‘Do as I say, not as I do’: a review of ‘Dominion’ by Tom Holland

In the city of Valladolid, Mexico (not to be confused with Valladolid in Spain, the capital of the ‘Catholic monarchs’ Isabella and Ferdinand, but clearly also religion-centred like its eponym), there is a mural painting that shows an Aztec priest, scarily raising his obsidian knife. He is about to cut open a victim’s chest to pull out his still-beating heart—but a Christian prelate is piously staying his hand. A sceptical viewer can be forgiven for imagining a speech balloon above the latter cleric’s head. He is saying: ‘Stop, you savage! That’s wrong! Learn from us! We burn them alive!’

This just about encapsulates a genuine critical view (i.e., one that is not awed by the ‘majesty’ of its subject) of Tom Holland’s 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (the UK subtitle is only slightly less grandiose: The Making of the Western Mind). It does so by going to the heart (sorry!) of the yawning dichotomy between religion’s smug overall self-image—even when it agonises over its right path; even when it admits atrocities, like a dictator manfully acknowledging that yes, there have been ‘police excesses’—and what religion has really signified in history. A thought experiment, described further down, will add to this.

Dominion is easy reading. It is full of interesting historical details and connections as well as deft character and event portrayals. The problem is that it gets a lot of crucial things wrong—and pushes a thesis that does not hold up. To spell out the thesis first, it is that Christianity totally colours everything in the West (and latterly much of the rest of the world too), not just in the trivial sense that it has poked its finger everywhere, but in a much stronger sense of its inescapability: that everything in the last 2,000 years was born of it and that even every attempt to reject or condemn it does so for ultimately Christian reasons.

One thing that Holland definitely does not show himself as is anti-Semitic, far from it—but it must be said that in pursuit of proof of the above thesis he seeks Christian connections and derivations in everything with the zeal (though not the methods!) of a Dominican ferreting out crypto-Jewish beliefs among nominal converts. His demonstrations of the thesis are not all equally convincing; many aren’t at all. The reason is that, with Christianity having been the dominant creed for so long and ubiquitous in all spheres of life, when something new came up, it would necessarily be in a Christian context and maybe have to adopt or adapt the available Christian vocabulary. Dominion to the contrary, that does not necessarily make it Christian. If a cat delivers a litter in a dog kennel, that does not make the kittens dogs.

As with this erroneous understanding of Holland’s with regard to origins, so with conclusions. He takes, e.g., the fact that Marx’s thinking led him to a policy of ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ and compares it with a phrase in Acts of the Apostles, ‘they gave to everyone as he had need’. Ergo, he determines that Marx’s thinking was Christian. This is equivalent to thinking that if different animals have acquired strong similarities through the phenomenon of convergent evolution, they are the same animal. By this kind of reckoning, sharks are dolphins, penguins are auks, bats are birds, and in fact bats also are whales, since they both use echolocation. 

With his methods of demonstration, Holland could have argued, say, that absolutely all Western music of all types is religious music, on the grounds that early music was religious; but that seems to have been too much even for him (or he did not think of it, which seems unlikely). In any event, Holland fails with regard to what to him is clearly the main issue, his standpoint that even disbelief itself comes from Christian roots.

That it is his pièce de résistance is shown by the way he harps on it. Though it is not the predominant feeling of the book, when it comes to disbelief there is such persistence in his attempts to convince the reader that it is Christian that the effort edges into querulousness. It closely parallels a situation familiar to many agnostics and atheists, that of being confronted by believers who plaintively insist, ‘But you must believe in something!’ Holland piles argument on argument because he cannot imagine that some people reject everything otherworldly simply because they are fed up with nonsense.

The author’s preface to Dominion contains pages on the phenomenon of crucifixion that are almost ghoulishly detailed, yet neglect to make it quite clear that in Jesus’s day the atrocity was also perpetrated on others than slaves. (Holland mentions over and over that Jesus was punished the way slaves were, because he is interested in the psychological effect of this on Christian believers.) Crucifixion had come to be extended to sedition and piracy and to troublesome people in general.

