In the context of the pagan classical world, the Christian faith was a shocking, even unfathomable inversion of the values systems and structures of the time, and its explosive growth unimaginable. Yet in today’s world, Christianity is often considered boring or backwards. How might we better discern and understand the radicalism of Christianity’s origins, its impact through the centuries, and its enduring formational power? 

Historian Tom Holland’s landmark book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, calls attention to these puzzles and paradoxes. Coming to the material as a historian of the classical world, he was amazed at the rupture that Christianity represented, and then followed the story over the millennia. His account is powerful – and as the co-host of the world’s most popular history podcast, his storytelling is peerless. 

Thank you to our sponsors, Trinity Forum board member, Katie Allen with her husband, Brent; Beth and Joe Kaufmann; and Genie and Amin Aminfar, and to our co-host, Basic Books, for their support of this event!

• What aspect of Tom’s remarks or the conversation was most compelling to you and why?
• How does Tom contrast the values and assumptions of classical antiquity to Christianity? Why does he find the values of the Roman empire alien?
• Why do you think that Tom would note that Jesus was an “uncanny” and even unprecedented character in ancient literature? What made him so?
• Tom also noted that “to live in a western country is to live in a society saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions” What concepts and assumptions is he referring to? Do you agree?
• Tom argued that many modern values like human rights and equality are rooted in Christianity. Do you see those values as sustainable without Christian belief and practice? Why or why not?
• Many Christians today feel embattled or culturally marginalized. What lessons, if any, might be drawn from the history of Christianity?

Please note that the transcript may contain inaccuracies and should not be used as an authoritative source.

Cherie Harder: Welcome to all of you joining us for today’s online conversation with Tom Holland on A World Transformed. We’re delighted that so many of you are joining us today, and just really appreciate the honor of your time and attention. 

I’d love to give a special shout out to our over 200 first-time guests, as well as our nearly 200 international guests, joining us from at least 30 different countries that we know of, ranging from Brazil and Bulgaria to Malawi and Malaysia. So welcome from across the miles and across the time zones. If you haven’t already done so, drop us a note in the chat box! Let us know where you’re joining us from. It’s always fun to see people tuning in from all over the world. And if you are one of those first time guests or otherwise new to the work of the Trinity Forum, we seek to provide a hospitable space to engage the big questions of life in the context of faith, and offer programs like this online conversation today. To do so, [we] ultimately to come to better know the Author of the Answers, and we hope today’s conversation will be a small taste of that for you today. 

Our guest today is a renowned scholar and gifted storyteller who’s explored one of the greatest puzzles and paradoxes of history. Namely, how is it in a world that celebrates strength and winning, where might is so often seen as right, that the religion of the meek would inherit the earth? Writing not as a theologian, much less an apologist, but rather as a historian, he shows how Christianity became, within 400 years of its birth, in the backwaters of occupied Judea, the official state religion of the entire Roman Empire, and is now the largest of any faith with over 2 billion believers. He explores what it was that, in his words, made Christianity so subversive and disruptive, how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom, and why, in a West that is so often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain so thoroughly Christian. It is, he claims, the greatest story ever told. And I’m so glad to get to welcome our guest today, Tom Holland, to explore that story with us. 

Tom is an award-winning historian, author, translator, podcaster and broadcaster. He’s the co-host, along with Dominic Sandbrook, of the best known history podcast out there, “The Rest is History,” which we highly recommend to all of our Trinity Forum viewers—it is a fantastic podcast. He’s provided a renowned translation of Herodotus, and he’s the author of numerous books, including Rubicon, Millennium, and Persian Fire. His most recent work packs on the heyday of the Roman Empire. And of course, his superb work Dominion, which we’ve invited him here today to discuss. Tom, welcome!

Tom Holland: Thanks very much Cherie, and thank you everyone for joining us today. Very honored to be here.

Cherie Harder: Well, we’re really delighted to have you. And at the outset, I want to ask you a little bit about how you came to write this book. And I know you started as a scholar of classical antiquity. You’ve written about how initially you found the figures glamorous and exciting and dramatic. But over time, you said that you came to realize that their values were actually quite alien from yours. And so I’d love to hear you talk a little bit about what made the classical world grow alien to you, and how did that alienation either inspire or shape, if at all, your decision to write this book?

