A Synopsis of Dominion, by Tom Holland

A synopsis of Tom Holland’s Dominion, by Phil Mitchell

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           Dominion is a book about the domain of Jesus Christ. His majesty and power as it has grown over the centuries, to become the most powerful cultural force ever known to mankind. Western culture is a product of His walking the earth and Holland does a marvelous job of demonstrating this chapter after chapter. 

           No society is contemplating how much Islamic culture to incorporate. Or how much Buddhism or Hinduism to adopt. Or how much Shintoism or Animism. But every nation is wrestling with what to incorporate of the culture created by Jesus Christ—Western culture.

Preface: 

Romans viewed crucifixion as the worst possible death anyone could endure. Not only was it physically excruciating, (where do we get that word?) it was scandalous. A person felt tainted by even viewing it. For the Jews it was even worse. That the eternal God would have a Son who became flesh, and then be tortured to death on a cross was both stupefying and repellent; not “merely blasphemy but madness.”[1] It took centuries but eventually “a corpse served as an icon of majesty.”[2]

           Eventually Christians, because of Jesus, came to believe that God was closer to the weak than the mighty. Christianity began in paradox—in the midst of cultures that stressed power, pride, honor, and strength—it stressed the weak and the suffering. But it produced what one Jewish scholar called, “the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world.”[3] 

           Holland states his purpose as examining those Christian currents that are the most widely held and enduring in the present day. “To live in a Western country is to live in a society saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.[4] (I recommend this book be read in conjunction with my book, Seven Ideas That Changed the World, which is much shorter but has the same thesis.) The emergence of Christianity is “the single most transformative development in Western history.”[5]

           The ambition of Dominion is to trace what one third-century writer termed, “the flood-tide of Christ.” “It is—to coin a phrase—the greatest story ever told.” [6]

Chapter 1: Athens 479 B.C.: The Hellespont

           Holland looks at the Persian Empire and finds an interesting conceit: Cyrus and Darius believed they were ruling by the will of some sort of divine being and this gave them the right to impose their will on others. The universe had a purpose. There was a “pattern to things.”[7]

Aristotle taught that in the heavens there was a circular orbit, eternal and obedient, yet it depended on “a mover which itself never moved.”[8]

           So Aristotle looked out on the world and concluded that there was an earthly order, a hierarchy, with certain men at the top. He was thankful that he was not an animal, a barbarian, or a woman.[9] The ancients all shared in this hierarchical view. It was commonly accepted that the way a man really became a man was by putting other men “in the shade.”[10]

Chapter 2: Jerusalem 63 B.C.: Jerusalem

           Jews came to the conclusion early that not only did they worship the supreme God, no other gods existed. Furthermore, mankind was unique. Only he had been fashioned in the image of the one God. And mankind alone possessed dominion over all other created things. God was separate from His creation. He did not fight with sea monsters—He created them. All of creation serves the one God. He is a God of order. God granted the Jews something He granted no other peoples—a covenant, and with that covenant He gave legislation authored by Himself. Every Jew, from the king to the simplest peasant, was subject to that law.

Chapter 3: Mission A.D. 19: Galatia

           The citizens of Galatia were profoundly committed to the worship of the Emperor. Then along came Paul with his intolerant message. “The Son of God proclaimed by Paul did not share his sovereignty with other deities. There were no other deities.”[11] The idea that a man crucified as a common criminal could be the supreme deity was scandalous to both Galatians and Jews. “Command and swagger were the very essence of the cult of the Caesars.”[12]

           Paul’s message was revolutionary. Everyone who opened themselves to the Gospel of Jesus Christ “were henceforward God’s holy people.”[13] Holland considers this a turning point in world history. “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.”[14]

           In this chapter Holland also points out that Paul’s teaching on sexual ethics was revolutionary. Actually, it is his theology of the body that is unique. But in teaching that our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit Paul was not “merely casting as sacrilege attitudes toward sex that most men in Corinth or Rome took for granted. He was also giving to those who serviced them, the bar girls and the painted boys in brothels, the slaves used without compunction by their masters, a glimpse of salvation.”[15]

           Into the darkness of the first-century pagan world something startling happened. Not as a leader of armies but as a victim the Messiah had appeared. “No one quite like him had ever been portrayed in literature.”[16] There was no comparison in Persian kings, or Greek philosophers, or Jewish prophets. “The logos—the word—had become flesh.”[17] (I must point out how similar this is to Russell Kirk’s insight in The Search for American Order. In chapter five he speaks of the “genius” of Christianity—the idea that a suffering servant might become the greatest conqueror of all.)

           This person and message will unleash the greatest cultural force of all time.

Chapter 4: Belief: A.D. 177, Lyon

           “All Christians, no matter where they were, had to live with the knowledge that they might be lynched.”[18] [Speaking of Blandina, a second-century slave girl] That a slave, ‘a slight, frail, despised woman’, might be set among the elite of heaven, seated directly within the splendour of God’s radiant palace, ahead of those who in the fallen world had been her immeasurable superiors, was a potent illustration of the mystery that lay at the heart of the Christian faith.[19]

           “The willingness of Christians to embrace excruciating tortures—which to those who sentenced them could only appear as lunacy—was founded on an awesome conviction: that their Saviour was by their side.”[20]

           Christianity has always been beset by various heresies. But in this era they all seemed to have one thing in common: that Jesus Christ might literally have suffered death.[21]

           One of the leading lights of this era was Irenaeus. He never doubted for a moment that he was engaged in a battle of ideas.[22] The Christian church created something never before seen in the world. A citizenship not based on birth, descent, or legal status, but to belief alone.[23]

           Holland then moves his narrative to what was probably the greatest city in the Roman world--Alexandria. There, emperor worship was demanded, and enforced with violence. Out of this cauldron came one of the great figures of Christian history—Origen. “To live in Alexandria—even for the most devout follower of Christ—was to experience the full dazzling potency of Greek culture.”[24] The Greeks and Romans built towering monuments to their religion and culture but Origen knew Christianity had something better. A monument made of “living stones.” It was Origen who first said, “Whatever men have righty said, no matter who or where, is the property of us Christians.”[25] In other words, all truth is God’s truth. 

           The third century A.D. saw the empire begin to unravel. There had to be a reason. The pagans decided it was because their gods were offended. So everyone was ordered to pay homage to them. Some refused such worship, among whom was Origen. He was tortured terribly and died within a year of his wounds. But within two generations the persevering Christian church finally became a legal entity under Constantine. The emperor who declared Christianity religio licita discovered something else about the faith. True religion did not consist of proper rituals or sacrifices. It consisted of correct belief.[26] Thus, the emperor summoned Christian leaders to a council in the city of Nicaea and there the bishops did something that had never been done before. They made a “declaration of belief that claimed itself universal.”[27] And although he did not know it, Constantine, “by accepting Christ as his Lord, had imported directly into the heart of his empire a new, unpredictable and fissile source of power.”