While on the subject of crucifixion: in hammering home the uninflected concept that ‘crucifixion was the way slaves died’, the author does not bother to explain what actions by slaves would incur that barbarity. This may sound preposterous, but some people who don’t know much about slavery, let alone specifically in Roman times, might even walk away with the impression that all slaves, not just rebellious slaves, ended up killed on the cross. Of course, it is always a problem for writers to decide how much reader knowledge, or even common sense, to take for granted. One last thing about crucifixion: to be burned alive, Christians’ favourite method pour encourager les autres, was no picnic either.    

The book holds from the outset that Christianity was a complete revolution because, in a world used to regarding force, naked power, as the top value, the only reasonable criterion, Jesus was the first to counter it with the value of acting nice towards others. Additionally, the book sees it as not just a revolution, but ‘the single most transformative development in Western history’. This dual claim, for the author, is absolute bedrock; in his book’s subtitle it is taken as a given. However, it is wrong—on no less than three devastating counts. Count one, the revolution did not actually take place. Christianity replaced what came before, but for a replacement to constitute a revolution, things really have to change, and a lot. Jesus may have brought his message (assuming he existed and did say the things attributed to him; we’ll get to that issue), and eventually the world’s rulers came to mouth it too; but in the realm of fact, they went on grimly pushing others around just as before. If anything, the new religion gave them another thing about which to push others around. The world did not become a kinder, gentler place when Christianity was adopted.

Count two, the most transformative developments in Western history—arguably in world history—were not religious at all. They were the discovery by some Greeks that, precisely to the contrary, it is possible to look at, investigate, and interact with the world without resorting to the supernatural; and the emergence and then implementation of the idea that it is the people who are the true sovereigns. The empowerment of people away from the gods and from overweening rulers—that is revolutionary. 

Count three, Jesus was not the first with his message anyway. Basically, he was using off-the-shelf notions. That should be no surprise, because they are provenly ideas that pop up over and over. Hammurabi, quoted by Holland himself, said that ‘the strong should not harm the weak.’ The Upanishads instructed, ‘Give, be merciful’. The Mahabharata (more specifically, the Vana Parva section), in a definition of dharma, espouses the virtues not only of generosity, goodness, kindness, and compassion, but—note this—forgiveness.

About five centuries before Jesus there had been a sudden slew of contemporaneous (or massively believed afterwards to have been contemporaneous) religion founders who uttered (or were credited with) similar words. There was Lao Tse, founder of Taoism. From his book Tao Te Ching: ‘Return love for great hatred.’ ‘I have three treasures… The first is called love; the second is called moderation…’ There was Zarathushtra, founder of Zoroastrianism (and also said to be born of a virgin, among other curious biographical coincidences). Notes Robert Ballou in The Bible of the World: ‘Much of Zarathushtra’s creed lives on in the religions of Israel and Christ.’ What did Z. say his god Ahura Mazda demanded, among other things? Kindness and benevolence. Thus spake Zarathushtra: ‘He who relieves the poor makes Ahura king.’

There was Buddha: ‘Hatred ceases by love. This is an eternal law.’ And: ‘To one in whom love dwells, all in the world are brothers.’ (Italicised here because of Dominion’s insistence that the brotherhood of all men is a Christian invention. Note: this and all other quotes from texts whose original language wasn’t English, and were translated many times, with different words and perhaps even intentions on each occasion, and in many cases were, from the outset, only someone’s report of what someone else said, are open to disputation as endless as it is fruitless, as long as the correct intention is transmitted.)

There was Confucius: ‘Love all men.’ ‘What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.’ There was Mahavira, re-founder of Jainism, which puts all others to shame with its impossible degree of love for the meek—a love which dictates not to do any harm even to the lowliest insect. And here’s a goodie, very pertinent, from the ancient Greek Cleanthes in his Hymn to Zeus: ‘Even the unloved is loved by you.’ 

A compressed way to express all this: ‘Buddha did it earlier than Jesus—and did it better.’ Buddhist strongmen could fight for the usual other reasons like conquest, dynastic rivalries, and the like, but generally not over their beliefs. Over the centuries, examples of religious wars, of St. Bartholomew’s Days or the like, are much rarer in Buddhism.