Tom Holland: I think actually, from childhood, it was the alien quality of the Greeks and the Romans that fascinated and excited me about them. But I just hadn’t really, I suppose, properly thought through quite what the implications of those alien characteristics were—sitting down and writing a book that was aimed very much at a kind of popular market. So I was trying to get inside the head of the Romans or the Greeks and bring them alive for potential readers. I was having to try and see the world through their eyes to a degree that I had not previously done, and I found the process of writing about, say, Julius Caesar, one of the greatest figures of history, someone I’d always hugely admired, but who sacrificed it is said, the lives of a million Gauls on the altar of his ambition enslaved another million. And he thought, far from feeling apologetic or worried about this, he thought this was tremendous. It was something that he trumpeted. I thought: What would it have meant to live in a civilization where that kind of violence, that kind of ambition for greatness, could trample down so many people? What would it have meant to live in such a world? And I suppose also very germanely, how was it that our instincts, our morals, had changed as profoundly as they had done? Because I was writing Rubicon, which was my first book about the collapse of the Roman Republic, the age of Julius Caesar, against the backdrop of the build up to the Iraq War. And in that build up, there was an enormous sense of anxiety across the world about whether the invasion was justified or not. Even those who did think that the invasion was justified when the war was launched, the high command, the US High Command, would boast about how few people they killed—Whereas I was writing about people who would boast about how many people they’d killed. And it focused for me a kind of puzzle. What has changed? And I felt the same when I then went on to write about, say, the Spartans in my next book, because the Spartans, who as a child I’d hugely admired their heroic defense at Thermopylae, were doomed to heroic defense. But they had practiced a form of state that had provided Hitler with his direct inspiration. They had enslaved a neighboring people, rather in the way that the Nazis enslaved the Poles and reduced them to a kind of bestial helotage. And again, I was thinking: “This is so alien. This is so frightening. This is so terrifying.” I suppose I started feeling this desire to work out what might have happened, and I started thinking: The great change, the great transformation, surely, is the coming of Christianity. 

So over the course of the decade that followed, I wrote about particular aspects of that. I also explored the relationship of Christianity to Islam, and then I sat down and started work on Dominion. And this Dominion was written as an attempt to stress test my hunch that Christianity really had been the most seismic and revolutionary development, not just really in the history of the West, but probably globally. I’m relieved to say that I was satisfied that it had been what I was setting out to show that it had been. But part of the excitement of writing it was not being 100% sure that the thesis would stand up to the actual process of writing and tracing Christianity’s evolution right the way from its birth up to the present day.

Cherie Harder: Interesting. You start Dominion with the crucifixion, and you note that for Christian believers, the resurrection is of course, the most salient, the most important aspect of our faith. But for a historian, you noted that the crucifixion is actually perhaps the most unusual; that there are other religions of the day that claim their gods had risen from the dead, but no religion in the classical world would ever have claimed that God died and was humiliated in a painful way: As a as a weakling, as a defeated slave.

Tom Holland: Right, and slave is the key word there, because crucifixion is paradigmatically the punishment visited on slaves. And I think that had Jesus suffered another form of death, it simply wouldn’t have had the impact that the fact he was crucified did. If we’re talking about Jesus as a historical figure, I think the one thing that pretty much every historian would accept is that he was crucified; because it’s not the kind of thing that anyone would have made up. You can sense when you read Paul’s letters, our earliest Christian texts, Paul of course, has had this blinding moment of revelation, but it seems to have stunned him so profoundly that even in his letters, he’s still trying to work out the implications of it. I mean, essentially, no one had seen the possibility that someone who had suffered such a hideous death could in any way be a part of the divine full stop, let alone the very refined, heightened sense of what a God was that the people of Judea had. It’s so mad, it’s so unexpected; a stumbling block to the Jews, madness to the Gentiles. I think we are desensitized to what that meant. It’s an effort to read Paul’s letters and feel just how vividly Paul himself, as he is writing them, is wrestling with the madness of what he is writing about.

Cherie Harder: So let me ask you, how do you as a historian encounter that? You have talked a lot about just how utterly bizarre, unfathomable, even obscene, the idea that once, God would be crucified in such a humiliating way. But you also talk about how Jesus was “unprecedented,” and I think you used that word even in other ways. Being tender to sinners, but denouncing the Pharisees as whitewashed tombs. You put it this way: “Nothing was remotely as uncanny as the character of Jesus himself. No one quite like him had ever been portrayed in literature.” As a historian, when you encounter an unprecedented character, how do you make sense of that?

Tom Holland: Well I think Jesus is…and I speak of him as a literary figure in the Gospels, the most extraordinary…if he is just a literary creation, then he’s the most remarkable literary creation of all time; because if you went to a writer and you said: “Okay, I want you to come up with a figure who is simultaneously human and divine, and you have to portray him in such a way that people in 2000 years time, in continents you’ve never even heard of, will still believe that this figure is both God and man. Go ahead and do it.” How many of us would be able to do it? It would take an unbelievably gifted writer to come up with that. Then you think, well, there are four people who are doing this, and although John is Greek, generally, they’re not great stylists. 