Chapter 5: Charity; A.D.362, Pessinus

           Julian the Apostate was chagrined that worship of the pagan gods had fallen off precipitously. What Julian failed to realize was that “the gods cared nothing for the poor. To think otherwise was ‘airhead talk.’’ Julian proposed combatting the new faith with aid of his own. However, “the young emperor, sincere as he was in his hatred of the Galilean teachings, and regretting their impact on all he held dear, was blind to the irony of his plan for combatting them: that it was itself irredeemably Christian.”[28]

           Julian in time learned an iron law of charity. Compassion for the poor cannot be summoned out of nothing. The logic that summoned compassion out of two wealthy men like Basil and Gregory “derived from the very fundamentals of their faith.”[29] There was no human existence so wretched that it did not bear witness to the image of God. It was at this time—the fourth century A.D.—that Basil’s brother, Gregory, took that logic of the image of God to its logical conclusion. He called for the abolition of slavery.

           “Lepers and children were not the most defenceless of God’s children.” Across the Roman world, “babies abandoned by their parents was a common sight.”[30] Up to this time virtually everyone was accepting of parents exposing their unwanted children. That is, until Christian people arrived on the scene. Many were like Macrina, a saint who rescued abandoned girls and took them home to raise as her own.

           Meanwhile, in Gaul, a new kind of hero was emerging—a Christian one. He is seen as heroic not because he wields political or military power but because he eschews both. Martin of Tours becomes a bishop precisely because he does not want to be one. Martin wields power because he rejects it, laying down his life for the weakest of his subjects.

           On the north coast of Africa—obscure by any account—there arises at this time one of the brightest lights in the history of Christianity. Augustine. He was known for rejecting the teachings of Pelagius. “That Christians might live without sin was not merely fantasy; it was a pernicious heresy.”[31] It was a fallen world we live in but one that could be delivered by light from heaven.

Chapter 6: Heaven; A.D. 492, Mt. Gargano

           Holland begins this chapter by describing the decline and death of paganism, that leftover from the Roman past. It was a Christian victory over Satan. Holland writes about the Christian struggles with a fallen world and then turns his pen to Gregory, the great and early seventh century pope. In this context he chronicles a radical new conception of time. The ancients had believed history moved in cycles but Christians had a linear view. History was a steady march onward and upward to the final judgment and the coming of Christ and His millennial reign. Even though Gregory looked out over the wreckage of what had once been the mighty Roman Empire he still had hope as he looked to the future. Augustine wrote that those who lacked the Christian understanding of history, “were doomed to wander in a circuitous maze, finding neither entrance nor exit.”[32]

           Holland then devotes a lengthy section to the evolving Christian view of the afterlife. He argues that Plato was quite influential. Augustine describes him as the pagan, “who comes nearest to us.”[33] 

           He then turns to the Irish, among the greatest missionaries the world has ever known. Irish monasticism was the most rigorous that has ever existed and they gave their attention to the lands east and south—what is modern day England, France, Germany, and even Italy. Columbanus was among the greatest. “Schooled in the ferociously exacting monasticism of his native land, Columbanus appeared to the Franks a figure of awesome and even terrifying holiness.”[34] The impact of Irish Monks is incalculable. Thomas Cahill’s famous book, “How the Irish Saved Western Civilization” should really have been titled “How Irish Monks Saved Western Civilization.”

Chapter 7: Exodus; A.D. 632, Carthage

           We move now into the world of late antiquity—a phrase coined by Peter Brown—when Christian emperors found their Jewish minority to be annoying and obdurate. But a far, far greater threat was about to appear. In fact, the greatest threat Christian kingdoms would ever face—Islam. “Provinces of the battle-wearied Roman and Persian empires, like over-cooked meat slipping off the bone, melted into the grasp of Arab warbands.”[35] When captured by the Muslim horde Christian and Jews, though people of “the book,” were to pay a tax and submit to their Arab conquerors. The tax was a sign of their inferiority to their new masters.

           The Muslims repudiated much of Christian teaching including and especially the idea that Jesus had been crucified. That was an error made by the biblical writers. Jesus had not so died. The Muslims also reputed the Pauline teaching that God had written His commandments on the heart. This idea made Christianity irrevocably different from Islam as well as Judaism.

           While Christianity is being driven from the Middle East and north Africa forever, it is expanding in northern Europe and Holland devotes a section to the growth of Christianity in England and the remarkable career of Bede. Bede made many remarkable contributions to Christianity, none greater than his redefinition of time. “There was only one fixed point amid the great sweep of the aeons,” so he fixed the hinge of history on the Incarnation. It was a “rendering of time itself as properly Christian.”[36] Holland notes that Bede was highly influenced by scholarship from the Middle East and points south, but a major player was also the Irish. They as much as anyone were forming a new people known as “the English.”

           Then comes the Battle of Tours in 732. There has been debate about its significance but Holland casts it as one of history’s turning points. The Muslims had been advancing all across southern Europe but that advance ended at the hands of Charles “the Hammer.” “More had hung in the balance at Poitiers than the Franks could possibly have realised.”[37] The Muslims had decisively repudiated the conviction that God’s true law was written on the hearts of men. At stake at Poitiers was nothing less than the legacy of St. Paul.[38] The Muslims had cut the world in half and ended the ancient world.

Chapter 8: Conversion, A.D. 754, Frisia

           This chapter begins a new section in Dominion, called “Christendom.” The first seven chapters Holland labeled “Antiquity.”

           One of the more astonishing developments—to me anyway--was the contempt Roman Christians in the fourth century had to missions. Augustine took the Great Commission seriously but hardly any of his contemporaries did. They “regarded Christianity as far too precious to be shared with the savages who lurked beyond the limits of Roman power.”[39]

           The “barbarian conversion” did not originate with civilized Roman Christians of the Mediterranean. It came roaring out of the far reaches of the former empire, from Ireland and England. Their inhabitants did not see their fellow barbarians as repulsive creatures to be avoided but as creations of God living in darkness and in desperate need of light. And light they provided.

           Holland gives the example of Boniface, a West Saxon, a people only recently brought to Christ. “He suffered no anxiety in contemplating the world turned upside down.”[40]

           We turn next to Charlemagne and the program of empire building Christian style. “As a programme for bringing and entire pagan people to Christ, it was as savage as none had ever been before.”[41] Charlemagne’s strongest criticism came from his own court. Alcuin, a disciple of Boniface, condemned the emperor’s policy. “Faith arises from the will, not from compulsion…pagans should be persuaded, not forced to convert.”[42]

           In response Charlemagne embarked on a serious program of education. “How could God’s law be written on the hearts of Christian people if they were not properly Christian? Without education they were doomed.”[43]

           In the last section of this chapter Holland describes the devastation of the pagan invasions—Huns and Vikings. But a remarkable thing happened. For the most part they converted to Christianity. This laid the ground for even greater Christian revolutions occurring after the celebration of the first millennium of Christ’s reign on earth.

