Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (published as Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World in the United States) is a 2019 non-fiction history book by British historian Tom Holland.
The book is a broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.[1] According to the author, the book "isn’t a history of Christianity" but "a history of what's been revolutionary and transformative about Christianity: about how Christianity has transformed not just the West, but the entire world."[2]
Holland contends that Western morality, values and social norms ultimately are products of Christianity,[1][3][4] stating "in a West that is often doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain — for good and ill — thoroughly Christian".[5] Holland further argues that concepts now usually considered non-religious or universal, such as secularism, liberalism, science, socialism and Marxism, revolution, feminism, and even homosexuality, "are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed",[6][7][8] and that the influence of Christianity on Western civilization has been so complete "that it has come to be hidden from view".[1][7]
It was released to positive reviews, although some historians and philosophers objected to some of Holland's conclusions.
Background
Tom Holland has previously written several historical studies on Rome, Greece, Persia and Islam, including Rubicon, Persian Fire, and In the Shadow of the Sword.[9] According to Holland, over the course of writing about the "apex predators" of the ancient world, particularly the Romans, "I came to feel they were increasingly alien, increasingly frightening to me".[10] "The values of Leonidas, whose people had practised a peculiarly murderous form of eugenics and trained their young to kill uppity Untermenschen by night, were nothing that I recognised as my own; nor were those of Caesar, who was reported to have killed a million Gauls, and enslaved a million more."[1] This led him to investigate the process of change leading to today, concluding "in almost every way, what makes us distinctive today reflects the influence over two thousand years of the Christian story".[10]
Prefiguring the book, in 2016 Holland penned an essay in the New Statesman describing how he was "wrong about Christianity".[11][12]
The success of what he calls the "Christian revolution" in changing our sensibilities, Holland argues, is evident in how complete its central claims now are taken for granted by "believers, atheists and those who never paused so much as to think about religion".[14] Holland also argues that many of those who most clearly recognized the "radical" implications of Christianity, and its departure from earlier morality, were those fundamentally opposed to it – including Friedrich Nietzsche, the Marquis de Sade and the Nazi Party.[4][14]
Reception
Terry Eagleton, writing for The Guardian, described the book as "an absorbing survey of Christianity's subversive origins and enduring influence" and an "illuminating study", concluding "Holland is surely right to argue that when we condemn the moral obscenities committed in the name of Christ, it is hard to do so without implicitly invoking his own teaching."[3]The Economist also reviewed the book favorably, calling Holland a "superb writer", though also writing that "his theory has flaws", and that "correlation is not causation".[13]Samuel Moyn, writing for the Financial Times, similarly stated that "Holland shines in his panoramic survey of how disruptive Christianity was for the ethical and political assumptions that preceded it", though also criticizing how "the illustration of the conquest of the west by Christianity risks becoming so total that it explains everything and nothing."[15]
Peter Thonemann, writing for the Wall Street Journal, called Dominion "an immensely powerful and thought-provoking book", stating "it is hard to think of another that so effectively and readably summarizes the major strands of Christian ethical and political thought across two millennia". At the same time, he criticized it as selective, writing "Mr. Holland postulates a golden thread of Nice Christianity ... this argument — that everything Nice in our contemporary world derives from Christian values, and everything Nasty in the actual history of Christendom was just a regrettable diversion from the true Christian path — seems to me to run dangerously close to apologetic".[1] The Los Angeles Review of Books stated that "Dominion's most important contribution is in emphasizing how terms we take for granted, even concepts seemingly as fundamental as 'religion' and 'secular,' come 'freighted with the legacy of Christendom'", stating that his argument about the Christian origin of "human rights, socialism, revolution, feminism, science, and even the division between religion and the secular" is carried out in a "mostly convincing way".[7]
Jonathan Sumption, writing for The Spectator, opined the book was "sustained with all the breadth, originality and erudition that we have come to associate with Holland’s writing."[16] Philosopher John Gray, writing for the New Statesman, called Dominion "a masterpiece of scholarship and storytelling".[17]
It was also favorably reviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald,[14]The Critic,[18] the New Yorker,[8] and Kirkus Reviews who called it "an insightful argument that Christian ethics, even when ignored, are the norm worldwide."[19] In a mixed review, Gerard DeGroot, writing for The Sunday Times, wrote that he "[had] to commend the originality of this book" but disagreed with its thesis, writing "the values described as Christian seem more like simple human nature... The idea that charity and tolerance are evidence of Christian influence seems too ethnocentric".[20]
Philosopher A. C. Grayling has rejected Holland's interpretation of Christianity's influence on modern morality,[21][22] meeting Tom Holland for a debate on the subject.[12][23]
Influence
Despite being intended as a work of history and not apologetics, the book has since publication been cited as both an influential contribution to recent debates on "cultural Christianity", and, for some, as a path to conversion in its own right.[24][25] As such, this has in certain Christian milieus been described as the "Tom Holland train" to the Christian faith.[24]