So I think the uncanniness of Jesus in the Gospels is either a literary mystery or they are channeling and articulating something that was genuine in a historical Jesus. But either way, there is a profound mystery there. Either the Gospels are an authentic account of this, of someone who was clearly remarkable and uncanny and unsettling, and whose fate was simultaneously mysterious and perhaps to some, revelatory—Or the texts themselves are a mystery. Because how did they come to be written? 

To say the stories told of Jesus or the parables that he tells are simply fictional…I mean, it doesn’t really solve the mystery because they have to come from somewhere. So where are they coming from? In Dominion, I didn’t discuss the historicity or otherwise of the Gospels because I know that it’s an enormous bog, and I feel unqualified really, to pontificate on that. But that’s personally my own feeling on it. I feel there is a strangeness there…an uncanniness that is kind of inexplicable.

Cherie Harder: Just sort of continuing with the strangeness…It’s perhaps an additional paradox in the early years of Christianity. It seems like one of the fuels to spread it was actually the persecution and even victimization of believers, many of whom were slaves. Whether we’re thinking about the scapegoats of Nero or the victims of Leone, like Blandina. How did you come to see that their suffering, their victimization in a world that prized winning, spread Christian so dramatically?

Tom Holland: I have to say, I think that a lot of the records of persecution are exaggerated. I think that there is there is a particular reason why martyrs come to hold the status that they do in the early church, and that is because the understanding of the early Christians about how heaven functions, and about how God functions, and God’s relationship to those who die, is mapped quite closely onto the relationship of a great Roman patron and his various clients. So I think early Christians tend to imagine heaven as being a bit like the great spreading villa of a fabulously wealthy senator, maybe even Caesar himself. And the whole basis of the Roman world is founded on the relationship between a patron and a client. And Christians, in the early centuries of Christianity, teach that most of those who are dead will have to await the Day of Judgment—The end of days before they are, if they deserve it, granted the bliss of heaven. In that sense, they are like clients who are kept waiting in the atrium rather than being led into the great banquet that Caesar is staging in the heart of his palace. But there are those who will be taken straight to “Caesar’s Palace,” to the table of God, and will sit at God’s right hand and be feasted by him. These are the martyrs. 

The thing that is radical…you mentioned Blandina…lots of people watching this may not know who Blandina was. Blandina is named in an account that most historians accept probably is historically rooted, which is an account of the martyrdom of various Christians in the amphitheater of Lyon at the end of the second century A.D. Blandina is named despite being the slave of a woman who is also a Christian martyr in the arena, but who is not named, and Blandina, we are told particularly suffered, and as she died, her fellow Christian martyrs looked at her and she seemed to take on the form of Christ. She seemed to be crucified. Blandina, undoubtedly in the opinion of Christian martyrs, did go straight to the table of God…to the banqueting hall of God despite being a woman and a slave. And both of those things would have invalidated her in the opinion of those who upheld the traditional social hierarchies of the Roman world. The fact that her mistress, her owner is not named, but she is named, again is a kind of manifestation of how the traditional hierarchies are being upended. The last is becoming first. You have there a sense of of the kind of the radicalism and the import of some of these narratives; that they are opening up for people the possibility that the traditional hierarchies are being upended by this unbelievable development that Paul had been the first to put in writing, as far as we know, that has survived, but that many since then are preaching across the Empire.

Cherie Harder: Speaking of upending those hierarchies, you recently said that in many ways, liberalism is largely secularizing. Paul’s letter to the Galatians where he says, there’s no longer in Christ, Jew or Greek, no longer slave nor free, no longer male nor female—you compared that letter to the Galatians (I think that comes from Galatians 3) to a depth charge released under the fabric of classic civilization or classical civilization. How so? What link do you see between that idea of “in Christ those distinctions are obliterated,” and a political system of classical liberalism?

Tom Holland: People will often say about Christianity…why isn’t it clearer? Why are there not clear rules and prescriptions? It’s not just modern atheists or skeptics who have articulated this. There were very few Muslim scholars, for instance, in the Middle Ages who read the Bible because they viewed it as having been corrupted by Jews and Christians who wanted to disguise the fact that supposedly, the Bible had proclaimed the prophethood of Muhammad, and so they tended not to read it. But there were some who read it—there were scholars who would read the New Testament, and they were bewildered by it because Muslims took for granted that the essence of revelation is kind of guidance on how people should live. The entire corpus of Islamic law is an expression of God’s prescriptions to humanity for how they should live and please him. But there’s nothing like this really in the New Testament. And Muslim scholars say “what’s all this stuff? Are you just walking on water or people applying foot lotions or…?” I mean, it’s all mad! There’s absolutely no rules at all! The same up to a point is true of Paul’s letters too. What you get with Paul’s letters is someone wrestling and trying to understand. It’s in that sense I think that they are depth charges, because they contain or come up with another metaphor or simile. They are like acorns from which great oaks will spring, because they contain so much within them compressed. So that famous one about there being no slave or free, no Greek or Jew, no man or woman in Christ. I mean, that’s the key.