Chapter 9: Revolution, A.D. 1076, Cambrai

           Holland turns to the great issue of “investiture” and considers it a turning point in world history. At the beginning of the eleventh century heresy once again raised its ugly head and the church reacted against it. In fact, when a heretic was burned in Orleans it was the first time in history it had happened. The “heretics” were reacting to obvious corruption in the church. Bishop Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII, attacked heresy but also fought for the purity and power of the church. He demanded celibacy, not just of monks, but of the “secular” clergy as well. Ordinary parish priests were required to practice it. What Gregory sought was, in Holland’s words, a “Reformation.”

           The biggest issue, the greatest of the age and one of the greatest in Western history, was the tensions between church and state. Who “invested” the clergy with their power and position? Was it king or church? Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, called for Gregory to abdicate St. Peter’s throne so that he, Henry, could replace him with someone more to his liking. Gregory responded with a world-shaking decision. He “declared that Henry was bound with the ‘chain of anathema’ and excommunicated from the church. His subjects were absolved of all their oaths of loyalty to him. Henry himself, as a tyrant and enemy of God, was deposed. The impact of the pronouncement proved devastating. Henry’s authority went into meltdown.”[44]

           What arose out of this controversy was something brand new in Western culture. The distinction between the “secular” and the “religious.” It became a permanent part of the West’s understanding of itself. Gregory had sought to bring all of society under the aegis of the church. He sought Reformation, not just for the church, but for all society. It was an idea that would reverberate down through the centuries. Many could dream of a revolution that would make the world a new place. “The Latin West had been given its primal taste for revolution.”[45]

           In the second half of this chapter Holland goes back one of the prime causes of Gregory’s revolution—the Cluniac revival. “The most intoxicating of all the reformer’s slogans was libertas—freedom. One place more than any other served as its emblem: a monastery charged with a sense of holiness so strong that Gregory had taken it as his model for the entire Church.”[46] That place was Cluny. A monastic order begun in A.D. 910 in southeast France, Cluny was the model because it had demanded independence from its local lord—Duke William. Cluny’s freedom from interference, the level of its commitment to high monastic standards, and the brilliance of its abbots, made it great. It led to the reformation of the High Middle Ages. This reformation led to another world-altering event—the Crusades. Begun in 1095 the Crusaders accomplished a feat that sent a thrill through all Christendom—the recapture of Jerusalem.

           The Roman Catholic Church and the papacy found itself at the Zenith of its power and influence. It was “an institution of the kind never before witnessed: one that had not only come to think itself sovereign, but had willed itself into becoming so.”[47] It was the glue that held medieval society together. From this order arose yet something else the world had never seen—the university town. Universities were the creation of the High Middle Ages. The idea arose that all souls were equal in the sight of God and only from this theological assumption could true justice arise. The concept of “human rights” began to take shape. This era produced giants like Peter Abelard who devoted his life to promoting the idea that “God’s order was rational and governed by rules.”[48] This led naturally to the search for order in every discipline, including nature. What moderns call “science” was being created. To look for laws in nature was to “honour the Lord God who formulated them.”[49] One of the greatest theologians of the age was Anselm who wrestled with theories of the atonement. “A distinctive order had arisen in the Latin West. Modernitas its enthusiasts called it. The final age of time.”[50]

Chapter 10: Persecution, A.D. 1229, Marburg

           The medieval church in the thirteenth century had reached the greatest power Christendom would ever know. The cause of reformatio would never be more intense. Neither would the Roman Catholic hierarchy ever have more ability to impose its will on the subjects of its kingdom.

           Holland begins the chapter with a vignette on St. Elizabeth, a woman of astonishing dedication who died at the age of 24 and was canonized shortly thereafter. A royal princess, she gave away all her wealth and devoted her short life to unstinting service of the poor. He also presents St. Francis of Assisi, the greatest of the mendicants, whose reputation and the order he established are with us to this day. Both are examples of the best medieval Roman Catholicism had to offer.

The cause of reformatio, however, had produced a powerful elite and “this elite had bred demands for revolution.[51]  Francis and Elizabeth lived at the time of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, which declared there was no salvation outside the Roman church. This, of course, meant the snuffing out of heresies and Holland devotes the bulk of this chapter to their persecution. The Council provided that the offer of salvation was universal—anyone could be saved. It also established the office of the Inquisitor. The “yearning to cleanse the world of sin” had turned murderous. 

The pope sanctioned a crusade against the Albigensians, home to the “Cathari,” or “pure ones.” For the first time the church turned its hostility to fellow Christians. The slaughter was dreadful, lasting for twenty years. This is when one heard the old maxim, “Kill ‘em all and let God sort them out.” The killing was finally ended but not without permanent blemish on the Church’s reputation.

Not all was mayhem and destruction in this era. When Christian warriors captured Toledo in 1095 they discovered a treasure trove of Greek scrolls, not least of which were the works of Aristotle. Christian and Jew went to the work of translation and most of Aristotle’s writings became available in Latin. The impact was immense. Roman Catholic scholars began the task of squaring the Greek’s teaching with Christian theology. The greatest of the reconcilers was Thomas of Aquino. A generation after his death the pope declared him a saint. “The result was to enshrine as a bedrock of Catholic theology the conviction that faith may indeed co-exist with reason.”[52]

Chapter 11: Flesh, A.D. 1300, Milan

           Christianity continues in this chapter as a revolutionary cultural force and nowhere more than in the arena of sexual ethics. The medieval church struggled with its evaluation of women. On the one hand they were temptresses who brought sin into the world. On the other hand, they were created in the image of God and the Bible is full of references to their humanity and worth before God. For example, no human being had ever been raised higher than the blessed virgin.[53]

           The reformatio brought about a revolution in the social dimensions of sexuality that was unlike anything ever seen in history. The sexual order before the coming of Christianity had assumed that “any man in a position of power had the right to exploit his inferiors.”[54] Then the Bible had recast this whole view. “Never before had any attempt to recalibrate sexual morality been attempted on such a scale. Never before had one enjoyed such total success.”[55] The church taught that a man could control his sexual impulses because he had been given the power of free will (yet another revolutionary idea). A wife had always been expected to be faithful to her husband. Now Christians were arguing that God expected the same from men—that a husband must be faithful to his wife. The Romans and Greeks would have argued that such a command would require a “heroic degree of self-denial.”[56]

           Along with the requirements of sexual restraint on the part of husband and wife was another revolutionary concept. The individual, not the patriarch, determined whether or not to enter into marriage. “Opening up before the Christian people was the path to a radical new conception of marriage: one founded on mutual attraction, on love.[57]

           Holland devotes the last section of this chapter to the medieval attitude toward sexual deviancy. Prostitution was decried, but it was also clear in the New Testament that they were to be treated with compassion and could attain forgiveness no matter how far they had fallen. And then there was homosexuality. This the church continued to condemn. For the Romans deviancy had been a “man allowing himself to be used as though he were a woman.”[58] But Christian teaching went far beyond this, condemning all sex between men. Then it took an even more radical step—it condemned sex between women. 