It may be objected that all this Far Eastern stuff was too distant, and any Mesopotamian and Greek references too recherché, for a backwoods carpenter like Jesus to have known any of it—so that, if he did not invent his attitude that benevolence trumps (sorry, again!) brute power, he re-invented it. In the first place his alleged father, who is supposed to know everything, should have told him. In the second place, although this is not certain, Jesus would very likely have heard of the Mithraism that was spreading about his own time right in the Roman Empire where he lived—a now largely forgotten religion that was derived from Zoroastrianism and echoed its ethics.

In the third place, if there was one thing Jesus definitely must have known it was the sayings of the prophets of his own religion, Judaism. ‘Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor… ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.’ (Amos) ‘I desired mercy, and not sacrifice’. (Hosea) ‘And oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor’. (Zechariah, with many echoes) ‘[W]hat doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy…?’ (Micah) Tom Holland himself mentions that when the apostles instructed the Christian churches that were being set up ‘to remember the poor’, they were not only following ‘the teachings of their master’ but ‘obedient to Jewish tradition’ (he doesn’t catch any whiff of contradiction between this and his insistence on the newness of Jesus’s positions). Here is Deuteronomy: ‘Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy’. Leviticus: ‘Thou shalt not avenge’ (emphasis added). ‘[T]hou shalt love [the stranger] as thyself.’ 

Tom Holland might counter that in Dominion this multitude of precedents is kept out of sight because the text is not meant as a full history of Christianity, but centres on what is pertinent to its thesis. Yes, but whether what Jesus said (or was said to have said) was original, is very pertinent.

The book is not only less but more than a history of Christianity per se. It is less, because while certainly providing its overall outline, it likes to spotlight some people and events, rather than cover everything at unvarying depth. For instance, it allots comparatively little space to the catalogue of heresies and to the intricacies of Scholastic debate. There is no Duns Scotus, no William of Ockham. Arianism isn’t mentioned by name; homoousios is, but not its enemy homoiousios, with just a little letter ay in the middle to make a deadly difference.

(For interested readers, there is a funny take on the subject in Van Loon’s Lives. In that book written during World War II, Hendrik van Loon supposedly invites personalities from different periods of history to come to his house for dinner with Erasmus and himself. Delving into the Council of Nicaea, he invites two of the representatives who attended that event of the year 325: the archbishops of Bithynia and Cyrenaica, respectively supporters of homoo and of homoio. Things turn nasty. ‘Bithynia got his hands into Cyrenaica’s whiskers, and Cyrenaica tried to strangle Bithynia…’)

Dominion is also more than a regular history of Christianity, because, on the other hand, it finds cause to bring in the rather unexpected, like Angela Merkel and Rolling Stone magazine. If we don’t get Doctor Subtilis Duns Scotus, we do get the poet-monk Sedulius Scottus.

The book speaks of a second revolution, about a millennium after the first one. Unlike the first, which was the alleged utter transformation of the world when Christianity was accepted, the second did take place. It had a more restricted scope, within political power politics: it happened when Christianity went beyond acceptance and enforcement to overlordship. Namely, when the pope showed the emperor, at Canossa, who really was boss. It is confusing when, in Dominion’s well-chosen illustrations, the caption to a photo of the ruins at Canossa, taken by Holland himself, alludes to the conflict between empire and papacy and calls it ‘the onset of the first European revolution’ (emphasis added). Surely just a slip of the pen—all right, the keyboard—and not Holland doubting that what he has been calling the first was real?

Another caption makes eyebrows shoot up even higher. It refers to Galileo facing the Inquisition: it ‘was not, as subsequent myth would have it, due to a reluctance on the part of the Catholic Church to pay attention to the opinion of eminent astronomers, but the precise opposite.’ This is effrontery, only comparable to the cracks about John Lennon—see below. Indeed the Church, as an institution, wanted to know what astronomers (and other scientists, and budding medical researchers) thought—but it wasn’t because of an interest in advancing knowledge, since it was satisfied with the God-given answers it knew. If it ‘paid attention’ (shiver!) to what scientists, whether laymen or clerics themselves as individuals, were thinking, it was to see if it went against the Church’s dogmas.