The sense that those letters: studied and studied, read and read, promoted and promoted generation to generation, it becomes hardwired into the mindset of those people who are raised in cultures that are being shaped utterly by the promulgation of sentiments and teachings like that particular one. The impact, I think civilizationally, is that over the course of time, you can bleed away that in Christ, and still have the notion of “to have no slave or free, to have no man or woman, to have no Greek or Jew” can be a positive. I would say that the ideals of a liberal society, the idea that men and women should be equal, the idea that human beings, no matter what their ethnic or cultural background, have a kind of inherent equality. The idea that the distinctions between those who are free and those who are slaves should be dissolved and that in the long run, that should manifest itself in an institutional sense. You can see how all of these things can be accepted by people who no longer need the idea that they’ve been dissolved within the consciousness of serving Christ; that instead they’ve become manifest in society. Societies that for a long while were Christian and now often perhaps are not overtly Christian. But I would say that in their DNA, in their marrow, they remain so shaped by teachings like that, that they are in their impulses and instincts, as Christian almost as they had been when everyone was Christian in the West.

Cherie Harder: I’ve got so much to ask about that. I want to ask you to expound on that a little bit in that, throughout your book, you talk a lot about the various ways in which so much of our values, our virtues, even our imagination and our assumptions, are affected by the Christian story, even if we don’t entirely recognize it. One area that I’d like to ask you about in particular: What is the downstream impact of the Christian idea? The paradoxical idea of humans as both being endowed with dignity (the idea of the imago dei made in the image of God), but also steeped in sin…the doctrine of original sin. That is where we have a proclivity towards doing the wrong thing, or at least certainly pursuing selfish ends. How do you see that idea? The first part, the imago dei, was certainly unusual in classical times and in many ways. The doctrine of original sin has had people contest it more recently. How does that affect the way that our civilization has adopted it over time?

Tom Holland: Well first of all of course, the idea that men and women have been created in the image of God derives from Hebrew scripture—from Genesis. It seems very radical when counterpointed to stories that are obviously pretty cognate to the Genesis stories. Most obviously the stories in Mesopotamia, in Babylonia, where the gods create humans basically as slaves, because the gods are fed up with building temples, so they create humans to do the building of temples for them. The biblical God creates human beings who share in His dignity. That’s a that’s a very radical notion. It obviously endows the idea of humanity with an incredible dignity, and I think the gut instincts that all human beings have an inherent dignity. I mean, it is a theological notion. That’s why it seems to me, humanism, even though it often casts itself as being hostile to Christianity, essentially, it seems to me a kind of Christian heresy, if you want to say; it’s Christianity without God, but it still privileges humans as having an inherent dignity that all other human beings should respect. So that is one side of the Christian legacy. The other, the original sin…it’s very specific, I think, to Latin Christendom, because Latin Christendom has been globally, so influential. The doctrine of original sin has also been massively influential in shaping politics.

The doctrine is most associated with Augustine, the great father of the church, the bishop of Hippo, author of The City of God, who witnesses the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, the sack of Rome, and the invasion of Africa by the Vandals, and so on. But, I suppose, his great theological battle is with the very first British intellectual. The very first person from my own country to have intruded on the world beyond. He’s a guy called Pelagius. Pelagius’ argument is that humans, if they are created in the image of God, they must have the ability to attain salvation through their own means. Augustine is radically opposed to this and he says: “no, that can’t be the case. Every human being has the taint of sin by virtue of Adam’s fall.” I think certainly since the 60s, it’s been very overtly argued that the progressive take is to say that the idea that humans can create heaven on earth, that they can attain salvation, is more inspiring, nobler, than Augustine’s pessimistic take that it’s impossible to fashion heaven on earth, and that humans can’t hope to gain salvation without grace; without the assistance of God. But I think that if political and cultural developments of the past few decades teach us anything, it’s the conviction that purity and goodness can be attained under one’s own steam. The implication of that is that those who have not attained it are therefore to be condemned, and it encourages, I suppose, a hierarchy of virtue that doesn’t have much place within it for the sinner— for those who can’t attain the heights of virtue. 