           The teaching of the church in this era was a watershed in how one viewed sexuality.

Chapter 12: Apocalypse, A.D. 1420, Tabor

           During the fifteenth century there was a keen expectation of the Second Coming, or the end of the world, or some kind of dramatic, world-changing event. The massive edifice of the Roman Catholic church had atrophied; “its lava had set….the papal order had become the status quo”[59] Christians hungry for ongoing reformatio found the papacy an impediment to needed change. An Oxford theologian name John Wycliffe went so far to say the papacy was without biblical foundation.

           One of the leading exponents of reform was the Bohemian, Jan Hus, who “openly derided the papacy as a primacy sanctioned by God.”[60] He was invited to Prague to defend his ideas before the emperor but he was arrested and burned in 1415. But his reforming zeal did not die out.

           One of the most apocalyptic groups was the Taborites. They believed “all traditional underpinnings of society…were fatally compromised.”[61] They were unusual in that they found a military genius to lead them into battle. Jan Zizka led them against several groups supported by the papacy. They were sufficiently victorious to earn a peace treaty with the more traditional political factions.

           Many in Europe were hoping for a savior, and some thought it might be Ferdinand of Aragon. Ferdinand did succeed in defeating the Spanish Muslims in their last stronghold, Granada, which fell on January 2, 1492. One person watching Ferdinand march into Granada was an Italian mariner named Christopher Columbus. Columbus saw himself as part of the apocalyptic milieu. He believed he was God’s messenger and spoke of himself in apocalyptic terms. He was destined to find a New Heaven and a New Earth and God told him exactly where to find it.

           Another Spanish explorer, Hernan Cortes, heard of a spectacular kingdom lying in interior Mexico.  He made the “staggeringly bold decision to head for it.”[62] The Mexica, as Holland calls them, had built a fabulous civilization of their own and had their own eschatology. Only the blood of human sacrifice could keep the universe from winding down. The Mexica were outclassed in military technology, but the real conflict was over rival visions of the end of the world. They dedicated the temple of one god by sacrificing 80,000 victims. For another they flayed their victims and wore their skins. Yet another required the sacrifice of children who were first made to weep. The Spanish had no problem bringing the Mexica to their knees.

           In human history conquering armies always felt they had a license to slaughter those they conquered. But not the Spanish. Their Christian heritage left them with a troubled conscience over the price paid for colonizing the New World. The leading voice for this hand wringing was Bartolomeo de las Casas, the great advocate for the native populations. He attacked Spanish atrocities and even began a program in international law. The dominion of Jesus Christ even reached into the minds of Spanish conquerors.

Chapter 13: Reformation; A.D. 1520, Wittenberg

           Holland devoted the last few pages of chapter 12 to the emergence of an obscure college professor named Martin Luther. Luther had originally been bothered by the sale of indulgences and had posted ninety-five points to debate them and other doctrinal issues. Over time Luther had concluded that “the true Antichrist mentioned by Paul reigns in the court of Rome.”[63]

           Luther continued to preach, write, publish challenges to prevailing Roman Catholic dogma. Finally, he was summoned to appear before the emperor in Worms. Holland makes much of the role of reformatio in Christian history. Gregory VII had shaken the world to its foundations in the eleventh century and Luther was just one more in a long line of reformers. He was merely doing what many Christians before him had done. Holland recounts a number of major Protestant distinctives; the false separation of laity and clergy, the folly of celibacy, and the necessity of salvation by grace alone. Finally, he appeals to conscience above all, and refuses to recant when ordered to by the emperor. The individual Christian’s conscience took precedence over pope and council.

           Holland then recounts some of the well-known adventures of Luther in the year following the Diet: his kidnapping by Frederick, protective custody in Warburg castle, the translation of the New Testament in German. Luther’s theological revolution “had freed Christians everywhere to experience it as he had experienced it: as the means to hear God’s living voice.”[64]

           Luther’s Reformation had far ranging consequence beyond what he could have ever imagined. There was the Peasant’s Rebellion of 1525 led by apocalypticists like Thomas Muntzer that killed 100,000. European states had to learn how to balance newfound spiritual freedoms with social control. The “Lutheran” states “set about designing a model of the state that no longer ceded any sovereignty to Rome. Meanwhile, in the privacy of their souls, Christians had lost nothing. In place of canon lawyers they now had God.”[65]

           Meanwhile, in England Henry VIII seized upon the Reformation to remove his country from the shackles of Rome and pursue his own marital agenda. On the continent the Anabaptists arose and the “Radical Reformation” created more consternation for the heads of state. Over the centuries many groups had never viewed the papacy as a legitimate authority supplying gunpowder to which Luther lit a fuse. In 1529 the Lutheran princes met at Augsburg to hammer out a way of governing in the midst of the new Reformation. They called themselves “Protestants” and laid the groundwork for a whole new way of operating nation states in a post-papal age.

           The Protestant thinker who did more than anyone to resolve the tension between freedom and authority was John Calvin. Setting up shop in Geneva, Calvin “wrestled with the practicalities of setting up a godly order.”[66] His only weapon was the pulpit. Refugees from all over Europe fled to Geneva to learn in Calvin’s “perfect school of Christ.”

 Religious conflagration broke out all over Europe. In England the reign of Bloody Mary (1553-1558) was followed by the peace of Elizabeth I. The Dutch suffered terribly for their Calvinism at the hands of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor, the French destroyed their Protestant minority on St. Bartholomew’s day in 1572, and Scotland came over to the Reformation in toto through the influence of John Knox. Finally, there arose a group called “Puritans” by their Catholic enemies. They sought to purify the church from its Catholic influences. Once again Holland points out the revolutionary nature of Christianity. The “rejection of tradition was itself a Christian tradition.”[67]

“A century on from Luther, Protestants could cast themselves as the heirs of a revolution that had transformed Christendom utterly. No longer merely a staging post in a lengthy process of reformatio, it was commemorated instead as an episode as unique as it had been convulsive: as the Reformation.” But now there was a whole new world opened up. “If God was to be found in the interior experience of individual believers, so also could He be apprehended in the immensity and complexity of the cosmos.”[68] And man’s understanding of the cosmos was about to be revolutionized.