Holland quotes Aquinas to the effect that ‘Holy Scripture naturally leads men to contemplate the celestial bodies.’ He proudly notes that Jesuits shone as astronomers in China. He does not mention the problem that after the initial interest in a given subject, once an orthodox opinion was established, it was wise not to question it. Then the author predictably manages to extrapolate, from such data as the Jesuits’ success, to a Christian origin of ‘not only sciences’ but ‘many gateways, many roads’. It slips his mind here how much medieval Christian science owed to the Arabs and to the Greeks through the latter.              

With regard to the question of whether that which Holland calls a revolution was due to Jesus’s message, or would have been if the revolution had happened, it is intriguing to note that Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, when conducting an extended, and very meticulous, inquiry into the causes of the growth of Christianity, and concluding therein that it was ‘most effectually favoured and assisted by the five following causes’, not a single one of the five is, or even mentions in the ensuing development, the message of love that Holland finds paramount, the closest being Gibbon’s cause IV, namely the Christians’ ‘pure and austere morals’, which, it will be acknowledged, are not synonymous with a policy of love and forgiveness for all, and may indeed often project a frowning image that emerges, even if unintentionally, as antithetical to it. (Sorry thrice over—one cannot write about Gibbon without experiencing stylistic contagion from the big wave swells, the oceanic sweep, of his sentences.)

This omission by Gibbon of a message of love and forgiveness as a reason for Christianity’s rise (let alone as a reason for equating that rise with a revolution) cannot be due to any historical discovery that may have been made since Gibbon wrote his treatise. His investigation was of a basically sociological nature, analysing effects on people’s minds, and Gibbon obviously was already fully in the know, in the eighteenth century, about the nature of Jesus’s message. By the way, nowhere in Dominion is there an analysis of the fact, if it is a fact, that Jesus also said, ‘I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ And another by the way: Gibbon was also fully aware that Christians ‘have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels.’

In his preface, Holland states, ‘Historians (…) are not in the business of debating whether [the idea that the crucifixion of Jesus is “the very pivot about which the cosmos turns”] is actually true. Instead, they study Christianity for what it can reveal, not about God, but about the affairs of humanity.’ He adds that this is because ‘beliefs are presumed to be of mortal origin.’ In other words, historians (qua historians) must not accept ‘supernatural (…) explanations’, and must only write about what it is that people believe, and what they do with those beliefs. The belief may not be true; the circumstance that people believe it, on the other hand, is a fact.

So far, so agreed. But historians have to guard against then writing in such a way that a supernatural belief could be construed by readers as being an actual fact. To put it in another form, it is reasonable to ask that historians always make clear which is which: if something they are writing about is such a belief, or is a fact, at least as far as they have been able to determine. Holland fails the test. He writes as if what is said about the life and sayings of Jesus and the apostle Paul and others really constituted attested historical events: he uses exactly the same tone as when talking about something Cyrus or Pompey did. ‘When Moses climbed Sinai…’ Something ‘could not help but arouse in Paul profound emotions of shock and revulsion.’

‘In the small room,’ says Holland, ‘where [Catherine of Siena] would fast, and meditate, and pray, Christ had come to her. The Virgin and various saints (…) had served as witnesses [to Christ and Catherine’s wedding]. King David had played his harp.’ Catherine’s contemporaries believed that. Some readers today, among the many who take up this book not in a critical frame of mind but to read good things about their religion, and were unfamiliar with Catherine’s story, may believe it too. After all, they believe so many other things that are equally improbable, to put it some way. If Holland does not keep the boundaries clear-cut, maybe it is just as shorthand, so as not to keep repeating ‘allegedly’, ‘supposedly’, ‘it was believed that’. Perhaps he does think it will be obvious to all when something is only alleged. No, not always to everybody. The difference is repeatedly blurred.

The fact that the people who wrote the New Testament did so many years after the alleged events isn’t even the main problem. Nor is the fact of their potential gullibility (always a widespread trait in the world). Even if they had done their writing right afterwards, the real point is that they weren’t historians, even of a pre-modern type; they were proselytisers trying to win people over to something they regarded as supremely important. If the story was touched up to add to its impact, or round out its message, doing so would not have seemed a dubious undertaking to them: it was simply the reasonable, and necessary, thing to do.

