In 2016 Tom Holland (b. 1968) stood in the wreckage of Sinjar, a Yazidi town in northern Iraq that the Islamic State had held for over a year. He was there with a Channel 4 crew, filming a documentary on the religious roots of ISIS violence. He had spent two decades writing about Rome, and he knew what conquering armies do to captured towns. The rubble did not surprise him. He walked through desecrated churches and saw that what had drawn the occupiers’ rage was the cross. ISIS crucified men in its public squares and posted the photographs. Holland had described the crucifixion of Jesus in print many times. Standing there, he understood that the symbol carried a meaning for the Islamic State that it no longer carried for him or for anyone he knew. It meant, he recalled thinking, the same thing it had meant to Rome: the right of the strong to torture to death anyone who defied them. The cross there, he said in a later lecture, “did not have the significance it did for me.” He flew home and rewrote the opening of the book he was drafting. That book became Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (2019).
Holland grew up in Broad Chalke, a Wiltshire village near Salisbury and its cathedral spire, the son of an atheist father and a churchgoing mother. As a boy he loved dinosaurs and Caesars for the same reasons: glamour, danger, extinction. Reading the Bible, he sided with Goliath and Pharaoh and Pontius Pilate, the big and the strong, against the scruffy Israelites and their crucified rabbi. He wrote vampire novels in his twenties, then found his trade with Rubicon (2003) and Persian Fire (2005), narrative histories of Rome and the Greco-Persian wars that sold in numbers academic historians do not see. He translated Herodotus for Penguin. He co-hosts The Rest Is History with Dominic Sandbrook (b. 1974), a podcast that fills the Albert Hall. He plays village cricket. He attends a 900-year-old Anglican church in central London without professing the creed recited there. His position in British letters is the position Dominion argues everyone in the West occupies: inside the church without believing a word of it.
The book runs to over 500 pages in three parts, Antiquity, Christendom, Modernitas, twenty-one chapters, each opening on a date and a place. 479 BC: The Hellespont. AD 19: Galatia. 1967: Abbey Road. The method is cinematic. Each chapter drops the reader into a scene, then pulls back to show what led there. Holland builds his argument through portraits rather than doctrinal exposition: Paul on the road, Origen mutilating himself for heaven, Gregory VII humbling an emperor in the snow at Canossa, Luther at Worms, Darwin at Down House, Nietzsche collapsing in Turin, the Beatles recording a song whose title states a Pauline doctrine as a pop hook. Terry Eagleton (b. 1943), reviewing the book in the Guardian, granted Holland the talents of a novelist: narrative gift, dramatic sense, an ear for the rhythm of a sentence. The judgment holds. Few histories of moral philosophy contain a collective of medieval Parisian prostitutes offering to fund a stained-glass window of the Virgin at Notre Dame.
The thesis rests on the crucifixion, and Holland works hard to restore its horror. Consider the scene from the Roman side, as the book asks the reader to do. A landowner leaves the city by the main road and passes the crosses set up along it. The men nailed there are slaves, rebels, pirates, provincial troublemakers. The birds have been at them. The landowner does not look away in shame, because there is no shame in it for him. The spectacle confirms the order of his world. Power displays itself on the bodies of the powerless, and the gods favor the strong. He goes home to a house staffed by human beings he may use as he likes, and no philosopher he has read tells him he is a bad man. This was the moral universe of antiquity, and Holland’s first achievement is to make the reader feel how far away it sits. Pagan Rome was not a liberal society in togas. The scandal of a crucified god was total. To proclaim a man executed as a slave the Lord of the universe inverted every value a Roman held.
Paul of Tarsus (d. c. 64) carries the inversion outward. By insisting that the distinctions of Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female no longer fixed a soul’s worth, he planted a universalism the ancient world had lacked. Holland does not claim Christian societies then freed their slaves or their women. His claim is subtler and stronger: Christianity lodged premises in the Western mind that reformers could turn against every institution built in Christ’s name. The pattern repeats across the book. Medieval radicals, abolitionists, suffragists, civil rights preachers, secular human rights lawyers: each identifies innocent sufferers, arraigns the powerful, and demands repentance. Each deploys a structure of feeling that is recognizably Christian, whether or not God appears in the brief. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) quoted Amos; the drafters of the Universal Declaration did not, yet Holland finds the same fingerprints on their work.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) stands behind the argument as its dark godfather. Nietzsche saw what Holland sees: modern egalitarianism is the victory of a slave revolt in morals, the triumph of the crucified over the aristocratic values of antiquity. The freethinkers of Europe had thrown out God and kept His ethics, and Nietzsche despised them for the inconsistency. Holland accepts the genealogy and refuses the sneer. Where Nietzsche mourned the blond beast, Holland notes that a modern Westerner recoils from torture and racial supremacy because two thousand years of Christianity trained his reflexes. In a 2016 New Statesman essay that previewed the book, Holland wrote that in his morals he had learned to accept he was no Greek or Roman at all, but “thoroughly and proudly Christian.” The formulation is careful. It concedes nothing about God. It concedes everything about inheritance.
