Welcome to the latest installment of “The AF Interview,” a subscriber only feature bringing you lonform interviews with leading thinkers whose work is relevant to that of The Davenant Institute.
I wonder if you’ve ever tried “the Cocktail Party test.” It goes like this: what was the last new book you would be embarrassed not to have read if you turned up at a get-together of writers and intellectuals?
I borrow this test from the critic Joseph Bottum. He had novels in mind when he thought it up, but if we apply it to non-fiction it’s hard to see a better candidate right now than Tom Holland’s Dominion. Almost overnight, the book became part of “The Conversation”–a necessary cornerstone in discussions about the past, present, and future of the West. At least, it did for those willing to square up to its thesis, a thesis which still feels spry, fresh, and daring four years on–an Errol Flynn of an idea.
So lively does the book feel that it’s hard to believe four years have passed since its 2019 publication. When I sat down with Holland at his south London home on a bright, wintery afternoon in January, he insisted that events since have only served to vindicate the book:
Nothing that’s happened since [Dominion] was published has caused me to revise my opinion of it. The pandemic, Black Lives Matter–all kinds of things have happened that have just confirmed me in my views.
Those views were first laid out in a 2016 article for left-wing UK magazine The New Statesman, entitled “Why I Was Wrong About Christianity.” There, Holland posited that the moral principles assumed throughout the West owe almost nothing to the classical Greeks and Romans, but virtually everything to Christianity. He concluded: “In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.”
This thesis developed into Dominion–a roaring success, which has established Holland in something like fame. His podcast, The Rest is History, co-hosted with Dominic Sandbook, is the most popular podcast in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Yet, he told me, Dominion’s success did not feel guaranteed at first.
The whole field that produces my books is very, very secular–very, very, liberal. There was a certain degree of anxiety about how to publish [Dominion] among my editors. So on the [UK] hardback cover there is very little hint that it’s a history of Christianity. The subtitle in Britain was “The Making of the Western Mind;” in America it’s “How the Christian Revolution Changed the World” and there’s an enormous great big picture of Jesus on the cross on the front–so that does tell you quite a lot about the difference between Britain and America!
And the paperback in Britain is a sort of sub-Sergeant Pepper montage. But to begin with, again there was almost nothing Christian in it. I had to go back and say “you need to bung in a cathedral, some angels–come on!
My editor’s a brilliant editor, and he was worried it would be ghettoized as a Christian book, because the assumption seemed to be that if a book is about Christianity then it is a Christian book.
This is unsurprising, on one level. As the 2021 census in Holland’s native country recently revealed, the UK is now, for the first time, a non-Christian majority nation. The nervousness over publication extended to Holland himself too:
I was nervous about it on various levels. For one, it’s an insanely ambitious book. I felt nervous too about whether there would be a market for it.
I also alternated between thinking ‘wow this is a radical thesis’ and thinking ‘but is it?’ It seems incredibly obvious!
The opening reviews were very much [saying] “this is massively over-egged.” There was one in The Times–I think it was the first review–which said ‘I walk out, I see a beggar, I give him money; I don’t do this because I’m Christian, I do it because I’m human.’ And I just thought ‘you haven’t read the book, you’re proving the point!’ But in a way that was a reassurance for me, because it suggested that [the influence of Christianity] wasn’t obvious to lots of people, and so therefore [the book] was worth having written.
Indeed, if one reads the conclusion of The Times’s (brief) review–penned by a professor of history–it is painfully shallow:
The values described as Christian seem more like simple human nature. Over aeons, the pressures of survival have forced humans to co-operate, to look out for one another. The susceptibility to Christ’s message displayed by Paul, and by those who followed him, reveals a natural human goodness that existed long before Jesus was crucified. The idea that charity and tolerance are evidence of Christian influence seems too ethnocentric.
Instances such as this illustrate that, just as fascinating as Dominion itself, is its reception. It has been a runaway success, yet has also paradoxically revealed the extent to which positive public discussion of Christianity is, for many in the West, now an anathema.
Ambivalent and negative responses were unsurprising though–Holland has experienced such before.
I [once] wrote an essay arguing that [Pope] Gregory VII was the Great Revolutionary in European history, which was a really important conception that fed into Dominion. And I made this argument, and the pushback I had against that from [left-wing] readers was amazing. It was like they’d been personally insulted.
My argument–well, it’s not my argument, it’s a pretty standard argument–was that it’s the Gregorian Revolution that enshrines the idea of there being twin dimensions: the dimension of religio and the dimension of the saeculum, which become religion and the secular space. And it was as though this was an absolute blasphemy–and I use the word advisedly.