Chapter 14: Cosmos; A.D. 1620, Leiden

           The Protestant Reformation was soon followed by a revolution in scientific thinking. It was also the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, arguably the worst in European history. But something even greater was beginning. “One day after the battle of White Mountain [the first of many terrible battles of the war] a ship name the Mayflower arrived…in the northern reaches of the New World.”[69] The American revolution had begun. And make no mistake about it, that’s how the Pilgrims and Puritans saw it. “Their gaze, for all they had settled on the margins of what seemed an immense and unexplored wilderness, was fixed on the entire expanse of the globe.”[70] They sought to reach all mankind even preaching to the native populations and translating the Bible into their languages.

           This was the era of Barolomeo de las Casas, the great defender of the native. Preaching the Christian doctrine of the sanctity of all life, las Casas declared that all human beings, pagan or not, had been endowed by God with the spark of reason. “Every mortal—Christian or not—had rights that derived from God…las Casas called them ‘human rights.’”[71]

           On the other side of the globe another revolution was unfolding. Jesuit missionaries had arrived in Beijing. The Chinese considered the study of the heavens of great importance for the necessary ordering of things but the Jesuits brought with them a superior understanding of the stars and how their path could be predicted. The Jesuits were better at predicting things like eclipses and it became clear to the Chinese it was because of the Jesuit’s religious assumptions—and their view of the universe: “That it had a beginning and would have an end. That it’s workings were ordered by divinely authored laws; that the God who had fashioned it was a geometer.”[72] To be a Jesuit was to “know that God’s purposes were revealed through the free and untrammeled study of natural philosophy…to take that path was the very essence of being a Christian.”[73]

           Holland devotes several pages to the controversy over Galileo. The battle is complicated and a true understanding of it does not serve Andrew White’s propaganda piece on the war of Christianity on science. The battle was really over Aristotle and to what extent Christian theologians should defend his cosmology. In the end, the heliocentric universe, won out through the efforts of many Christian scholars not just Galileo. And Galileo foresaw a future of increased scientific understanding. But make no mistake, all those going forward into solving the great scientific mysteries had one constant: “They all had their origins in Christendom.”[74]

Chapter 15: Spirit; A.D. 1649: St. George’s Hill

           This begins the third section of Holland’s book. This one is entitled, “Modernitas.”

What Christianity had unleashed on the world was a never-ending spirit of reformation, even revolution. Society could always be improved, if not perfected. And the reforming instinct has been carried into the modern world and inspired a host of reform movements. Many of them would call themselves “secular” but they are heirs of the Christian spirit of reform which can be traced at least to the eleventh century.

           Christian society now had two very distinct meanings of the word “religion.” On the one hand true religion governed society, informed culture, and was to be required of all men. On the other hand, religion was deeply personal, buried deeply within the human heart. The need for an outward display of fealty to the religion of the state was a necessity. But the society also had to allow for the liberty of the individual spirit. “Religion was also something intimate, personal.”[75] The tension was to be permanent in western society. “Between the demands of those who believed there was only the one true religion, and those who believed that God wished all to practice their religion freely, there could be no easy reconciliation.”[76]

           The conclusion of the Thirty Years War had sought a peace that would establish a “proper Christian order” but also an end to the bloodshed. The English Revolution, led by the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, had sought the same. Cromwell had sought a “tradeoff…between the yearning of the Presbyterians for a purified commonwealth, and the demands of radicals for an absolute liberty of religion.”[77]

           One of the difficult decisions was what to do with the Jews. They had been officially banned as early as 1290 but still settled in England. Cromwell gave them the de facto right to be a part of British society. The Quakers were another group that had to be accounted for. They were radical in those days; “Women were particularly active.”[78] One of the greatest advocates for freedom of conscience was Baruch Spinoza. A Dutch Jew he invoked Calvin, arguing that true obedience to God “should be grounded in liberty…Spinoza, when he pushed the case for toleration, was participating in a debate that had always been fundamental to Protestantism.”[79] Spinoza’s theology was heterodox—he did not believe in God in the traditional way—his views were nonetheless “utterly saturated in Protestant assumptions.”[80]

           Holland devotes the last section of this chapter to the remarkable story of Benjamin Lay who epitomizes the spirit of reform and revolution brought by Christianity. Lay was a Quaker. He and his wife were hunchbacks; “both were barely four feet tall.”[81] First in the Caribbean and then in Philadelphia they waged a tireless war against slavery. “As in the time of Gregory of Nyssa, so in the time of the Lays: slavery was regarded by the overwhelming majority of Christians as being—much like poverty or war or sickness—as a brutal fact of life.” However, the Lays were of a different mind. Even William Penn, the greatest Quaker of them all, had argued while writing in prison that “that all of humanity had been created equally in God’s image.”[82]  Penn’s theological argument notwithstanding, Quakers in Pennsylvania had owned slaves and Lay preached against the practice incessantly. He became such a bother he was banned from their congregational meetings. But in the end Lay was victorious. On his deathbed he learned that the Quakers had banned the practice of slavery.

Chapter 16: Enlightenment; A.D. 1762, Toulouse

           As the title suggests, in this chapter Holland deals with several major figures of the so-called Enlightenment. First Voltaire, who hated Christianity with a passion. The fanaticism of Christians had only served to “cover the earth with corpses.”[83] Holland does not deny the power of these eighteenth-century intellectuals. “For the first time since the reign of Constantine, the commanding heights of European culture had been wrested from Christian intellectuals.”[84] But Holland denies that the Enlightenment operated outside Christian culture. “In truth, there was nothing quite so Christian as a summons to bring the world from darkness to light.”[85] Voltaire admitted, “Some sense of the divine was needed, or else society would fall apart. ‘If God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.’”[86]

           Holland repeatedly shows how “Christian” the anti-Christian intellectuals were. There criticisms of Christianity were rooted in the assumptions of Christian culture. Voltaire shared in the depiction of history as divided into three phases—Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. What he fails to note is that he did not create these distinctions. They were created by the Protestant reformers. In fact, Holland argues, all these revolutions go back to the One who said, “Woe to you who are rich.”[87] In the early days of the French Revolution the occupation most disproportionately represented was that of the priest. The French Revolution eventually became viciously anti-Christian but the English never did. Especially on the American continent it was infused and motivated by Christian ideas. “The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American Republic…was the book of Genesis.”[88]

