The ancient world was a place with very different values from the modern Western world. In the Heroic Age, gods were involved in the affairs of men, but they were capricious. The Greek and Roman gods raped whomever they wanted, and the heroes of Greece and Troy were tossed back and forth as their patron gods and goddesses involved themselves. Obviously, such mighty deities took no notice of poor people. Society needed to be on the good side of these capricious deities, and one could never really know where one stood in their favor, but over the years they had developed a set of sacrifices that had been known to be effective. Others, who less convinced in the gods, believed that Fortune determined events.

Like their gods, so their people. The Greek reward for valor in capturing a city was getting to rape the women, enslave the men, and plunder the city. Aristotle wrote that some people were born to be free and others born to be slaves, a statement that continued to be used as justification up to modern times. “In Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet.” (99) Babies that were wanted, especially those with birth defects, were exposed on the trash heaps to die. The right of the powerful to use people as tools for their own ends was taken for granted.

The Jews, however, thought differently. Their God had made a covenant with them—unheard of; what god binds himself with a covenant?—and not only that, but he treated them with love. He had given them a list of commandments and sacrifices, so they could know where the stood with him. They only gave him lip service and acted like all the other ancients, which they attributed the destruction of the Temple, but since Judaism derived from the written word, it survived. By the time of Christ, the loving covenant the Jews had with God was rather envied in the Mediterranean. This produced a tension: God was God of the whole world, but his covenant was only with a small group of people and had rather restrictive laws.

Christians entered this mix with the bonkers assertion that God came to earth and was crucified—the painful, ignominious death reserved for slaves and insurgents that served as a proclamation of Roman power and dominance. Christians said that this made all people equally children of God: male/female, slave/master, Jew/non-Jew. Paul notably also said that the laws of God are now written on our hearts through the Spirit, rather than in a written list. They saw the weakness of Christ as producing victory, not the mighty among men. Some explicitly rejected the material things—wealth, comfort, food—in their attempt to be like Christ, even celebrating dying for him. These values came to completely recreate the values of the Western world.

After Constantine the Empire discovered that, while common religious practice (the pagan rites) did not unify, common belief did. Furthermore, this belief rewired what virtue looked like. St. Basil built a large building to care for the poor, which also became the first hospital. His sister, St. Macrina, went around to the trash heaps looking for babies to adopt, because she said she saw the face of Christ in each one. Their brother, Gregory of Nyssa, condemned slavery, although everyone saw that as infeasible; even Basil said “how would the unintelligent provide for themselves?” Paulinus, a billionaire-equivalent and Senator, gave up his wealth and status to live as a poor hermit (although he did seem to always be able to give lots of money when a charitable cause came around). The virtue found its apex in St. Martin of Tours, who had given half his cloak to a cold beggar while he was still a soldier, and he lived in poverty as a hermit after resigning from the army. His was so widely seen as a spiritual athlete due to his asceticism that he was elected bishop of Tours (to the annoyance of the elites, especially other bishop candidates), and even afterwards did not live in the bishop’s residence but in a hut outside of town. Christianity so changed the face of virtue, that when Emperor Justinian tried to revive paganism, he had to tell the priests of once-revered Cybele to care for the poor, something that had never previously been a part of paganism.

Once the current and former areas of the Roman Empire had become Christian, and, considering the barbarians outside it unworthy of Christ, there was little missionary impulse. However, the Irish Christians (and their Anglo-Saxon brothers) came from a different cultural perspective. Not only was Irish Christianity extremely ascetic, and their spiritual “athleticism” inspired many people to join them, but they also were determined to take the Gospel to the Germanic tribes: “To experience hardship was the very point.” (203) A British scholar named Alcuin persuaded Charlemagne that converting the Germans by force was not what the gospel was about, and he also produced a relatively mass-produced, large-print, easy-to-use (capital letter, a proto-question mark, etc.) Bible so that priests would be educated and could instruct the people on how to live life, and not just be a sort of nobility.

By 1000 the Vikings, Germans, and Huns were no longer military threats and had become Christian. Many pagan kings found advantage in becoming Christian, not necessarily because they initially believed it, but because it provided access to trade (e.g. wealth), as well as knitting them into a long tradition of wisdom, culture, and meaning. The Church, however, was widely seen as corrupt, and starting around 1075, Pope Gregory VII instituted a number of reforms that resulted in the development of “Christendom”. He rejected the traditional right of kings to appoint bishops and said that the Church was separate from the saecula, the non-Church government. This essentially created the sacred/secular divide, with the Church seen as the shepherds of the sheep and the secular government as guards of the sheep against wolves and robbers. He increased the papal authority over kings, humbling the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. He also required priests to be celibate, with later Popes expecting priests to have, for instance, all forty of Gregory VII’s homilies memorized. Similarly, he said that there was no salvation outside the (Roman) Church.