This is (or should be) obvious in this day and age; only recalcitrant fundamentalists refuse to countenance it to any degree. Here’s something to do on a rainy afternoon: to look into parallels between Jesus and King Arthur. Not in their actions, of course, but in the creation and accretion of their narratives. Both were persons whose existence has never been genuinely proven, but about whom it can be conceded that it could have been real, in Arthur’s case as a warlord who fought against Saxon invaders. Both, though for different reasons, were then garlanded with tales of their origins, feats, and ends.

If one were to go by evidence alone (quelle idée!) rather than what was stated by chroniclers with their respective agendas, even the ‘fact’ of Jesus’s cross cannot be proven any better than King Arthur’s round table. If Jesus did exist and wasn’t the embodiment of an idea, or perhaps a composite figure (it is also interesting to compare his historicity with Homer’s), he objectively could have died in some other way and have been attributed a death by crucifixion for higher effect. This could be an intellectual exercise, or a parlour game: find similarities and differences specifically between Jesus’s apostles and Arthur’s knights. To kick it off, note might be taken of comments by Holland himself on the apostle Luke (not the others): ‘a historian to whom tradition would give the name of Luke’. ‘Even if Luke is not to be trusted…’ Debate: was Luke more, less, or equally a reality as Sir Gawain? 

Beyond what is provable lies what may only be fancy. It might be thought that the factual would be held clear in people’s minds, while the unreal or possibly unreal would be blurrier, but it turns out to be the other way around. Churchill, unsurprisingly, has a good phrase for this phenomenon, in reference to Arthur, in A History of the English-Speaking Peoples: ‘The name of the British soldier who won the crowning mercy [a big victory in battle] of Mount Badon [Mons Badonicus] (…) takes us out of the mist of dimly remembered history into the daylight of romance.’ ‘All power to the imagination’ is not just a slogan, it is psychology.

The best, though by far not the only, example of the way these considerations impinge on Dominion will be found in the title to its Chapter 3. In all chapters, Holland includes a date and place in the heading, to precisely pinpoint its opening scene. As in ‘479 BC: The Hellespont’, or ‘1967: Abbey Road’. When, in turning to the apostle Paul, he headlines it ‘AD 19: Galatia’, he is making what is said about Paul sound just as factual as historical events that are indubitable. And as he must know as a professional writer, c’est le ton qui fait la musique.

The book adopts a cinematic technique, of a specific type, generally to good effect. Not only each chapter, but each section within each chapter, starts not with a panning overview of a situation but by zeroing in on a particular event or setting. (Like this review.) Then the narrative transitions to a flashback of what led up to that event (‘He was not the first to say this’, or ‘this was not the first time this had happened’, or variations of this phrase, are an oft-repeated device), and then moves back ahead in time (pace Zemeckis), then backtracks once more, and so on. The flashing back and forth adds to the dramatic interest. The technique works especially well, for example, when Holland makes a section on Fascism start with the landlady of Horst Wessel, a hero to the Nazis, later hymned.

In some cases, however, the cutting-back-and-forth procedure causes a measure of clarity to fall to the cutting-room floor. In his telling of the Investitures Controversy, it isn’t all that easy to follow who did what to whom first. The story of Guglielma of Bohemia and her disciple Maifreda da Pirovano (a woman who thought she could become pope, so, obviously, she had to be burned alive) is also a bit of a puzzlement as it dances from one to the other. When Luther gets into trouble with religious higher-ups, Holland, to heighten the tension, additionally emphasises the diverse deadlines he is given. He is allowed sixty days to recant—then three weeks—but no, that was before—then 24 hours—was this after, or also before?

Precisely because it is a matter of repeated comings and goings, to give full quotes showing how disorientation is generated would require lengthy chunks of text; but there is one sentence that condenses the problem. ‘Back in ancient times, when the statue of Venus retrieved from a building site in Siena had been worshipped as a portrait of a living goddess, …’ This can be interpreted as that the ancients took a statue that they found in Siena and worshipped it. But wait—Siena didn’t even exist back then, or was a hamlet unknown to the ancients that are being referred to. The sentence could have been fixed by saying, ‘the statue of Venus that was later to be retrieved from a building site in Siena had been worshipped…’ But that would have required that the author (or his editor) notice the potential confusion.

