Dominion

Tom Holland, a British historian of the ancient world, opens Dominion with a vivid account of crucifixion in the Roman Empire, where slaves were nailed to crosses on the Esquiline Hill in Rome and left for vultures. Against this backdrop, Holland introduces his central thesis: that Christianity, born from the scandalous worship of a crucified criminal, became the most transformative force in Western history, and that its assumptions continue to saturate modern Western thought even among non-believers. He frames his project as tracing "the currents of Christian influence that have spread most widely, and been most enduring into the present day" (12). Holland confesses that his own youthful loss of faith, triggered by a children's Bible placing dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, gave way over decades to the realization that his moral instincts derived not from reason or human nature but from Christianity's transformation of Western civilization.

The book's first section establishes the pre-Christian world. Holland begins with the Persian Empire under Darius, the first great power to cast imperial rule as a cosmic battle between Truth and the Lie. He surveys Greek philosophy, from Aristotle's concept of a divine intelligence governing the cosmos to the Stoics' notion of natural law and conscience. Hierarchical assumptions permeated the ancient world; Aristotle's insistence that some were naturally fitted to command while others must obey typified attitudes Christianity would later overturn.

Holland then turns to Jerusalem, where Pompey's conquest in 63 BC brought Roman power into collision with Jewish monotheism. He traces the covenant between God and Abraham's descendants, the understanding of humans as created in God's image, and the messianic expectation that intensified under Roman occupation. A tension within Judaism between the exclusivity of the covenant and the universality of a Creator God set the stage for Christianity's emergence.

Paul of Tarsus, a Pharisee and strict adherent of Jewish law, resolved this tension with explosive force. After a dramatic conversion, Paul spent his life preaching that Christ's crucifixion had abrogated the exclusive Jewish covenant and that all peoples were now equally God's holy people through faith: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" (87). Holland presents Paul's letters as "the most influential, the most transformative, the most revolutionary ever written" (96). Paul fused Jewish morality with Greek philosophy, enshrining the concept of conscience at the heart of a new divine law written on the human heart and insisting that the body of every person was "a temple of the Holy Spirit" (100), granting dignity to slaves and prostitutes alike.

Holland traces how early Christians built institutional structures and defined orthodoxy. Irenaeus, a church leader in Gaul, championed a "catholic" (universal) Church with authority derived from apostolic succession and compiled a canon of scripture. Constantine's embrace of Christianity and the Council of Nicaea in 325 produced the first universal creed. Christianity's revolutionary concern for the poor receives extended treatment: Basil of Caesarea built what was effectively the first hospital; his brother Gregory of Nyssa called slavery an offense against God; their sister Macrina rescued abandoned infants from refuse tips. Martin of Tours, a former soldier who shared his cloak with a freezing beggar, became a new kind of hero admired for poverty rather than power.

Holland describes the development of monasticism as a bridge between the earthly and heavenly realms, with enclosed communities embodying the distinction between the sacred and the secular. He then turns to the rise of Islam in the seventh century, which swept across formerly Christian provinces in the Near East and North Africa, cutting the Latin West off from Christianity's ancient heartlands. The Qur'an denied the Trinity and the crucifixion, presenting Islam as the final revelation superseding both Judaism and Christianity.

The recovery of Christendom from Viking, Magyar, and Saracen attacks, Charlemagne's fusion of military conquest with mass education in Christian faith, and millennial hopes around the year 1033 set the stage for the Gregorian Reform, which Holland presents as the primal revolution of the West. Pope Gregory VII's prohibition against kings investing bishops and his excommunication of Emperor Henry IV established a decisive separation between church and state, generating the concept of the "secular" as a sphere distinct from the sacred. This revolution produced the first universities and the principle, codified in Gratian's Decretum around 1150, that natural law required recognition of human "rights" regardless of rank. Holland contends that the concept of human rights originated not in the Enlightenment but among medieval canon lawyers.

The reforming impulse also turned persecutory. Holland traces the Albigensian Crusade against suspected heretics in southern France, the establishment of the Inquisition, and the escalating persecution of Jews through blood libels and expulsions. He also examines how Christianity reshaped sexuality and gender: marriage as a sacrament requiring mutual consent weakened clan structures, while Paul's condemnation of same-sex relations created a new category of sexual behavior later codified as "sodomy."

The late medieval crisis expressed Christianity's enduring capacity for radical upheaval: Hussite revolutionaries in Bohemia established a communist community where all property was shared, while Columbus sailed west driven by apocalyptic expectations. Luther's Reformation is presented as both a revolutionary break and a continuation of Christianity's self-transforming nature. His theology of salvation by faith alone, or sola fide, his translation of the Bible into German, and the violent upheavals his revolution unleashed reshaped European politics. Calvin's transformation of Geneva into a model of Christian discipline proved especially influential, inspiring movements from the Dutch revolt to English Puritanism.

Holland argues that Christian assumptions continued to shape Western thought even as explicit belief declined. The Jesuit mission in China relied on astronomical expertise derived from a distinctively Christian tradition of natural philosophy. The English Civil War served as a laboratory for competing visions of freedom, with Oliver Cromwell pioneering religious liberty while Quakers pushed radical Protestant principles further still. Spinoza's philosophy, though seemingly a break with religion, was "a book that only a man utterly saturated in Protestant assumptions could ever have written" (377). Benjamin Lay, a Quaker activist, campaigned against slavery in a startling Christian repudiation of an institution most believers had always accepted.

The Enlightenment, Holland contends, was a mutation of Christianity rather than a departure from it. Voltaire's moral standards were "distinctively, peculiarly Christian" (394), the French Revolution's ideals derived from Christian traditions, and the British campaign against the slave trade fused Evangelical conviction with Enlightenment universalism. Holland traces how the Western concept of "religion" was exported globally: British officials in India invented "Hinduism" by imposing Protestant distinctions between religion and the secular onto a civilization that had no such categories. Secularism itself, Holland argues, is not neutral but distinctively Christian in origin.

Darwin's theory of evolution emerged from a Christian tradition of natural philosophy but destabilized assumptions about human dignity. Marx's critique of religion as "opium of the people" was itself saturated with Christian assumptions: his linear view of history, his vision of a classless paradise, and his moral outrage at exploitation all derived from biblical rather than economic sources. The twentieth century's catastrophes tested these convictions further. Nietzsche had warned that the death of God would leave human rights as "bleached and stranded relics" (464) of a retreating faith. The Nazi regime pursued the consequences of abandoning Christian morality to their extreme, while Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings offered a profoundly Christian response, insisting that true strength lay in willingness to surrender power.

Holland concludes by arguing that Christianity's influence persists in movements that define themselves as secular. Martin Luther King Jr. grounded the civil rights movement in Christ's command to love one's enemies. The end of apartheid in South Africa was "one of the great dramas of Christian history" (503). Angela Merkel's decision to welcome refugees and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's construction of border fences both drew on competing Christian traditions of charity and defense of Christendom. The #MeToo movement's insistence that every human body is sacred derived from Paul's teaching. Holland argues that humanism and secular liberalism ultimately rest on Christian foundations, and that the cross remains "the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution" (541), its audacity explaining Christianity's ongoing power to inspire transformation across cultures and centuries.