Whereas I think that the doctrine of original sin is the most authentically democratic theological notion ever developed, because it means that all of us, even the most virtuous, even the saints—they have sin. Saint Peter denied Christ three times, and he holds the keys to heaven. I think that “tension” which expresses itself in the churches in the fourth and fifth century as well…the idea of: “Do you focus on those who are a godly elect (those who have attained a measure of sanctity that means that they can just set everyone else aside), or do you accept that the vast mass of people are inevitably sinners?” You have a kind of broad church, as it were, and that has been an enduring argument running throughout Christianity. I think it’s the tug between those who would argue that, because we’re created in the image of God, therefore surely we can attain a “goodness” that is pleasing to God, and those who say “no, we can’t, therefore we should accept that the vast mass of people have to be tended to.” It’s an enduring argument that is very manifest, I think, in politics today.

Cherie Harder: You know, speaking of politics today, your book describes just how entirely Christianity remade the world; comprehensively permeating it, even in ways we don’t always recognize. As you were just talking about and alluding to, concepts like human rights and the like. One could say the religion of the weak did win. But one of the perhaps unsettling or puzzling developments recently (and it’s something that’s been echoed in times past as well) is the yearning of some for a different form of dominion, whether it’s through a form of nationalism or triumphing over enemies that perhaps seems more akin to romanism. From the point of view of a historian, what’s going on? Did Christians just get tired of winning? Or is this just differences within Christianity of how we understand what it means for the meek to inherit the earth?

Tom Holland: Well, I think the whole history of Christianity in a way, is a history of paradox. It’s a great generator of paradoxes. To the Romans, the early martyrs, they deny having a patria…a fatherland. They claim that they are citizens. They are people who have emancipated themselves from earthly polities, and they are now the Christian people. This to the Romans, to the Greeks, to the Judeans, it’s deeply shocking. Everyone should have roots, but the early Christians are saying “no, we don’t need this.” They are self-consciously preaching a kind of universalism. Paul is obviously doing that. I mean, that is what “there is no Jew or Greek within Christ,” that’s the implication of it. I guess it seems very appealing; it’s very “Star Trek” isn’t it? United federation of planets…very “hippie.” But, there is obviously a dark side to it as well, because if you think of there is no Greek or Judean in the greek, but often translated, “there is no Greek or Jew.” Paul is a Judean. He’s a Jew. But he hopes that everyone will accept this message from his countrymen and his countrywomen. But famously, most of them don’t. The Jews don’t want to lose their distinctiveness in a “universal marsh” as they would see it. They want to hold to their covenant. They want to hold to the laws that they have been given by God.

This then generates a tension in relations between the church and the synagogues as they evolve over the course of late antiquity and into the Middle Ages, and then into the modern age that everyone knows about. It’s the first of a number of tensions that have always existed within the Christian claim to be universal. Again, what about pagans? What about Muslims? What about when Christians start going overseas? What about the Aztecs? What about any number of different people? The impulse of Christians to say “we’re conquering you for your own good. We are abolishing your evil customs for your own good. We are bringing you to Christ.” Yet the risk of that is that then, they start behaving like the people who did the crucifying rather than were crucified. Of course, within the body of the Christian people themselves, there are many different perspectives on what being a good Christian should be and what the church should be. Again, that generates through the Middle Ages—the persecution of heretics into the early modern period wars between Catholics and Protestants. To this day, there are different denominational perspectives and and and arguments. I guess from my point of view, it serves to demonstrate the truth of Augustine’s perspective that it’s impossible to have a new Jerusalem on earth until the Good Lord decides that He is ready to descend from the heavens, and that moment hasn’t come yet. 

Cherie Harder: In just a second we’re going to turn to questions from our viewers, and there’s a bunch of them lining up. But before we do, I wanted to ask just one more question of you, which is…I have heard that, for scholars, for researchers, research inevitably becomes at least a form of “me-search.” You have spent much of your vocational life researching, studying, and writing on different different civilizations. I know you grew up in the church and then later left it as a young person. Did the process of, of studying Christianity and writing Dominion change your view at all of faith, morality, spirituality, or the like?

Tom Holland: For sure. I’ve always found whenever I… I’ve always been very interested in the dimensions of the supernatural. I actually began my career as a vampire writer, so writing about periods of history in which I was trying to find ways to incorporate vampires, but, I mean, when I wrote about the Romans or the Greeks, I was very interested in how they understood the gods, because I think that without understanding what the gods meant to the Athenians or to the Romans, you can’t understand them. I found it often kind of moving to think about, say, how the Athenians regarded their great civic patron, the goddess Athena. But there’s no way I could ever have any sense of what it would be like to worship in the cult of Athena. I mean, it’s so dead and gone, whereas Christianity is the the religion in which I was raised as a child, my mother is a Christian, my godmother, who I talk about at the end of Dominion, was a Christian. I admire Christians; Christianity is a part of the culture and the history in which I’ve grown up in. So, reading about the different periods of Christianity and I guess, above all, reading some of the great Christian writers and thinkers and theologians over the course of the centuries, I found it very powerful and moving. I found as I wrote about them and thought about them, I would again try and enter into their heads and see the world as they saw it, and imagine what it would be to believe in all this, to believe in angels, to believe in the extraordinary.