A useful feature of the book is that it separates references to sources, on one hand, from footnote material, on the other, so that the reader doesn’t have to keep turning to the one when just searching for the other, as happens with some other texts. The rule is broken in just a couple of instances.

Effective use is made of etymology, as in the phrase, ‘armies of robbers, wicingas (…): Vikings’. The sentence ‘Irenaeus had come across a range of schools, each with their own opinion: their own haereses’ comes in the introduction to heresies. ‘Eoster, the festival of spring’ introduces Easter.

Occasionally a slightly irritating habit surfaces of not filling in the names of people or events to which attention has been drawn. ‘The last descendant of Charlemagne to occupy [the throne] had been deposed, blinded and imprisoned.’ Who? ‘In 1254, a notably pious king…’ (Who??) ‘In 1195, a particularly disastrous defeat [of Christian arms in Spain]…’ Which battle was that? Admittedly, the book already runs to 600 pages, but would it have made much difference to fill in those words and not force readers, whose interest has been whetted, to look them up?  (Answers, respectively: Louis III the Blind (naturally); Louis IX, sainted; Alarcos).

Holland sees Christianity’s fixation with sex (not in the good way) not as sick but only as something revolutionary (because of its ‘sacral understanding of marriage’ and because Paul added a condemnation of female homosexuality to that of the male variety). He cannot perceive the Church’s ‘long and arduous struggle to trammel the sexual appetites of Christians’ as moving beyond attempts to prevent rapes, as broadly defined, which is a good objective, to coarse prurient meddling.

When Dominion turns to Spanish conquests in the Americas it emphasises Friar Bartolomé de las Casas’s attempts to alleviate the mistreatment of enslaved Indians. It does not note the irony that the Spaniards simply switched to importing African slaves. Maybe it would be unwarranted to demand that it should add that. However, if it is getting into the subject of ‘the conquest and the Church’ at all, it should at least have alluded to the Church’s openly announced and practised cultural erasure of the Indians—a monstrosity that even today finds deniers. The Peruvian slavers who later eliminated every possibility of interpreting Easter Island culture had no lofty motives; the Church convinced itself that it had.    

Now, let us turn to the earlier-heralded thought experiment. Imagine a large corporation. (Since it manufactures, um, zidgets, let us call it Zidget.) Zidget has a tremendous mission statement. ‘Not only are we committed to making the best zidgets—in comparison, what others make aren’t even real zidgets—but our business practices are absolutely exemplary; our employee relations are such models for the world that they are only outshined by our customer relations.’ And so on. People who read the mission statement are enthralled. Because of its aims and announced policy, a full-scale Zidgetism movement has developed.

In actual practice, though, Zidget has cutthroat business practices. Its office politics are murderous, even literally so. Its history has been rent by bloody corporate splits. Discrimination against female staffers is official Zidget policy. Despite that and more, such is its prestige—because of that mission statement—that many of its employees entrust the education of their children to schools run by Zidget—only for there to be unending disclosures of cruelty and abuse of their pupils. Things are so bad that, if the people involved in the scandals came from anywhere other than Zidgetism, Zidget would immediately be forced to close down, and the officials jailed; instead, they tend to be allowed to just resign, and perhaps discreetly get a different job at Zidget headquarters. For all that, the bosses of Zidget, and of some of its offshoots and rivals, see fit to lecture everybody on ethics and on all events and issues under the sun (and although, it must be admitted, nobody really heeds the admonitions much, they remain headline news).

Zidgetists have a simple rejoinder to complaints that Zidget’s standards are more honoured in the breach than in the observance: people should only go by Zidgetism’s lofty principles—not by the actions of the fallible people in the organization. Here, then, is the question this imaginary scenario has been leading up to: are either the reality or that excuse admissible?

It hardly seems necessary to point out that any similarity in the above tale to real-life entities and events is purely coincidental: it is so far-fetched it couldn’t possibly be believed. Here, however, is something else that can be thought about, this time in reference to a solidly real-life situation. In the nineteenth century, or perhaps as early as the Middle Ages, an organisation evolved in Sicily with purely defensive purposes against oppression and lawlessness; an admirable mission statement too. It later changed, rather. Its name was the Mafia. Question: what counts, its original aims or its actual performance?