           The philosophes were enamored of human rights, or as they called them, “the rights of man.” They assumed they were natural to human reason, but they were not. They originated—of all places—in the Catholic canon lawyers of the High Middle Ages. The Enlightenment philosophers sought the origin of rights in Greece and Rome. But they discovered something that did not exist. Neither of those ancient civilizations knew anything about such rights. Holland devotes quite a few words to one writer who understood this—the Marquis de Sade. The true divisions in society existed, “those who were naturally masters and those who were naturally slaves.”[89] Man simply stands “next to the Chimpanzee” on the ladder of power.[90] De Sade recognized that “the rights of man were no more provable than the existence of God.”[91]

           Holland ends the chapter by observing that, although ideas like the Marquis’ were logical and held by some, by the end of the eighteenth century the Christian view had triumphed. All the nations of Europe abolished the slave trade. “Amazing Grace indeed.”[92]

Chapter 17: Religion; A.D. 1825, Baroda

            Holland begins this chapter with a blood-curdling account of sati—a Hindu woman casting herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. This act of self-immolation was an ancient part of Hinduism and the word itself means, “good wife.”[93] Christians were appalled and saw this as a vindication of their superiority over paganism. Christianity was a superior religion to paganism. Holland then goes on to argue that Christianity, and especially Protestant Christianity, invented the very idea of a “religion.”

           It was clear that the Hindus could not be dismissed a mere pagans. They had sacred scriptures—as old as the Bible. They had temples, and rituals, a priesthood—all the things possessed by Christianity. The Hindus, however, would not have understood the Christian classification of them as a “religion.” “No word remotely approximate to it existed in any Indian language.”[94] Hindus themselves—as well as the British—began to use the term “secularization.” There was the religious and the secular.[95] This opened a door for Indians to shape what the religion looked like. For example, there were Indians who opposed suttee. Thus, in 1829 suttee was declared illegal. An Indian historian wrote, “Christianity spreads two ways: “Through conversion and through secularisation.”[96] The idea that a religion could function in a completely secular way—in two spheres of existence, religious and secular—was a “distinctively” Protestant idea. “A country did not need to see itself Christian…to start seeing itself through Christian eyes.”[97]

           Holland then examines how this process worked itself out in two other “religions”—Judaism and Islam. The Jews had, to say the least, an uneven history in Europe. By 1848 they were technically illegal in the kingdom of Prussia. But the Emperor, Friedrich Wilhelm, wanted to integrate them into his domain. Friedrich was himself deeply Christian on a cultural level. How do you have a Christian kingdom that admits the killers of Christ? The solution was similar to that in India. Jews were allowed to retain their religion as long as they functioned as “secular” in the public sphere. The French had already done the same in their Declaration of Rights.[98] However, “secularism” was not a neutral concept. Again, Holland argues that it was an invention of Christianity. “That there existed two dimensions, the secular and the religious, was an assumption that reached back centuries beyond the Reformation: to Gregory VII, to Columbanus, and to Augustine.”[99]

           Tension with the Muslims was seen in the controversy over slavery. The Muslims had no problem with it, and even argued that it was the natural way of things—as had Aristotle. Muslims had historically believed that the law was in written documents handed down from the prophet. But they capitulated to the Pauline idea that it was written on the heart. In time Muslims came to argue that slavery ‘s evil had been written on the hearts of men. From there it was an easy jump to the idea of international law and human rights. Holland describes the abolitionist movement as something that just exploded, “like the rushing wildfire of the Spirit.”[100] The British pursued abolitionism even though it went counter to their economic interests. And slavery continued to exist in many regions of Africa. The British knew that slavery could never be eradicated until the entire continent had “been won for civilisation.” “Civilisation” won out. “It was not the slavers who ended up settling Africa…but the emancipators.”[101] The emancipators were, as you might guess, an army of missionaries sent out from Europe and America. They were an irresistible army of conquest—conquest for the Kingdom of God.

Chapter 18: Science, A.D. 1876, The Judith River

           The latter half of the nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in how Western culture viewed science. The ancient past had always been of interest to Christians. One of the most powerful Christian ideas was creation. The world had a beginning. It did not rotate through endless cycles. Geology seemed to buttress Christian faith. Creation bore witness to design. Charles Darwin, along with many others, saw the opposite. The natural world contained “too many examples of cruelty to believe that they may ever have been the result of conscious design.”[102]

For centuries Western intellectuals sought to identify the laws of God’s creation. Now Darwin’s theory of natural selection had no need of God at all. Christianity taught that God Himself became a man, lived as a slave, and suffered a cruel death. Yet in weakness He was triumphant. Weakness had proven to be the greatest strength ever known. Darwin’s theory challenged all that. Weakness was nothing to be valued. There was more. “For eighteen long centuries the Christian conviction that all human life was sacred had been underpinned by one doctrine more than any other: that man and woman were created in God’s image.”[103] Darwin’s theory eviscerated that doctrine. He asserted, “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.”[104] Why were some races more advanced than others? There could only be one answer. Evolution had produced a “natural hierarchy of races. [Whites] had elevated themselves to a new degree of consciousness. Others had not.”[105]

           The full assault on the Christian view of civilization began. According to Darwin’s “bulldog”, Thomas Huxley, “It was only by stepping over the corpses of extinguished theologians that humanity would be able to leave delusion behind.”[106] Huxley called it a “New Reformation.” Science had always existed—the Greeks were off to a good start—but Christianity got in the way and scuttled progress. Holland observes, “That nothing in this narrative was true did not prevent it from becoming a wildly popular myth.”[107]   The Darwinists, however, were not leaving Christianity behind at all. Huxley had all the marks of the “Puritan character.” “Moral earnestness, the volitional energy, the absolute confidence in his own convictions, the desire to impress them upon all mankind.” “The war between religion and science reflected…the claims of both to a common inheritance.”[108]

           Some studied man’s place in the universe; others began to study his sexual nature. The word “homosexual” was invented. Despite the reductionism in viewing man’s sexuality much of the Christian heritage was retained. Fidelity in marriage remained deeply valued.

           Holland devotes a lengthy section to Andrew Carnegie and the social implications of Darwin. Carnegie’s view was right out of the social Darwinist catechism: “The only alternative to the survival of the fittest was the survival of the unfittest. Indiscriminate charity served no purpose save to subsidize the lazy and the drunk.”[109] But Carnegie retained much of his Christian heritage. He felt responsible to use his wealth for the betterment of mankind and so bestowed it on an endless number of social programs.

           The most far reaching consequence of Darwin’s thinking was its impact on a young Russian—Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov—better known by his penname, Lenin. Darwin’s impact on Lenin was great but even more that of another of Darwin’s successors—Karl Marx. According to Lenin, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution as it applies to organic matter so Marx discovered the law of evolution as it applies to human history.”[110] Marx had established the destiny of mankind scientifically. It was the evolution toward a classless society. Of course, there was no need for God. According to Marx, anyone who thought Christianity was of long term importance was “slumbering in an opium den.”[111] But Marx was also a product of his Christian heritage. “For a self-professed materialist he was oddly prone to seeing the world as the Church fathers had once done; as a battleground between the cosmic forces of good and evil…If, as he insisted, he offered his followers a liberation from Christianity, then it was one that seemed eerily a recalibration of it.”[112]

           Marx’ was a powerful, prophetic vision. Capitalism was doomed to collapse. The hour of salvation was at hand.