Tom Holland: I felt a great yearning to share in that belief, to do it not just as an intellectual exercise, but to feel it in my heart. And over the course of my life, I’ve read the Bible through three times. So the first time I read it in the King James Version as a literary exercise, kind of akin to reading the plays of Shakespeare, and I wanted to read this great masterpiece of English prose. The second time I read it, before writing Dominion as preparation, and I studied it as a historical text. So trying to work out where all the various books had been written, all the various parts that were stitched together to form Genesis or whatever, what the dates were of the Gospels and Paul’s letters and so on, approaching it as a historical text as I would any other historical text. And then while writing Dominion, I read origin, the great third century AD philosopher, theologian whose writings I found very, very appealing.

Tom Holland: And I felt very seen when I read a very severe Christian theologian saying that origin is always the favorite Christian writer of those who aren’t properly Christian. But I don’t care. He moved me very powerfully. And there was one thing in particular where he compared the Bible, he was a great scholar of the Bible, he compared the Bible and all its various books to a great mansion full of many rooms, and that all these rooms were locked. And if you want to find the key to each room, you have to get into another room, and that’s where you will find the key. And such a powerful idea. And I then reread the Bible in that understanding, thinking from the first line of Genesis to the last line of revelation. Everything is in this text for a reason that has to do with the divine creator of the world. And what’s the implications of reading it in that light? And I found it so moving and powerful that the kind of afterglow of that is still very much with me.

Cherie Harder: That’s beautiful. Okay. We’re going to turn to questions from our viewers. And if you’re joining us for the first time, you can not only ask a question, but you can like a question that helps give us an idea of what some of the more popular questions are. So we’ll start off with a question from Joel Hanson, and Joel asks, what was the most surprising development or event in the history of Christianity that you found in your research?

Tom Holland: That’s a really good question. I mean, so much is surprising. It’s almost impossible to answer that question. I suppose on one level, the most surprising thing about Christianity is that I think it, certainly in the West to a degree, has been its own gravedigger, because I think that atheism is not a repudiation of Christianity, but a logical conclusion to it. And that, to me, was a kind of surprising reflection. But when you think about it, I mean, my argument for why that is, is actually, once you see it, I can’t escape it, which is that going back to the Hebrew prophets. There is a lot of skepticism. Jeremiah or Isaiah are profoundly skeptical towards the Gods of the Egyptians or the Babylonians or the Assyrians. They’re saying, these are just stock and stone. The tops of hills or springs or groves, there’s nothing holy about them at all. Holiness is in the one God. And that is a sentiment that Christians inherit, and it typifies their reaction to the gods worshiped in the Roman Empire. And it is manifest in the way that missionaries in the early Middle Ages respond to the great trees that are sacred to Thor, they chop them down. And when they go over to when the Spanish sail to Mexico, they are toppling the gods of the Aztecs and so on. And I suppose in a sense that instinct to see superstition as something that should be banished and to see idols as something that is overthrown, is an instinct that starts to cannibalize Christianity as well. And it’s very manifest in the Reformation. The reformers treat the Roman Church as the Roman church had treated the pagan gods. And in a sense, what happens in with the radical enlightenment and then with the French Revolution is that people saturated in Christian assumptions, start turning that hostility towards superstition and idols against Christianity per se. And that, I think, is very much where we are now with new atheists and so on. You know, we have a slight crisis in the Church of England here in England at the moment. Bishops seem to be kind of falling left, right and center. They do not seem to me particularly efficient at evangelizing it. Preaching the gospel, and certainly much less so than, say, Richard Dawkins, whose evangelical sense that getting rid of religion will make you a better person. I mean, he’s out there preaching this good news, this euangelion all the time with a fervor and a vividness and a self-confidence that I simply don’t recognize in any public Christian figure in Britain at the moment. And that’s because I think he is, in all but his disavowal of Christian faith, utterly Christian, as increasingly I think he seems willing to accept.

Cherie Harder: Interesting. Well, there’s a lot we can unpack there, but I see the questions just piling up. So I’m going to go to a question from Matthew Teague Matt asks, he says: “I feel like much of what’s happening in America today is a return to pre-Christian ideals of power and might as supreme virtues.” I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that, Tom, and whether it indicates a larger historical trend.