Gregory’s successor, Urban II, created the Curia, due in part to a monk named Gratian, who took all the church councils (including local ones) and synthesized them into a coherent set of law, which became canon law. Many of the decisions were conflicting, and those that he could not resolve any other way, including using Roman Law which had recently been found in a newly discovered library, he used as his ultimate metric “love your neighbor as yourself” to make the decision. The resulting Decretum was used for canon law up until recently also formed a basis for many European laws, especially in Germany. When Martin Luther rejected papal primacy and jurisdiction of Church law, he did not have a different law to offer, so the princes modeled their codes of law on the existing canon law. One of the important results of canon law was that, for the first time in history, tradition was no longer primary and the law was expected to dispense justice equally to powerful and poor alike. Prior to this, it was just assumed that the law existed for the powerful, who got better justice than the weak.

There were several other important developments during this time. The scholar Peter Abelard insisted that doubt and inquiry was an important part of faith, which periodically put him at odds with the Church hierarchy. He created a list of the conflicting teachings of the Church Fathers, for instance, not because of lack of faith, but because he was trying to reconcile them. He and others also saw nature as reflecting God’s order and God’s laws, and therefore to study nature was to study God. Also around this time, while some monastics, particularly the friars who were out in the world, saw women as a source of temptation and sought to establish male authority over them to prevent this. But on the other hand, the Virgin Mary was highly honored, Jesus longed to take Jerusalem under his wings as a mother hen, and even monastic abbots compared themselves to mothers, giving the milk of doctrine to the monks in their charge.

Apparently Gregory’s reforms had not really succeeded. By the early 1200s the Church was seen as widely corrupt, and there was a widespread desire for holiness. Within the church, a growing number of people, including Pope Innocent III, felt the need to forcibly excise heresy, and created the Inquisition. He also sanctioned a Germany army that went around enthusiastically cleansing cities of heresies. How to tell who was a heretical and who was faithful? The papal legate, when asked at Béziers, said “Kill them all; God knows his own”. Not all holiness movements rebelled against the Church, however. St. Francis of Assisi, while he rejected his inheritance and worldly goods, living as a mendicant preaching about Christ, stayed within the church. Although he discomfited the Pope, the Pope did give him license to continue.

Problems continued. John Wycliffe (England) rejected papal supremacy, John Hus (Prague) also rejected the pope (but did not call him the antichrist). The communist (in a Christian, not Marxist, sense) Taborites maintained control of an in Germany for a few years, where all were equal. Conflict with the papacy and temporal leaders resulted in up to three popes at a given time. Things came to a climax with Martin Luther, whose readings of the Bible led him to realize that salvation comes through faith in Christ, not through the sacraments or through the Church. The Church could not go that far and excommunicated Luther, but many the German kingdoms generally supported Luther and tried to create a Christian government based on his thinking. As it turned out, many groups had not accepted the papacy’s primacy over the witness of the Spirit, and Luther lit a pre-existing powder train that exploded all over Europe.

John Calvin, on request, set up a religious governance system in Geneva, although he was clear going in that they would need to improve their behavior if they wanted him as pastor. He had no temporal authority, just the force of his sermons, but nonetheless had a large influence on the city. He thought that a Christian community needed four things: ministers to preach God’s word; teachers to instruct the youth; deacons to meet the needs of the poor; and presbyters, elders “elected to stand guard over the morals of the laity” (331). Something like 15% of the city was summoned before the presbyterian commission to explain things like lack of church attendance. This came to the Americas via the Puritans, who were disappointed that Dutch Calvinist Leiden was not pure enough (that is, too tolerant), and they set up New England as a model Christian society.

All the religious conflict resulted in several changes. First, toleration of other (Christian) beliefs became a Christian virtue. The warring German princes signed an agreement that Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists could worship freely. In England, the monarchy was abolished partly because the king was too tolerant, but the result was an explosion of new beliefs: anti-trinitarians, Baptists who rejected infant baptism, Quakers who thought that the inner Light superseded the Bible, Ranters who were more pantheistic. Even Cromwell supported some amount of tolerance, and did not enforce death penalties. In the American colonies, the Quaker colony of Philadelphia became a haven of tolerance (in contrast with intolerant New England, although even they were quickly required to be more moderate).

A second change was the increasing primacy of the voice of the Spirit. “It was Calvin himself who had proposed that true obedience to God should be grounded in liberty.” (375) Quakers explicitly placed the inner Light as more important than Scripture. Spinoza took Protestant arguments to their conclusion: if Church rites were just ceremony, and that popes had corrupted Jesus’s teachings, coupled with the Protestant disdain for miracles, then God’s laws are the natural order and God is the universe. The importance of inner conviction over external laws/commands has continued even to modern times, even as the Christian ethic has not. This emphasis on inner conviction rather than tradition, as all previous societies had done, is, in Holland’s view, an essential part of the Western, Christian value system.