Chapter 19: Shadow; A.D. 1916, The Somme

           For many the unprecedented carnage of World War I was a vindication of Christianity. But for many others it was a vindication of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche understood where civilization was headed. “God is dead…We have killed him.”[113] However, “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.”[114] Nietzsche attacked the Enlightenment values that he saw clearly derived from Christianity. He held Enlightenment philosophers in contempt for their unwillingness to follow where their hostility to Christianity logically led. “Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith.”[115] Nietzsche celebrated pre-Christian paganism, when men took pleasure “in inflicting pain; for knowing that punishment might be festive…in the days before mankind became ashamed of its cruelty.”[116]

           Holland then turns his attention to the Bolsheviks and fascists, circa 1930. Instead of a tiny little group of radicals the Communists now ruled the largest nation on earth. With regard to Christianity their policy was simple: destroy it. They established the League of Militant Atheists whose job was to rid the earth of religion once and forever. They figured it would take about five years. But Holland finds irony in the Bolshevik program. “The godlessness of the Soviet Union was less a repudiation of the church than a parody of it. ‘Bolshevik atheism is the expression of a new religious faith.’”[117] 

The same was true in Italy and Germany where fascism was the new religion. It saw itself as replacing Christianity. “Fascism worked to combine the glamour and the violence of antiquity with that of the modern world. There was no place in this vision of the future for the mewling feebleness of Christianity.”[118] Hitler’s policies, “although rooted in a sense of race…were rooted as well in the clinical formulations of evolutionary theory. The measures that would restore purity to the German people were prescribed equally by ancient chronicles and Darwinist textbooks.”[119] By 1937 Hitler had determined—like Lenin—to rid the world of Christianity. He was angered by the church’s opposition to the liquidation of the retarded and cripples. The German people needed to come to accept the extermination of the weak. 

The last third of this chapter takes a most interesting turn. It focuses the life and writing of J.R.R. Tolkien. “Every story, he believed, was ultimately about the fall. No less than Augustine had done, he interpreted all of history as the record of human iniquity.”[120] “He aimed to write a fantasy that would also—in a sense acceptable to God—be true…Tolkien believed that whole of history bore witness to Christ.” Tolkien was a relative rarity in the 1930s—an intellectual with great affection for the Jews. Scientists had decided that the Jews were not really a race at all. They were a “virus, a bacillus.” “Only people affected by the baneful humanism of Christianity…could think otherwise.” Tolkien was one of those Christians—and there were many across Europe—who identified with the Jews in the midst of the greatest crisis in Jewish history. The biggest objection of the Nazis was to the book of Genesis. “Universal morality was a fraud perpetrated by the Jews. ‘Can we still tolerate our children being obliged to learn that Jews and Negroes, just like Germans or Romans, are descended from Adam and Eve, just because a Jewish myth says so?’”[121] Holland acknowledges that a number of Christians had been seduced by the social Darwinism of the Nazis. They came to be servants of Hitler’s racial ideology, claiming that in aiding the destruction of the Jews they were servants of Christ.

Shortly after the war ended Tolkien published the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The major themes were right out of Christian culture. “True strength manifested itself, not in the exercise of power, but in the willingness to give it up.”[122] The fall of Mordor came on March 25—the very day that according to tradition Christ entered the womb of the Virgin Mary. The book was not well received. “Most reviews, when not bewildered, were contemptuous. The books roots in the distant past, its insistence that good and evil actually existed, its relish for the supernatural: all were liable to strike sophisticated intellectuals as infantile.” His purpose had been to communicate the “beauties of the Christian religion; its truth.” It would end up as the most widely read book of the twentieth century.

Chapter 20: Love; A.D. 1967; Abbey Road

           The Beatles are the most popular rock band of all time. In 1967 they performed before a world-wide audience of 350 million and released their latest single. It was almost an anthem. It’s chorus, repeated over and over was, “All you need is love.” It was a prescription with which “neither Aquinas, nor Augustine, nor Saint Paul would have disagreed.” The same sentiment was being expressed in America by “an orator of genius, with an unrivalled mastery of its cadences.” Martin Luther King was an apostle of love. The Beatles did not take their message of love from the Bible, as King did. “They took it for granted.” Like modern Westerners they did not realize that their understanding of love was drawn from the Christian heritage.

           The “rights” movement in America came to involve not only blacks, but women and homosexuals as well. But these movements all drank from the same well. “All human beings possessed an equal dignity.” A Roman would have laughed at such nonsense. Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for it. But at least he understood its origin—the Bible. In 1971 John Lennon wrote the anthem of atheism, “Imagine.” But Lenin’s atheism was “unmistakably bred of Christian marrow.” So too was the greatest concert of all time in 1985—Live Aid. It was designed to raise money for suffering Africans. Why would rich Western rock stars raise money for poor black people on another continent? The answer was their Christian past.

           Holland devotes a good portion of this chapter to the spectacular growth of Christianity in Africa. In 1900 about ten million Africans called themselves Christian. By 1984 the number was 250 million. (And today it approaches 600 million.) The Christian gospel was attractive to this gigantic number of Africans and was the major factor in the undoing of Apartheid. “It was Christianity that had provided the colonized and the enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, carving out empires for themselves, had done so as the servants of a man tortured to death on the orders of a colonial official.”

           The last section of this chapter is devoted to 9-11 and its aftermath. George Bush could not understand why people of Muslim background would carry out such an attack. Bush, like most Westerners, thought his values were the values of countless million Muslims. Bush’s policies were met by anti-war and anti-colonial protests. But the protesters overlooked an important fact: their objections to imperial policies came not from the colonized but the colonizers. Opposition to empire came out of a long tradition of the Christian understanding of politics. Bush would never understand a man like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Al-Zarqawi saw the world through a different, non-Western lens. The U.N. had declared that all human beings had natural rights. But al-Zarqawi rejected this obviously Christian formulation. Humans had no natural rights and there was no natural law. The idea that there should be equality between men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim, had no place in Islam. Bush thought his values were universal. They are not. They are Christian and Western culture has been completely infiltrated and dominated by those values. They have “dominion” over Western thought.