In a way, nobody cared what I wrote about Greece or Rome, because they don’t matter. But writing about the church in the 11th century, which might seem an incredibly recherché subject, generated a lot of heat for reasons which struck me as incredibly interesting, and so that’s [another] part of why I wanted to [write Dominion]
Whilst he may have gained the ire of one set of readers, Dominion caught the eye of another set whom Holland had not previously engaged with: Christians.
[Publishing Dominion] plunged me into a whole dimension of discourse that I had previously not been engaged with, and so I find myself talking to people who I would not previously have been talking to–primarily religious groups. I started to be reviewed by publications that I’ve never heard of! And I felt that they were getting to grips with what I was saying in ways that the more secular publications weren’t.
This is certainly true. Reviews of Dominion appeared in high-profile Christian publications such as The Gospel Coalition, Christianity Today, and Word on Fire; even a number of reviews in secular publications were nevertheless penned by Christians, such as James Orr in The Critic, Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard, and Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. Holland has also since appeared in many interviews, panels, and podcasts hosted by Christians, such with the evangelist Glen Scrivener at SpeakLife (more than once), with Jonathan Pageau at The Symbolic World, and numerous times on Premier’s Unbelievable? podcast, dialoguing with N.T. Wright and debating with A.C. Grayling.
“The pushback I had against that from left-wing readers was amazing. It was like they’d been personally insulted”
Hand-in-hand with Dominion’s popularity among Christian audiences and thinkers has come its popularity among conservatives of all stripes. Despite having its genesis in an article in the left-wing New Statesman, Dominion is now often mentioned in the same breath as the work of conservative writers such as Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, and others who care to discuss frankly the Christian foundations of the West, and the ill effects of the West’s own rejection of these.
I think [Dominion has been picked up on the political right] for very obvious reasons: it’s the left who are winning. I think the 60s is perhaps the most theologically convulsive and fruitful time since the 1520s, and the process of “reformation”, or whatever we’re going to call what we’re living through at the moment, is a repudiation of so much, in the [same] way that the Reformation of the 16th century was a repudiation. And so, inevitably, the revolutionaries are not going to want to seem like they are in hock to some antiquated Christian tradition. It’s offensive to their sense of themselves and what they’re doing. Whereas I think, probably, to people on the right, who are more traditionally minded, it’s more obvious.
Many of the Christian and conservative voices championing Dominion have used it as a springboard to call for a return to our Christian roots. Conservatives after all, by definition, supposedly want to conserve. Yet the viability of what is broadly known as “conservatism” has long been questioned. Roger Scruton described the origin of conservatism as a “hesitation within liberalism,” and many wonder if it has ever amounted to anything more. As Holland sees it, conservatives using Dominion to advocate the conservation of a once-stable foundation have missed the point.
The argument of the book is that any society founded on Christianity is inherently unstable, because the process of reform is a constant temptation–although temptation is the wrong word. It self generates. [You see it in] that pattern that begins with Gregory [VII]: the medieval church is Europe’s first revolutionary institution, and [the Gregorian reformation] calls itself a reformation. The Reformation of the 16th century is simply another iteration of it. [The Reformation is] a response to the fact that the revolutionaries of one age become the elite of a later age. And that whole process is very evident in early modern and modern history.
I think the fact that Jesus dies at the hands of a great power, and the fact that the last shall be first, and that rich men are sent away because they won’t give away all their goods–these generate massive tensions within traditional elites, whether they’re imperial, socially elite, the rich. [It means] that always, if they’re Christian, the shadow of doubt is there about power, greatness, and wealth. And, as [Christianity] develops in the West–much more than in, say, Orthodoxy–it generates an inherent instability. Gregory VII humbles kings, Protestants humble kings, French revolutionaries humble kings. Every elite is subject to their subjects.
What’s been interesting since Dominion came out is that this process has been very evident on social media, on the street, in academia, in all kinds of ways. There’s a kind of competitive urge to demonstrate one’s sanctity, holiness, and purity–and you do that by calling out those who maybe a year before were the epitome of [cultural virtue].
A further misconstrual of the book is that Holland is advocating for the inherent superiority of the Christian values which have shaped the West. Yet he insists this is simply not the case:
There are certainly Christians who say, ‘look, [Dominion] proves that all the good things come from Christianity.’ Whereas what I’m saying is that our understanding of what good things are comes from Christianity. I’m not making a claim objectively about whether they are good things. Other peoples, other civilisations, other periods have had very different ideas about what is good.
