same time, I was always skeptical about skepticism. I felt a sense that it was slightly boring and that I would much rather that the supernatural dimensions were true. When I look back at my writing career, I began writing vampire books in which I was looking at specific historical periods through the medium of supernatural beliefs and using them to kind of construct plots. And when I came to write straight history, I would do the same. If I was writing about the Romans or the Greeks or whoever, or early Christians or early Muslims—as I was writing, I would adopt the perspective of the people that I was writing about towards the supernatural. So, if they believed in the gods, I would talk about the gods as if they were true, or if they believed in angels or whatever, I would do likewise. And I think because of that, I became very interested in the way in which convictions and beliefs about supernatural dimensions were massively important in explaining the differences between various cultures, civilizations, and ways of thinking. So, it was increasingly not a materialist basis. I mean, I entirely accept that economics and class are important, but actually, I don't think they're more important than the beliefs in the supernatural. That was the conclusion I was coming to, and which prompted me to write about early Islam. And writing about early Islam, I felt all the more what I had already felt writing about ancient Greece and Rome: just how Christian I was. In The Shadow of the Sword, I was writing about Zoroastrianism, I was writing about Judaism, I was writing about Islam. But when I wrote about Christianity, I just felt, ‘Yes, this is my country. This is what I feel most comfortable writing about,’ even though, of course, the Christianity of late antiquity is very different from Christianity of the 21st century in so many ways. But I did feel a real consciousness of how Christian I was and how Christian everybody around me was and the culture that I lived in was. And that's really what then prompted me to write Dominion, was to stress test that thesis—to stress test the degree to which the country I lived in, and I suppose the West more broadly, had been shaped by Christian assumptions and stories and narratives and beliefs. And I suppose because of that sense of congruity when I read all the various Christian writers going from [St.] Paul, right the way up to the present day, I found them more moving, and I was more receptive to them than I was to any other writings about the supernatural dimension that I'd read. And I allowed myself to think, ‘Well, what if the supernatural is actually true?’ And there were various moments in the writing of Dominion that kind of opened my eyes to that possibility. One which I've talked about loads was going to Iraq. And this passage in Origen about the Bible as a mansion full of many rooms with locks on, and the key in each different room, opened my eyes to a new understanding of the Bible. And the cancer experience and all kinds of things like that, for which I have perfectly rationalist explanations. [1] It doesn't even need a rationalist explanation. It’s just a succession of coincidences that happened. Any sense of the supernatural could be explained by heat stroke, anxiety, whatever. It wasn't that miraculous that I was able to get the proper treatment for cancer. I mean, none of it is in any way miraculous or conclusive, but because I had been, I suppose, acclimatized to the excitement of thinking the supernatural might actually be true and realizing that that made me feel happier and made me feel that the world was more exciting because of it. Basically, I'm no longer content with materialism, and the only non-material framework I have, credibly, is the Christian one because nothing else…You know, I'm not going to become a Muslim or a Hindu, and Athena is dead and buried and gone. So, it has to be Christian. And with that proviso in mind, I'm happy to say, that's the place I'm at. I'm aware it's not exactly the kind of affirmation of faith that—you know, it's not Lutheran, but maybe it is to the degree that it's kind of personal to me. It's my accommodation to Christian faith.”
Amy: “Finally, a lot of people who are using this terminology of ‘cultural Christianity’ and promoting it as an idea—one gets the feeling that this has a clear political dimension for them and that they're hoping through the recovery of some kind of cultural Christian beliefs to create political and social change on a broad scale. I'm curious for your opinion: do you think that has much potential, particularly if people are not buying into Christianity as a whole?”
Tom: “It tends to be associated with the Right, and it tends to be promoted by people who are on the side of, I guess, conservative Christians. And they may be conservative over sexuality or gender or immigration or whatever. And they sense that this has a kind of potency, perhaps, that just moaning about it on Fox News or whatever doesn't quite have. And so that's what they want to tap into. But I guess the argument with which I end Dominion is that everything is culturally Christian, pretty much. I mean, Darwinism isn't, fascism isn't, but pretty much everything else is. And therefore, arguments over abortion or trans rights or whatever—I mean, both sides are culturally Christian. They're arguing over points of theology or points of emphasis. So, it seems wasted breath to say that someone is culturally Christian. I mean, everyone's culturally Christian. In my last chapter in Dominion, I opened by looking at Angela Merkel's opening of the border to Muslim refugees and Viktor Orban's putting up the barbed wire fence, and both clearly draw on Christian traditions. I mean, you can say no to Muslim refugees coming in—particularly if you're the president of a country that was occupied by a Muslim empire for centuries—and say that you're defending Christianity. And you can open up and play the Good Samaritan and say that you're in tune with Christianity. I mean, Christianity is properly civilizational. It can't be reduced to a kind of program. That seems to me part of what makes the Gospels, in particular, so culturally fertile: Jesus is very difficult to bring down. That’s the power of it. The Bible is full of contradictions, and so Christian civilization is full of contradictions.”
This interview was edited for length and clarity. The opinions expressed therein are not necessarily representative of those of 1517 as an organization.
[1] Holland received a cancer diagnosis a few years ago and was later declared cancer-free.
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