The Ghost of Christian Past

 From American Reformer:

Holland’s 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World landed like a bombshell on the complacently atheistic world of the British intelligentsia, and continues to send shockwaves through the academy and popular discourse. In it, he courageously contends that “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions….The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past” (13). Indeed, the very fact that this is so hard to see is itself evidence of Christianity’s total transformation of Western history: “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted” (17).

Holland writes neither as a Christian (though he has since tentatively re-affirmed the faith in which he was raised) nor as an apologist for Christianity per se. Throughout his gripping narrative (even his critics agree that Holland is one of the most gifted writers of historical nonfiction alive today), Holland pulls no punches about the failures of Christians throughout the centuries to live up to their own ideals, as church leaders–like other sinners–have often lusted after wealth, and control. But the key point, he stresses, is that at the very least, they had ideals of love, mercy, and universal justice that they could fail to live up to—and, crucially, were often astonishingly self-critical about their own failures. Over and over he notes the curious tendency of Christian civilizations to be riddled with self-doubt about their own exploits. It is fashionable today to malign the evils of British imperialism, even as we romanticize the empires of pagan antiquity. “Yet the British,” writes Holland,

despite the certitude felt by many of them that their empire was a blessing bestowed on the world by heaven, could not entirely share in the swagger of the [Persian] Great King. Pride in their dominion over palm and pine was accompanied by a certain nervousness. The sacrifice demanded by their God was a humble and a contrite heart. To rule foreign peoples—let alone to plunder them of their wealth, or to settle their lands, or to hook their cities on opium—was also, for a Christian people, never quite to forget that their Saviour had lived as a slave, not the master, of a mighty empire (429).

The irony of modern discourse is that, for all the vitriol poured on Christians for their failure to love those who are different, care for the marginalized, or stand up for the rights of women, few pause to consider why we should care about doing any of these things. Certainly the pre-Christian worlds of pagan antiquity did not. For your average Persian, Greek, or Roman, argues Holland, it was self-evident that foreigners and the poor were the scum of the earth, good for little except enslavement, and that women’s bodies existed chiefly for the gratification of powerful men. Holland goes out of his way to remind the reader that crucifixion, before it became a symbol of Christ’s triumph, was a symbol of Roman brutality, an ingeniously cruel form of torture that signified the stark power politics of the ancient world. The fact that the Christians would dare celebrate the ignoble end of their leader in a death fit only for slaves is proof enough of the sheer radicalism of the “Christian revolution”; the fact that we scarcely bat an eye at the sight of a crucifix attests to the astounding success of that revolution. (Read more.)

Share