I think it’s evident that the notion of what is good is very culturally contingent. And that’s ultimately the argument. As it’s framed, it’s a pretty relativist book. It’s basically undermining the idea that anything is absolute. It’s essentially saying that depending on where you are it can be as morally valid to chuck a small baby down a ravine as it is to rescue it from a dung heap. It’s not a work of theology. So I think Christians who think that it’s about the truth claims of Christianity are missing the point.
Long centuries of Christian apologetics have, of course, taken account of the varying human accounts of morality which Holland mentions. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis famously quipped that “Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.” And, more effectively than any other apologist in the 20th century, Lewis made the case for the human longing for the Good being evidence that the Good must in fact exist.
Yet Holland’s point stands: on its own terms, Dominion is not the slam-dunk for the truthfulness of Christianity which some have made it out to be. It is a great temptation, in an age increasingly hostile to Christianity, for Christians to press gang non-believers like Holland into service when they offer a positive blurb of the faith.
“As it’s framed, Dominion is a pretty relativist book. It’s basically undermining the idea that anything is absolute.”
Despite an ambivalence about whether Christianity is true, however, Dominion has–albeit unintentionally–served as one of the most effective apologetics in recent years for Christianity being good. And, one way or another, people want goodness. In preparing for our interview, a number of friends and acquaintances in church ministry told me that they regularly have new non-Christians attending their churches whose curiosity has been driven by Holland’s work. Interestingly, they are almost always men, and often interested in the aforementioned likes of Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson as well. The spiritual depths of the Christian tradition have been cracked open for many of these readers–and even for Holland himself.
As I was doing the research for Dominion, I found the experience of reading the heritage of Christian literature incredibly enriching, and eye-opening and wonderful, and I didn’t have anyone to share that with. And so I found talking to people who do share that perspective great. I feel like I’m on the edge of an enormous ocean, full of wonders–amazing islands and undiscovered continents. And I know it’s all out there and I’m just sailing out towards it.
I’ve always found myself very moved and excited by contemplating the supernatural. I began my career as a novelist writing vampire books, in which I took the beliefs about the supernatural in different periods of history literally. That was a rather crass and reductive way of doing it, but, [when] writing about the ancients, it absolutely seemed to me that one of the problems with a lot of academic writing about the classical world is that, because academics don’t believe in gods or angels, it’s like [they’re] studying a butterfly by putting a pin through it and sticking it to a board. It’s one way of doing it, but you’re missing out something quite important! So I’ve always tried to write in a way that is true to what people believed, [being] open to the possibility that because people believed this stuff it animated them in ways that we might otherwise miss.
In the wake of Dominion, Holland himself has become a regular attendee at St. Bartholomew-the-Great, a medieval church in the City of London.
When I was writing the book I was going to lots of different churches that would provide me with context. So when I was doing medieval Christianity I went there because it was the oldest–but also because it’s the only recorded appearance of the Virgin [Mary] in London, and it’s where Benjamin Franklin was a printer. That seemed to me to sum up the whole tradition of everything I was writing about. I went to Calvinist churches and Quaker meeting houses and all that kind of stuff, but that was the one that [stuck].
For readers of Ad Fontes, a curious omission from Dominion might seem to be any engagement with “the disenchantment narrative.” In the early 20th century, borrowing a phrase from writer Friedrich Schiller, sociologist Max Weber spoke of the modern West as “disenchanted,” in contrast to “enchanted garden” of the medieval and ancient worlds, with their greater belief in the supernatural. This idea has been latterly popularized by writers such as Charles Taylor, and, in works such as Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, the Reformation is often invoked as a chief culprit due to its reform of medieval superstition and theology. It is often argued that Protestantism necessarily entails disenchantment, given its theological opposition to Roman Catholic sacramentalism.
Although Holland does not engage disenchantment directly in Dominion, it has become an ongoing source of interest as he has engaged with Christianity further:
I don’t actually write about [disenchantment] really in Dominion, but I’ve come to feel it as a kind of ache. If I can shift the gear stick of my imagination so that I’m in a world where angels are appearing and miracles are being performed it seems so much more alive, and thrilling, and exciting.
To be honest, I have come slightly to regret the Reformation. I think the process of desacralization was massively sped up [by it], and I kind of regret it.
I’ve asked this of a number of evangelicals: what do you make of the saints of the early years of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons? Do you think they’re holy? What do you make of them? And they’re generally not very interested in them–they barely know about them, [and] they don’t really care, which seems to me a great shame.
I’m sure the Protestant response is that it’s all just crypto-paganism, but I like the feeling of being joined to the mystery of Christianity’s beginning in this country…I think one of the reasons why Christianity seems so attenuated to people is precisely because that sense of the mystery is gone.”
There is a valid challenge here. Holland’s work has served to make many Westerners more aware of the weird and wonderful history of Christianity. It is perhaps incumbent upon evangelical and Protestant readers–who possess, in general, the biggest reserves of energy and orthodoxy for the Church’s foreseeable future–to reckon with such parts of our heritage, one way or the other. And even though sensible Protestants should regard as over-egged the charge that Protestant theology necessitates disenchantment in principle, we should be able to reckon with the charge that Protestantism has, at times, aided and abetted disenchantment in practice. Although, on its own terms, it should never return to an embrace of relics and suchlike, Protestantism need not be permanently divorced from a rich, lively view of God’s activity in the cosmos. Holland concedes this point somewhat:
I understand that what [Protestant] theology says is different to how it manifests. And I think that there is a certain degree of mystery in the hyper post-Protestantism that is manifest in social justice movements at the moment. It’s really reimporting a sense of the fantastical. Trans rights stuff is absolutely founded in the belief that there are souls, and that there are essence that can in some way change.
Although Dominion traces the West’s past, it has inevitably become a key text in discussions about its future. “The great Nieztschean question”, as Holland calls it, is whether a society can sustain Christian values without Christian belief.
I think the answer to that has been scrabbled by fascism. When Nietzsche posed that question–“there will be terrible convulsions”, I paraphrase, “terrible things will be done, the world will be painted in blood”, all that kind of thing–he was right within a few decades.
The effect of fascism, and particularly of Nazism, was to enshrine itself as the epitome of evil, and to give back to post-Christians a sense of morality that was not dependent on Christian doctrine. So since the Second World War, one of the reasons why institutional Christianity has dramatically fallen off a cliff is that the Christian mythology has been replaced with a mythology that is rooted in an experience of Nazism.
Now the question is: is that sustainable? I think that these fundamental Christian ideas, as they become untethered from Christian doctrine and Scripture, are bound to drift and mutate, and perhaps will create their own doctrines. But because they’re not overtly theological they’re bound to be deeply-contested.
In Holland’s estimation, then, whatever comes next is uncertain. Perhaps we will need to wait until Hitler and all that comes with him has faded from living memory. That is a way off yet–but it is only getting closer. Whatever transpires along the way, it seems fair to assume that Dominion–or at least the argument it advances–will remain part of the conversation.
As my discussion with Holland wrapped up, we began speaking again about how Christianity continues to pique his personal interest:
I’ve read the Bible through three times. First, I read the King James Version as literature. The second time I read it before writing Dominion, so I was reading it as a historical text. The third time I read it inspired by Origen’s comments about Scripture being a mansion with many rooms in which the keys are to be found in all the various rooms. And I thought “I’ll read it in that light”–and it’s brilliant. Reading the Old Testament in light of the New, reading the New Testament in light of the Old–reading the Old Testament basically in the way that Paul must have read it when he was trying to make sense of what the hell was going on, looking through it to find prefigurings and pressagings. It was amazing, absolutely amazing.
Intrigued, I asked him what exactly amazed him so much as he worked through the Scriptures:
What I found myself wondering was “where was Jesus?” or rather “where was the Son of God in the Old Testament?” Is it Jesus who wrestled with Jacob? Is it Jesus in the burning bush? It just kind of hallowed and sanctified stories that were so familiar from Sunday school as to seem almost trite, and suddenly made them seem very awesome–full of awe.
One negative comment on Dominion made by John Gray of The New Statesman (in an otherwise positive review) regarded Holland’s description of “the uncanny character of Jesus himself.” Gray smarts at this: “How does he know Jesus was so unusual? There were many other Jewish prophets active in Roman Judea and surrounding areas when Jesus preached, and it may be no more than a fluke that he has been remembered and the rest forgotten.”
Gray forgets himself here: Holland is the historian, and Gray should stick to philosophy. Christianity still bears–and has always borne–the indelible mark of Jesus of Nazareth himself. It strikes me that, in writing Dominion, Holland has given his readers a taste of something like his own experience of reading the Scriptures. But rather than flicking through the pages of the Old Testament, wondering “where is Jesus?” and finding him in an unexpectedly hallowed moment, his readers turn the pages of history–of Dominion itself–and find the Nazarene there, before finding themselves “full of awe.” It recalls the kind of discovery which Gerard Manley Hopkins once made: “Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men’s faces.”
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