Tom Holland: I mean, speaking as a non-American looking across the Atlantic in a country that is, you know, America sneezes and we catch a cold, I think that America seems to me still a profoundly American country. I mean, overtly, Christianity has a role in public life in America that it simply doesn’t have in Europe any longer. But also the fact that even those on the liberal progressive woke wing, if you want to put it like that, remain utterly saturated with Christian assumptions. I mean, the conviction that those who have historically been disadvantaged, therefore have a kind of moral privilege is unthinkable without the kind of Christian seedbed. Now, I don’t want to kind of comment on politics because I, you know, it’s not for me to comment on American politics to American viewers. But having said that, I do think that Donald Trump is probably the least Christian president the United States has ever had. And it’s another paradox that he Probably, I guess won the majority of evangelical votes. But he really does seem to me someone who just has no real interest. I think as far as I can tell in Christianity, he has no kind of feel for it, he’s like someone kind of, you know, in a room, a dark room, groping after trying to work out what’s in the room, but he has no real kind of instinctive sense for it.

Tom Holland: Maybe it enables him to purge himself of the hypocrisy that perhaps is inherent in a Christian who seeks power, political power. I think that for most American presidents, there’s been a deep vein of hypocrisy there, and perhaps those in which the hypocrisy is least evident (So I’m thinking of Jimmy Carter, who’s just died), he’s generally seen as a failure as a president. Maybe to be a good president, you need the hypocrisy. You need to be able to balance your Christian impulses and instincts with a certain relish for power, because if you don’t have that relish for power and a relish for deploying it, you’re not really going to be an effective president. I think Trump is a fascinating political figure because he, more than any president before him, seems unapologetic about exercising power, and seems to almost despise people who don’t have that appetite for power, which is why generally, he seems to be keener on those who are overt strong men, rather than kind of Justin Trudeau type political figures. It may be that his success is perhaps a reflection of the fraying of Christianity, but I don’t know. Because, as I say, it does seem to me that America remains so Christian. By Christian, I mean overtly Christian in a way that’s just not true of Europe, even though I think Europe is still in its instincts and impulses, and remains very Christian too.

Cherie Harder: Interesting. So a question from Bethany Reinhart. Bethany says: “In light of the approaching holiday of Saint Valentine, could Tom speak to how Christianity changed the dynamics and assumptions about marriage, family, the purpose of family, children, etc. in contrast to previous civilizations?”

Tom Holland: Goodness, I’m aware that I’m giving very long answers to these questions, and that’s because the issues are so broad! Massively. I mean, Christianity totally rewires the Roman understanding of sex, of relations between the sexes, of marriage, in a way so utterly that, again, we tend not to recognize it. I don’t want to go into great detail about it, but the Roman understanding of sexuality from our perspective, is very brutal. It privileges the male citizen who has command over those who are characterized as his inferiors. These would be women dependents, and at the bottom, slaves. A Roman citizen has the right, in fact, is expected to, exercise his sexual needs on those who are his inferiors. This is just the dynamic of a Roman familia. This is the dynamic of those people in Corinth and Rome to whom Paul is writing. Corinth is a Roman colony, so it’s governed by Roman rather than Greek sexual mores. This is what prompts Paul’s great commentary on sex and marriage. What Paul is saying essentially, is that it’s better to marry than burn. So what should the role of a marriage be? Paul says that it should be akin the relationship of a man to a woman.

Tom Holland: The closest parallel is that of Christ and his church. That may seem very gendered these days, but think about it in this way: In a Roman household, in a Corinthian household, the man has the right to use his slaves, adult or children, male or female, basically any way he wants. The Romans have the same word for urinate and ejaculate, and this essentially is casting slaves as the equivalent of urinals. Paul is writing to these people and saying the male, the head of the household, should be like Christ. Obviously Christ does not go around sexually abusing the scullery maid or the page boy or whatever. He has to show continence and love to his wife, who is like the church. It imposes massive demands on people for whom this is an entirely alien way of understanding themselves, their sexuality, and what their institutional role should be. Furthermore, it implies that the ideal relationship is a lifelong monogamy. Again, there’s nothing really like that. There is nothing in antiquity where you have a lifelong monogamy…if you have monogamy, then it’s not lifelong, and if you do have lifelong relationships, then generally you can have a number of wives. So this combination of lifelong and monogamous is something very, very distinctive. It takes the church a very, very long time to impose it, and to impose the sexual standards that are implicit in the idea that a man and a woman’s relationship should be akin to that of Christ and the church. It is the great labor of the church in the Middle Ages to complete that. The effect is that even when the Reformation happens, the assumptions that have been instilled by the Roman Church over the course of the Middle Ages remain in place. You can tell that by looking at one of the most famous plays written in a Protestant country: Romeo and Juliet. The implication of Christ and his church is that Christ chooses the church and the church chooses Christ. It is not up to clan leaders to choose to marry cousins off to one another. It’s up to individuals to choose one another, and this effectively is romantic love. What you have in Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets—they wanted the head of those clans—they think that they should decide who Romeo and Juliet marry. But Romeo and Juliet have other ideas. That is an ideal that has fed through right the way into the present day. When I was writing Dominion, I did think, well, I’ve got to write about the 60s. I’ve got to write about the sexual revolution of the 60s, and I’ve got to put my hands up and say, that is a radical reconfiguration of Christian sexual ethics. But then, as I was writing it, the Harvey Weinstein “Me Too” thing broke. What struck me, having written about how Christian sexual morality transforms Roman sexual morality, was that there were very few people, if any, who were saying “Well, what’s wrong with what Harvey Weinstein did? Why shouldn’t a powerful man use his inferiors as he wants?” Because that’s what a Roman would have taken for granted. A Roman would have found it incomprehensible that Harvey Weinstein got sent to prison. They would have said what’s the issue? But no one said that, and that is the index of just how profoundly and radically, even now, with all the transformations of the post 60s sexual order, our instincts remain so deeply Christian.