Reception broke along predictable lines. Tim Keller (1950-2023) told his readers the book’s importance was hard to overstate; pastors began citing it from pulpits. Ross Douthat (b. 1979) commended it in the New York TimesJohn Gray (b. 1948), no Christian, praised in the New Statesman its “devastating demolition job” on the sacred history of secular humanism. Tim O’Neill, an atheist who runs the History for Atheists site, found most of it sound and watched with amusement as fellow unbelievers reached for eighteenth-century myths to fend it off. Ayaan Hirsi Ali (b. 1969) later named Holland an influence on her conversion. A book by an agnostic became an instrument of Christian apologetics, which should give its admirers pause, since the author never argues that Christianity is true. He argues that it won.
The strongest objections come from historians who accept much of the story and balk at its reach. Samuel Moyn (b. 1972), reviewing the book in the Financial Times, praised the panoramic survey of how disruptive Christianity was, then observed that the conquest becomes so total “it explains everything and nothing.” The objection has teeth. If liberalism, socialism, feminism, secularism, the scientific revolution, and the sexual revolution are all Christianity, the category has stopped excluding anything, and a thesis that excludes nothing cannot be tested. The Economist put the same point in three words: correlation is not causation. Christianity pervaded Europe for fifteen centuries before the abolition of slavery; it also pervaded Europe during fifteen centuries of slavery, serfdom, crusade, and pogrom. A framework present on both sides of every transformation explains none of them without more argument than Holland supplies.
A second objection concerns the ledger. Peter Thonemann, in the Wall Street Journal, saw in the book a postulated golden thread of “Nice Christianity,” with everything humane in modernity credited to the faith’s essence and everything cruel in Christendom’s record filed as betrayal. The asymmetry runs through the book. When Christians build hospitals, Christianity built them. When Christians burn heretics, Christians failed Christianity. A rigorous history must explain why the same scriptures and the same institutions generated both, and for the same reasons. Slaveholders quoted Philemon; abolitionists quoted Galatians. Both were reading the book Christianity canonized. Holland knows this, and his closing pages concede that Christians brought persecution and slavery in their wake while insisting the standards that condemn them remain Christian. The concession is elegant. It is also unfalsifiable.
A third objection concerns debts. Christianity did not invent its moral capital from nothing. The dignity of the person made in God’s image, the God who hears the cry of the slave, the prophets who set the widow, the orphan, and the stranger against the king: this is the Hebrew Bible, centuries before Paul. Amos thundered against those who trample the poor; Micah asked what the Lord requires and answered justice and mercy. Greek Stoicism had already taught a natural law binding Greek and barbarian, slave and free. Roman jurisprudence, Enlightenment argument, and commercial society each added load-bearing walls to the structure Holland calls Christian. He acknowledges the sources and then lets the drama of the cross absorb them, so that Judaism figures mostly as prelude and Athens as foil. A reader could finish the book without registering that the moral revolution Holland assigns to Golgotha was in large part a Jewish inheritance carried to the gentiles by a Jew who never stopped thinking of himself as one.
The last objection is philosophical rather than historical. Origins do not settle validity. Even if human rights descend from Christian theology by an unbroken chain, it might still be the case that rational agency, reciprocity, or the conditions of social cooperation can now bear their weight. Genealogy embarrasses the secular humanist who thought his values self-evident; it does not refute him. Holland demonstrates that the water we swim in flowed from a Christian spring. Whether the water requires the spring to keep flowing is a question the book raises and cannot answer, because no history can.
What remains after the objections is considerable. Dominion forces a recognition that few readers escape: secular progressive morality is a local product with a birthplace and a birth certificate, not the default setting of the species. The instinct that the victim deserves the center of the story, that the strong owe justification, that every life weighs the same in the scale: these are inheritances, and most of the ancient world would have found them absurd. The book performs its argument in its reception. Atheists and evangelicals fought over it using identical moral vocabulary, each certain the other had betrayed the weak, each deploying the rhetoric of the crucified against the crucifiers. Nietzsche might have laughed.
Holland began in Sinjar, and the book earns its opening. He stood where men had been crucified in the twenty-first century by soldiers who saw in the act what Rome saw: proof of dominion. The distance between that reading of the cross and his own, he realized, was the distance Christianity had moved the world. Measuring that distance with exactness may be beyond any historian. Showing that it exists, and that those who deny it are standing on it, is what Dominion does. That is enough to make it necessary reading, for believers who want to know what their faith wrought, and for unbelievers who want to know where they got their conscience.
