Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

I bought this thinking it was a different book to his UK version of a similar name. It's not, though it has a nicer contents page.Tom Holland is objective.The book itself was in pristine condition.

Tom Holland has written a superb overview of the impact of Christianity on the West. He argues we in the West are moored to our Christian past and our morals and ethics derive from Christianity. Holland believes that Christian values permeate Western culture and thinking. If anything, Christianity's influence has been underestimated. Holland claims that many beliefs that we take for granted have Christian origins. He argues that George W. Bush was mistaken in assuming that Muslims shared a Christian worldview and such values are universal.Holland does not fully explain what he means by Christian values. Jesus spoke repeatedly about inequality and injustice. He spent a lot of his time helping the poor and society’s outcasts. He wanted his followers to love their enemies. The Bible suggests that God is closer to the poor than to the rich. Matthew 25 states the key test for a disciple is treating the poor and the hungry as if they were Jesus. Professor Richard Hays of Duke Divinity School believes that Christians are meant to direct their energies towards the renunciation of violence, the sharing of possessions, and overcoming ethnic divisions. Holland discusses the impact of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, who were both students of the Bible. They preached a message of non-violence and forgiveness.Saint Paul claimed that Christ's church was open to all, slave and free, Greek and Jew, male and female. He taught that everyone is equal before God and we should love one another. These were revolutionary ideas in the Roman world and we still struggle with them today. Holland argues that because God loves each of us unconditionally, we are in turn meant to love and respect our fellow man. Holland discusses the Beatles and he claims that songs like “All You Need is Love” and “Imagine” express Christian beliefs.Holland has written extensively about Rome, ancient Greece, and Islam. He claims that the more he studied classical antiquity the more alien he found it. Holland concluded that his values were distinctly Christian. Christianity became the dominant religion in Western Europe because of the Romans. Pagan Rome was a barbaric place. It was depraved and violent. The Romans entertained themselves by having criminals eaten alive by wild animals. Rome was also corrupt and materialistic, with only the rich having any rights. Julius Caesar is fondly remembered by classical scholars but he carried out genocide in Gaul. The Romans tended to destroy societies that got in their way. The Romans and Greek philosophers like Aristotle did not care about the poor and the downtrodden, they viewed them as losers. Aristotle justified slavery as natural, claiming some humans were slaves by nature, lacking the moral reason to be regarded as the equals of free men. Christianity must have seemed an attractive option for many ordinary people in the ancient world.Holland does not believe that God exists but he was raised a Christian. He claims that we in the West have retained our Christian morals and ethics even though many of us have stopped believing in God. The book is not a history of Christianity. He mentions theologians like Irenaeus, Anselm, Origen, Marcion, and Pelagius. It helps to have some knowledge of Christian history to understand their significance.When the Britain Empire occupied a country it would usually be forced by Christians to ban practices they considered barbaric. In India, Hindu widows would sacrifice themselves by sitting atop their deceased husband's funeral pyre. The British banned this practice because of pressure from Christian evangelicals. William Wilberforce was a devout Christian, who forced the British Parliament to ban the slave trade in 1807. The Bible did not seem to condemn slavery, but British Christians knew it was wrong. As Western culture has become more liberal we have embraced behavior that the Bible specifically forbids, like divorce, working on the Sabbath, and homosexuality. We are now making our own rules, but they are still rooted in the gospels.In 2002, the World Humanist Congress affirmed “the worth, dignity, and autonomy of the individual.” Holland views this as a quintessentially Christian idea that finds no parallel in the ancient world, or in other parts of the world today. Humanists believe “that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others.” Holland argues that the source of humanist values is not to be found in science or reason but in Christianity.Holland suggests that Western secular liberals are deluding themselves in believing that Western views on human rights are universally shared. Western Liberals have insisted that Afghans should embrace gender equality. Holland claims that "To be a Muslim was to know that humans do not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God." For some Islamic scholars, such as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi the idea of equality between men and women, or between Islam and other religions, is “a monstrous blasphemy”. There is no such thing as “human rights” only the laws of Allah; any attempt to impose those human rights on Islamic countries is infidel heresy and will lead to friction.Holland discusses the dark side of Christian history. Over time, he writes, Christians “have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake.” He notes, for example, that the efforts of missionaries to bring Christianity to Africa were undermined by a “colonial hierarchy” in which black people “were deemed inferior.” But he also argues that the very standard by which we condemn colonizers is itself Christian.

Tom Holland is no Christian, in that he doesn't believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who died for the sins of the world, was raised on the third day, and later ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father. On the other hand, consistent with the thesis of this book, he recognizes clearly how profoundly Christian he really is, in the sense that the unspoken values that permeate western society are inherently Christian values formed in the milieu of 2000-plus years of Christian expansion. Most interestingly, he argues that for almost 1000 years, the very weapons used by the church's bitterest enemies were more often than not first expounded by St Paul and then forged in the fires of various Christian revolutions since the age of the Apostles.Imagine a mining town that develops over the centuries its own foundry, factories, and logistics networks centered around the mineral wealth of the mines. The town grows into a city built on this wealth. All of the glory of the city flows from this fountain. As do many of its ills. Periodically, some of the townspeople rise up against those ills--the smog, the corruption, the byproducts dumped into the nearby streams. When fights break out, those same townspeople use swords forged in the city factories (and in later years, rifles, cannons, and tanks) to wage their warfare, never recognizing the irony of their utter dependance on the very thing they are fighting.Such, in many ways, is Holland's view of Western Civilization. Christianity's inner strength relies on a paradox in that the weaknesses of Christendom are really only correctable by first taking for granted its underlying assumptions."For two thousand years, though, Christians have disputed <that power was the driving force of history>. Many of them, over the course of this time, have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake. Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change. 'God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.' This is the myth that we in the West still persist in clinging to. Christendom, in that sense, remains Christendom still."Nietzsche was and is perhaps the philosopher who saw this most clearly, recognizing that if God is really dead, the Will to Power was a much more consistent ethic than caring for the weak and poor. Hitler took this and ran with it, and for a few years the 20th century got a glimpse of the pre-Christian world--one that cared not for the weak and poor, but for power and glory.The modern woke secularists rely on these same underlying Christian assumptions to attack the church that seems to be the source of many of their grievances. They do not realize the Pandora's box they may be opening.

I was very impressed with all the information that the writer contributed to the story of how the Christian faith has helped shaped the world and the USA. As a historian and a Christian there was much I knew, but also much that I learned. I felt that the author, indicating that he himself is an atheist, might skew the information to slant against what the Christian faith has done. However, he was very even in his discussions and conclusions, showing how the basics of God's Word and in it the commandments of Jesus "loving God with all your heart, soul and mind" and "loving your neighbor as yourself", as well as the Ten Commandments have been important in shaping a good and civilized world, looking toward a Deity for guidance. It was a good read and I had a hard time putting it down. Anyone who is interested in history will probably enjoy it.

This is a complex book - the author attempts to cover a lot of ground in one book, and in general succeeds. He delves into topics that are an unexpected pleasure, or at least of academic interest to the reader that I have not seen elsewhere . In many places he avoids coming to a direct conclusion, leaving it to the reader to make up their own mind. While some may consider this a cheap trick to avoid controversy, I can appreciate his desire as an academic to present both sides and let the informed reader make their own conclusion.This is not a devotional book, nor does it shy away from Christianity's blemishes. Yet at the same time, one is left with the awesome realization of the good that it has brought into this world, which only happened because of God's willingness to humiliate Himself on the Cross. The story of how the humble and meek conquered the strong.