Not that any close correspondence to Christianity—let us say out loud what we’re talking about—is intended or implied. For a good reason: Christianity has murdered immensely more people than the Mafia has. The fact that in most cases Christianity gives the murders the name of executions does not alter the grisly fact. Among the world’s religions, Christianity and Islam have, far and away, the most bloodstained histories. And yet, like so many others, Holland has an amazing ability: he can quite freely admit the torrents of bloodshed (he goes into the Albigensian crusade at considerable length), yet blot it out in his mind when suitable. He can unblushingly write about ‘the Christian conviction that all human life was sacred’. One may wonder, who said that? Torquemada, perhaps? Or—lest all this be considered to be aimed at Catholicism alone—was it the Puritans (inter many alia) as they were putting witches to the torch?

Or was it Calvin, as people were being murdered on his say-so? Calvin is a particularly good example of that ability of Holland’s mentioned in the previous paragraph: ‘The means he [Calvin] used,’ he writes, ‘were (…) never violent.’ Thirty-odd pages later, he notes that Calvin ‘approved the burning at the stake of a particularly notorious heretic’ (Holland, rightly ironic regarding the reason, explains that the victim held ‘shocking’ views—quotation marks Holland’s—on the Trinity. One can only agree; clearly the man had to go.)  When Holland found himself writing this as he put together his manuscript, did he go back and erase the line about ‘never violent’, or at least qualify it as ‘initially never violent’? Neither one nor the other. (It is true that Calvin was so humane that he held—unsuccessfully—that in the case of Michael Servetus, who said that the blood circulated through the body, a beheading was good enough for that, not a burning alive.) Holland doesn’t so much as suggest, while he is on the subject, that along with the Trinity guy there were any others. In fact, there is disagreement among historians whether the total number of people murdered at Calvin’s behest was 38 or ‘only’ 23.

A cavil is likely to be put forward: that all that is in the past, that Christianity is all reformed (with a small ar) and is now exclusively sweetness, ecumenism, and reason (except, it goes without saying, towards atheists). But there are other ways to kill than with swords and pyres. Obsessive clinging to bad ideas can also do it. Take the matter of condoms. When the AIDS epidemic was at its worst; when Africa was one of the places most ravaged; when lifesaving drug cocktails had not yet been invented, and the use of condoms was known to be the only thing that drastically helped avoid contagion (short of abstinence, which is a fantasy on a par with the wildest supernatural belief); the pope, at that time John Paul II, went to Africa pushing the message not to use condoms. People thankfully paid little attention, but if they had, as he badly wanted, he could have caused (do the maths) hundreds of thousands, even millions of additional deaths. Torquemada would have been left in the dust.

Two thoughts. One is about someone who gets considerable play in the book, Martin of Tours, and the incident in which the saint-in-the-making, when he was a soldier, cut his cloak in two with his sword to give half to a shivering beggar. Doesn’t anybody ever ask why, instead of that theatrical gesture, which presumably left both of them partially warm and partially cold, he didn’t give the man the whole cloak? Martin, after braving the cold for a while, with saintly fortitude, could get a complete new one for himself from the military supply depot. The other thought concerns the admonition to ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. Fine in most cases—but one-size-fits-all formulations are risky. Has any thought been given to the case of people who are shot through with self-loathing? Woe betide their neighbours.

Holland is very sarcastic about overblown reports, including by Voltaire, of Galileo’s sufferings at the hands of the Inquisition. However, if Galileo wasn’t actually tortured, it was because—not having a religious fanatic’s will to martyrdom—he sensibly retracted any scientific drivel he spouted that might be counter to Scripture. He did so in the face of threats of torture that were made perfectly clear to him. Holland forgets that he himself had earlier written, ‘The astronomer, recognising the glint of steel behind his host’s smile [the host being ‘a cardinal battle-hardened in the fight against heresy’], had bowed to the inevitable.’ A threat of violence is itself an act of violence—even if incomparably less than the ghastlinesses the cardinal was just hinting at. Further, for the author to make a big fuss over the exaggeration of one case, given the colossal scale of perfectly proven atrocities, cannot be described as other than shameless.