As a result of being illuminated by the inner light, both Quaker Benjamin Lay, as well as the former (and earlier) Spanish colonist Las Casas, came to the conclusion that if all people are equally children of God, slavery was unconscionable, and both campaigned against it all their lives. Lay lived just long enough to see the Philadelpha (Quaker) Yearly Meeting vote to censor any Friends who owned slaves. Quakers were an important part of abolishing slavery in Britain in 1833 and, later, in the United States. Britain went so far as to use its navy to enforce a ban on slavery, and even to use it as a requirement for helping the Ottoman Sultan with his military/financial difficulties. Since the Qur’an/Sunna explicitly allows slavery, the Christian idea of the inner light, the spiritual meaning, trumping the letter of the law had to be imported into Islam, where, a century later it had taken firm root.

The sacred/secular divide had by this time resulted in the idea of “religion” being something that was a private choice, unrelated to the workings of government. This was not an idea that the rest of the world had, but European colonization ended up exporting it. For instance, Hindus in India had no concept of “Hinduism” as a “religion”. But the British citizens had given Parliament a mandate to eliminate the practice of suttee, of widows burning themselves on their husband’s funeral pyre. This was troublesome for the East India Company, which stayed out of “religious” issues in order to prevent conflict. Some Hindus were also opposed to the practice, and used the British idea of “religion” to their own ends, arguing that suttee was not originally part of “Hinduism” and had come in via corruptions. Thus, if it is not part of “Hinduism”, it isn’t “religious” and could be banned. So even though there was no indigenous idea of a “Hindu religion”, it got imported anyway.

Slightly earlier, the Enlightenment had tried to enthrone Reason in place of God and create human rights, with an imagined ancestry from Greek philosophy and government. However, the underlying thinking was completely Christian. Human rights were not self-evident to anyone without the Christian idea that all people are equally children of God. For example, the Marquis de Sade yearned to return to the Roman era so powerful men like himself could use subordinates for their own pleasure. Nietzsche saw more clearly and philosophically, contemptuous of the Enlightenment conceit that morality and ethics have any justification without a God to define them, and ridiculed the idea of “Greece as a land of sunny rationalism” (465). He predicted (correctly) that morality would have to become relative. None of this endeared him to Christianity, which he loathed, since he felt it held weakness as a virtue, while he revered strength, explicitly glorying in ancient Greece because of their cruelty.

Christianity has had direct influence on modern social progress. The abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s insistence on non-violent advocation for equal rights for Blacks, all are directly Christian. Holland observes that modern efforts at a non-Christian ethic and morality have also been deeply rooted in Christian thinking. Andrew Carnegie, for example, tried to better society through Science. But the idea of a linear time and progress towards an ideal end are deeply Christian; Greece, Rome, and China all had a cyclical view of time. Progress is a Christian idea. Even Science came from Christian ideas of linear time (no progressive evolution in cyclical time) and the essential ordered nature of the universe (done by God, rather than by the actions of capricious gods or forces) and therefore understandable. Twentieth century radical Frantz Fanon, when asked what de-colonization looked like quoted Jesus: “the last shall become first”. Progressive homosexual values derive from Krafft-Ebbing’s psychiatric studies from which he concluded that homosexuality was not deliberate sin but rather an innate condition; if that is true, then love and concern is a very Christian approach to the situation. Even the definition of homosexuality as same sex attraction rather than acting in a feminine position, was first articulated by Paul. And while the Sexual Revolution attempted to roll back sexual restrictions that Christianity had enforced for two millenia, the #MeToo movement was essentially arguing for their return: women have equal value to powerful men and consent is required.

In Dominion, Tom Holland writes a lengthy story of the process of going from ancient pagan values to modern Western values, which he does by taking pivotal time periods and tangentially swinging from story to story, occasionally giving some commentary on his thesis. Along the way you encounter major figures in Western Christian history that are not commonly referenced, as well as interesting contextual perspectives that are hard to come by reading more clinical sources. However, while the stories are interesting and engaging, the focus on stories obscures the thesis. If you want a pop history of the Christian development of the West this a solid choice. However, if you would like an answer to “How the Christian Revolution Remade the World”, the book is about 300 pages too long and uses the wrong format. Each chapter only has a total of about one page’s worth (at most) of discussion on the topic. The rest is stories that illuminate the historical context but do not serve to answer the question asked by the subtitle. If you want that question answered, listen to any of the YouTube interviews of Holland with regard to his book, such as Socrates in the City’s interview, you will save yourself 15 or 20 hours.


Review: 5
The stories are engaging, interesting, and give useful historical context. But the book does a poor job of explaining what the Christian revolution actually changed, in favor of personal stories.
▶ Notes

Copyright © 2025 by Geoffrey Prewett