Chapter 21: Woke; A.D. 2015, Rostock

           Facing the Syrian refugee crisis, Angela Merkel made the decision to “abandon any lingering sense that the [European] continent as Christendom and open it up to the wretched of the earth.” She had absorbed a morality that she thought was universal and, “Islam, in its essentials, was little different from Christianity.” What she did not realize was that “Germany, remained in its assumptions about how a society should best be structured, profoundly and distinctively Christian.” She was unwittingly demanding that for Muslims to enter European society they had to twist their religion into something decidedly different. They had to submit to a society of human laws rather than the laws of Allah. Secularism was not neutral. It was produced “by the sweep of Christian history.” The West had become skilled at “repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences.”

           The publishers and staff of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hedbo, learned this the hard way. After satirizing Mohammed the same way they had been satirizing Christianity for years, Muslim gunmen broke into their headquarters and killed nine of them. They could not understand it. Didn’t they buy the secular conceit that “all religions are the same?” To imagine that secular values were timeless was the “surest evidence of how Christian they were.”

           Holland then turns to Hollywood and the belief that there should be no restraints on human appetites: drugs, sex, and violence were packaged as entertainment. But then Hollywood learned what the Romans and Greeks knew all along. Sexual license is only the province of powerful men. Everyone else is a victim. Enter Harvey Weinstein. The “Me-too” movement was built on a solidly Christian assumption. Even men’s appetites were to be restrained. Margaret Atwood’s novel, A Handmaid’s Tale, told of a dystopian future of women enslaved and abortion denied. Though the feminists repudiated the Christian faith, their arguments for male restraint were from the very “womb of Christianity” itself. “America’s culture wars were less a war against Christianity than a civil war among Christian factions.”

           “Christianity, it seemed, had no need of actual Christians for its assumptions to still flourish.” “Like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye [Christian morals and presumptions] were breathed in equally by everyone: believers, atheists, and those who never paused to so much as think about religion.”

           Holland ends his book with a section that is poignantly personal. He speaks affectionately of his godmother, Deborah Gillingham, and her determination to raise him in all things Christian. Holland admits that his book is about the lofty peaks of history—the rise and fall of civilizations, popes and theologians, revolutions and reformations. But “the story of how Christianity had transformed the world would never have happened without people like my Aunty Deb.” She provided him with a model of what an individual Christian looked like. And Holland recognized the immense power of such people. “It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb that…which has come to be so taken for granted that it seems like human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.”

           Christianity is “the most influential framework for making sense of human existence that has ever existed.” Even the modern myth of atheistic humanism is entirely a product of the Christian past and shot through and through with Christian assumptions. “To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. That is why the cross remains…what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution.”

[1] P.1

[2] P.14

[3] P.19; This is Russell Kirk’s argument in “The Roots of American Order.” Christ did not come to dominate the political world; He came to save sinners.  See especially chapter 5.

[4] P.23

[5] P.24

[6] P.28

[7] P.51

[8] P.51

[9] P.53

[10] P.60; Holland is citing the Iliad; “Always fight bravely and be superior to others.”

[11] P.100

[12] P.100

[13] P.111

[14] P.123

[15] P.128

[16] P.133

[17] P.135

[18] P.140

[19] P.142

[20] P.142

[21] P.132

[22] P.133

[23] P.137

[24] P.141

[25] P.144

[26] P.155

[27] P.155

[28] P.175; see Seven Ideas That Changed the World, chapter 3

[29] P.177; see Seven Ideas That Changed the World, chapter 1

[30] P.180

[31] P.183

[32] P.197

[33] P.202

[34] P.205

[35] P.213

[36] P.223; Holland does not capitulate to the secular dating using “C.E.” and “B.C.E.” He uses Bede’s system of A.D. and B.C. And secular pagans do not change a single date. They just try to rid Western history of Jesus Christ. Good luck with that.

[37] P.229

[38] P.230

[39] P.250; this topic is discussed at length in chapter one of Richard Fletcher’s brilliant book, The Conversion of Europe.

[40] P.252

[41] P.258

[42] P.258

[43] P.260; Alcuin sought to make writing more user-friendly. He introduced grammatical devices like capitalizing the first words of sentences and the question mark.

[44] P.262

[45] P.266

[46] P.266

[47] P.270

[48] P.279

[49] P.279; see James Hannum’s fine work, The Genesis of Science, for a detailed examination of this process.

[50] P.282

[51] P.306

[52] P.307

[53] P.317; Holland accuses the medieval church of getting its view of women more from Aristotle than the Bible

[54] P.320

[55] P.320

[56] P.323

[57] P.325

[58] P.330

[59] P.358

[60] P.365

[61] Location 4716

[62] P.374

[63] P.384

[64] P.393

[65] P.397

[66] P.403

[67] P.410

[68] P.411

[69] P.391

[70] P.391

[71] P.397; see chapter 1 in Seven Ideas that Changed the World

[72] P.400

[73] P.402

[74] P.410; see chapter 7 in Seven Ideas that Changed the World

[75] P.445

[76] P.446

[77] P.449

[78] P.452

[79] P.454

[80] P.456

[81] P.462

[82] P.465

[83] P.473

[84] P.473

[85] P.474

[86] P.477

[87] This would, of course be Jesus Christ, in Luke 6:24

[88] P.484

[89] P.494; even Marx was too “Christian” to go this far

[90] P.494; de Sade wrote this in 1791, nearly seventy years before Darwin

[91] P.494; the idea of human rights has never existed without the influence of the Bible and Christian culture. See chapter 4 of “Seven ideas that Changed the World.”

[92] P.498

[93] P.501

[94] P.503

[95] The terms themselves originated in the Middle ages. There were clergy under rules, the monks. They were “regular” clergy. All other priests were “secular.”

[96] P.508

[97] P.508

[98] The term “Judaism” itself was a Christian invention.

[99] Bernard Lewis argues that it begins with Jesus’s words, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

[100] P.525; in an interview, Holland, who pre-Covid attended the oldest church in England, said that when sitting in church he sometimes feels like he needs to just give in to the Spirit.

[101] P.525

[102] P.531

[103] P.534

[104] P.534

[105] P.536; it is fascinating that contemporary social justice movements so repudiate Darwin

[106] P.538

[107] P.540

[108] P.540

[109] P.543

[110] P.578

[111] P.579

[112] P.580

[113] P.526; in my Kindle addition of Dominion the pagination keeps shifting. Now, here in chapter 19, we find page numbers lower than those several chapters back. I have no idea why this happens. I will continue to footnote according to the page numbers I am given even though they are incoherent. The easiest way to find your way around in Holland is to have an electronic copy and use the word search function.

[114] P.526

[115] P.527

[116] P.529

[117] P.533; and so all modern Leftist movements must be understood

[118] P.536

[119] P.536

[120] P.542

[121] P.543

[122] P.591; once again the pagination in my edition is incoherent; the book has two more chapters to run but the pagination ends at this point. For the rest of this paper all footnotes will be to page 591.