Cherie Harder: Thank you, Tom. There’s so much more we’d love to ask you, but in just a moment I’m going to give you the last word. Before doing that, a few things just to share with all of you who are watching us: Immediately after we conclude, we’ll be sending around an online feedback form, and we would be grateful to receive your thoughts and your feedback about today’s program. We read every one of these. We try to incorporate your suggestions to make these programs ever more valuable. As a small token of our appreciation for doing so, we will send you a code for a free Trinity Forum reading download of your choice. There are quite a few that we think would be relevant to today’s conversation, to enable one to more deeply engage some of the themes that we talked about, and a few in particular that we would recommend are the Strangest Story in the World by G.K. Chesterton, Why God Became Man by Anselm, A Practical View of Real Christianity by William Wilberforce, and City of God by Augustine, who Tom has quoted from several times. In addition, for everyone who registered, we will be sending around an email tomorrow with a link to a lightly edited version of today’s conversation, which we really encourage you to share with other people, as well as a list of readings and resources for those of you who want to more deeply explore some of what we talked about. In addition, I want to invite all of you who are watching to join the Trinity Forum Society, which is the community of people who work together to advance Trinity Forum’s mission of cultivating, curating, and disseminating the best of Christian thought.

In addition to being part of this community and part of the mission, there are a number of benefits of being a society member, including a subscription to our quarterly readings, a subscription to our daily “What We’re Reading” list of curated reading recommendations. And as a special incentive, all of those of you who join and become a member or with your gift of $100 or more, we will send you a signed copy of Tom Holland’s extraordinary book, Dominion. I also just want to encourage everyone to sign up and stick around; On February 21st, we’ll have our next online conversation with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on his new work Believe, and will be releasing our full spring schedule in the next few weeks. I’d also like to add my own thanks to our sponsors for today’s program: Katie and Brant Allen, Beth and Joe Kaufman, and Jeannie and Amin Minfar, as well as our co-host, Basic Books. I’d also like to thank my colleagues, the Trinity Forum team, who helped make the mission of the Trinity Forum visible and workable. So many thanks to Tom Walsh, Campbell Vogel, Marie-Ann Morris, Frances Owen and Macrae Hanke who put our mission into action. Finally, as promised, Tom, the last word is yours.

Tom Holland: So I wanted to finish with a poem by a poet who I began reading a lot in the wake of writing Dominion because I found poetry was a better way, I suppose, of articulating feelings and emotions about Christianity that I actually found quite hard to put into words. It’s by the Welsh poet R. S Thomas, who was a vicar; a very eccentric vicar. His vicarage was famously cold, and his diocese finally had loads of radiators put in, and he was so furious about this that he ripped them out and chucked them out on the heap. But he’s a brilliant, brilliant poet, and the poem that I’ve chosen is The White Tiger because it sums up, I suppose, my feelings about God. 

It was beautiful as God

 must be beautiful:

 glacial eyes that had looked on violence

 and come to terms with it;

 a body too huge and majestic

 for the cage in which it had been put;

 up and down in the shadow

 of its own bulk it went

 lifting as it turned, 

the crumpled flower of its face

 to look into my own face without seeing me.

It was the color of the moonlight

 on snow and as quiet as moonlight,

 but breathing as you can imagine 

that God Breathes within the confines 

of our definition of Him,

agonizing over immensities that will not return.

Cherie Harder: Thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure to talk with you.

Tom Holland: Thank you.

Cherie Harder: And thank you to all of you for joining us. Have a great weekend.