Shame is even less to be found in the handling of John Lennon. There is a particular venom to be noticed here that presumably was generated by the singer-composer’s anti-religious pronouncements, such as the lyrics, ‘Imagine there’s no heaven… No hell below us… Imagine there’s no countries… And no religion, too… Imagine no possessions.’ Holland highlights the fact that Lennon had a Rolls-Royce and a swimming pool, and was seen in the video of Imagine ‘gliding around in his recently purchased seventy-two-acre Berkshire estate’. Forget the fact that Lennon had legitimately and personally earned all of it, in the course of bringing more joy to zillions than he could have spread by giving that amount of money away. Forget that he did it without burning or racking a single person. The point is, are we to assume that the archbishop of Canterbury and the pope issue their teachings while living in bedsitters and taking the bus to work? Holland has the gall to accuse Lennon of being a hypocrite.

Yet his pages on the Beatle also reveal something deeper. Holland moves on to combine the scorn he heaps on Lennon with that thesis of his that Christianity is the primeval source of everything this side of Jesus’s crucifixion. ‘In its hypocrisy no less than in its dreams of universal peace, Lennon’s atheism was recognisably bred of Christian marrow.’ Holland’s methods for making attributions to Christianity were discussed earlier. What needs to be noticed now is something that this sentence reveals in passing.

Hypocrisy, it is declaring in black on white, is a distinguishing mark of atheism (like, say, the mark of Satan on witches). One can readily understand religion seeing atheism as wrong—how could it think otherwise? One knows only too well that it also believes atheism to be evil—since it gives every appearance of thinking, at least for the duration of fulminations against atheism, that religious people perform only good deeds while atheists go about doing only evil deeds, and it does not need evidence to believe in something, only faith; and anyway, atheism stands in opposition to religion, and that is evil enough. But the charge of hypocrisy, which is a very specific thing, is a bit baffling; no irony meant here.  

Two possibilities suggest themselves. One, the accusation is simply what psychologists call projection. Two, it may allude to the old tenet that atheism is itself a belief, in the religious sense of that word, which would indeed make its rejection of belief hypocritical. The tenet is a misconception, since to believe that God does not exist is no more religious in its nature than to believe the same about Mickey Mouse. But given that religious people do not comprehend this, or are not prepared to accept it, it might be the reason Holland said what he did. One has to wonder if Holland really thought this one sentence through. It also says that hypocrisy is a mark of Christianity.

A final matter that Dominion regards as a prize exhibit is that of human rights. To the customary conclusion that such rights were born of Christianity, which it reaches with the usual kind of arguments, it adds that if human rights didn’t have Christian beliefs to underpin them, they would have nothing to rest on at all. This is a misreading of the nature of compliance with any rules, from abiding by declarations of the rights of man to not parking on zebra crossings. Nothing of this kind of thing has the sort of solid foundation Holland seeks. In the real world, people obey laws and regulations, and the rights of others, and so on (when they do) for one of two reasons (or for both). To avoid social or legal penalties, or because they think it is right—i.e., because their consciences tell them to do so.

Holland or similarly-minded people might argue that this proves the religious underpinning, because those consciences were initially forged by Christianity (or, in other parts of the world, by the corresponding sole true religion in each). However, it could be countered that it is precisely the other way around: that because the good ideas were in their consciences, the framers of religions put them into the required sets of beliefs and practices they were prescribing (vide Lao Tse and Zarathushtra and the rest). This is a chicken-and-egg situation. It is, however, one ch&egg situation for which a criterion for decision is available. One chooses which of the two came first, the religion or the conscience, according to whether one is the kind of person who needs spectral beings hovering about them to get through the day, or the kind that can do without them.

If one thinks about it, that is the criterion that most people are likely to apply to this book as a whole.

Related reading

Did Christianity make the Western mind? by Charles Freeman

Wrestling with fables: a review of ‘We Who Wrestle with God’ by Jordan Peterson, by Nicholas E. Meyer

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

The radical atheism of the American revolutions: interview with Matthew Stewart, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp