Kingdom of heaven

Tom Holland’s Dominion goes a long way toward answering that question. A historian of antiquity by training, Holland broadens his scope from classical Persia all the way to the 21st century, treating Christianity as at once the ideological miasma that none of us can escape from and the genesis of a genuinely novel vision of humanity, one whose reverberations still unsettle in our contemporary, so-called secular age.

Holland lays out his cards clearly at the outset. Once, he writes, he shared the popular vision of Christianity echoed by its detractors since Edward Gibbon: the story of proud and aesthetically vigorous pagans brought low by the “pale Galilean,” as the poet Algernon Swinburne called Jesus, who brought the colorful classical world tumbling into the “grey” of the Dark Ages. “My childhood instinct to see the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised,” Holland writes. “The defeat of paganism had ushered in the reign of Nobodaddy and of all the various crusaders, inquisitors, and black-hatted Puritans who had served as his acolytes.” Only when writing on the classical world was he confronted with just how foreign pagan conceptions of morality, humanity, and dignity were from the Christian-inflected values he had grown up with. Caesar, he writes, killed millions of Gauls and caused millions more to starve to death, and yet this seems to have figured little into the accounts of his admirers or detractors. The civilizations of Sparta and Rome, Holland says, “continued to stalk my imaginings as they had always done: like a great white shark, like a tiger, like a tyrannosaur” — fascinating, yet alien and terrifying. And so, Holland set out to find out why these beasts were so foreign. Or, conversely, how Christianity had rendered them so strange.

At the heart of Holland’s conception of Christianity is its central message of ironic transgression. Earthly power will be subverted. The mountains are made low. Valleys are brought high. The meek, the weak, the poor, the sick: All are worthy of our care and of God’s love. Those who in a classical paradigm might have been rendered “gods” — heroes, emperors, powerful men — were conversely brought down. The god who dies on a cross was and is, Holland argues, anathema to nearly every value system of the time. “That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.”

Yet that scandal became, as Holland deftly shows, the very underpinning of what he characterizes as a universal Western consciousness: a belief in the dignity of the human person that has brought us not merely the Spanish Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation but also the Enlightenment and the separation of church and state. European liberalism is, he implies, but one cryptic manifestation of the Christian conception of man. “In the age of Charlie Hebdo,” Holland writes close to the end of the book, “Europe had new expectations, new identities, new ideals. None, though, was neutral; none was anything other than the fruit of Christian history. To imagine … that the values of secularism might be timeless was, ironically enough, the surest evidence of just how deeply Christian they were.” Holland reads Christianity both in the reactionary screeds of modern evangelicals and in the ferocious commitment to social upheaval you find in today’s social justice activists.

But in such a paradigm, what is there left to fight against? To whom can Christianity still be offensive, and why? Towards the end of Dominion, Holland hints that the 20th-century sexual revolution may be, in part, a religious reformation of its own: a renewed paganism that valorizes human freedom, erotic desire, and power. “Sexual repression was boring,” he writes, “and to be boring was box-office death.” He then speculates, in a slightly jarring aside, that Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct may have been influenced by his subscription to the theology of this new Babylon.

For much of its significant page length, Dominion is by turns enthralling and unsettling, blending gruesome anecdotes from Christian history with a broad-brush vision of Christianity’s unlikely triumph. But Holland’s final chapters on the contemporary culture wars feel somewhat abrupt: There is an absence of detail more deeply felt for the sensitivity that has come before. Is it really true that we are just dealing with different inheritances of Christianity? Or does the contemporary cultural moment have anything as novel, one might even say strange, as Christianity once was?

In his Pagans and Christians in the City, published earlier this year, Steven Smith posits that we have inherited not one but two strands of philosophical history — the lust for glory of the classical pagans and the unsettling self-denial of Christianity — and that these are contradictory. In the rise of today’s “spiritual-but-not-religious” attitudes and in our renewed cultural openness to spirituality more broadly, Smith sees the resurgence of cultural paganism, with its “credal minimalism” and its valorizing of personal and physical self-improvement. It is these modern pagans that merit more examination. Given the scope and depth of Dominion, one hopes they might be the subject of another of Holland’s books, if not this one.

Tara Isabella Burton is a contributing editor at the American Interest, a columnist at Religion News Service, and the author of the forthcoming book Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World.