Biography
It is a few minutes past midnight on Christmas morning, 2021. In the priory church of St Bartholomew the Great, the oldest church in London, the candles burn against Norman stone that has stood since the twelfth century. Incense hangs in the air. The congregation files out into Smithfield, where for centuries the city burned its heretics. One man stays behind. He is fifty-three years old, a bestselling historian, the co-host of the most popular history podcast in the world, and he carries in his body a cancer diagnosis less than a month old. Doctors have told him the operation may leave him incontinent and infertile, and the Omicron wave has swamped the hospitals so badly that no one can tell him how far the disease has spread. He walks to the Lady Chapel, the one spot in London where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared, and he does something he has not done since he was ten years old. He kneels and prays. He later recalls his reasoning in the idiom of a man hedging a bet: “I might as well give it a go!”
The man is Tom Holland (b. January 5, 1968), and the scene compresses his career into a single image. He spent decades writing about people for whom the supernatural was as real as weather, first as a Gothic novelist, then as a narrative historian of Rome, Persia, Christendom, and early Islam. He wrote Dominion, the book that argued the modern West remains Christian in its bones whether it believes or not. And now, stripped of health and certainty, he tested his own thesis on his knees. Within weeks, further examination reversed the diagnosis. No surgery was needed. Holland concedes that the sequence proves nothing to a skeptic. His brother had put him in touch with a specialist. Coincidence explains it as well as grace. But the experience moved him, and he has joked since that if the Virgin Mary answered the prayer of a self-described Protestant agnostic, then “God must have a sense of humour.”
Broad Chalke
Holland grew up in Broad Chalke, a village in the chalk country near Salisbury in Wiltshire, the elder of two sons. His father was an atheist. His mother, Janet Holland, a devout Anglican, took the boys to church. His younger brother, James Holland (b. 1970), became a historian of the Second World War. The village gave Holland a childhood in which the past lay on the surface of the land: churches, barrows, fossils in the chalk, and eight miles away the tallest spire in England.
The formative scene of his intellectual life took place in Sunday school when he was six. He opened a children’s Bible and found, on its first page, an illustration of Adam and Eve standing beside a brachiosaur. The boy knew his dinosaurs. He knew no human being had ever seen a sauropod. The teacher did not care about the error, and Holland has said the shock planted the first shadow of doubt across his childhood faith. The two obsessions that would govern his imagination were already in place. Dinosaurs came first. Ancient empires followed, and in his own telling the appeal was identical: both were glamorous, dangerous, and extinct. Splendor and terror, available only through fragments. The faith receded as the empires advanced. By his teens he had absorbed the Enlightenment verdict handed down through Edward Gibbon (1737-1794): that Christianity had smothered the color of the classical world and ushered in an age of credulity. He pictured Athens and Rome as blue sky and sunlight on temples, and the coming of Christianity as a gray autumn day, like returning to school after the summer holidays.
He attended Chafyn Grove preparatory school in Salisbury, then Canford School in Dorset, then Queens’ College, Cambridge, where he read English rather than history or classics. The choice shaped everything that followed. He took a double first, concentrating on Virgil (70-19 BC) and the English Romantic poets. Virgil gave him a model of history as tragedy, empire, and loss. Byron (1788-1824) gave him ruined grandeur and dangerous charisma. Holland began a doctorate at Oxford on Byron and abandoned it. He was, he later said, fed up with universities and fed up with being poor. Queens’ eventually elected him an honorary fellow, the academy’s way of embracing a man who had declined to join it.
One more thing happened at Cambridge. On his first day in 1986 he met a woman named Sadie. They were friends for years before they became a couple. They married in 1993. She trained as a midwife, and they have two daughters. Holland has called her his best friend and credits her with steadying him through the lean years when he was trying to become a writer and failing at the kind of writer he wanted to be.
The vampire years
Holland wanted to be a great novelist. His first book, The Vampyre (1995), published in America as Lord of the Dead, converted his abandoned doctoral research into Gothic fiction: Byron as a literal vampire. A sequel, Supping with Panthers (1996), moved between Victorian Britain and India. Attis (1996), Deliver Us from Evil (1997), and Sleeper in the Sands (1998) kept mixing historical settings with horror and religious myth. His last novel, The Bone Hunter (1999), dropped the supernatural for a thriller built on the rivalry between the American fossil hunters Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897) and Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899). The dinosaurs of Broad Chalke had returned for a curtain call.
The novels sold modestly and reviewed respectably. Robert Macfarlane (b. 1976) praised Sleeper in the Sands as high adventure ballasted with serious research. But the career Holland had imagined never arrived, and he came to a hard verdict on himself: he had wanted to be a great novelist and discovered he was not one. The limitation was not prose. It was that his imagination fed on vanished societies rather than on the psychological texture of contemporary life. He did not want to invent people from nothing. He wanted to resurrect people who had lived inside moral worlds different from his own.
The failure paid dividends. Ten years of fiction taught him pace, scene construction, character introduction, and suspense across four hundred pages. He gave up vampires and kept the Gothic. His histories return again and again to blood, ruins, ritual, plague, mutilation, apocalyptic expectation, and the collapse of worlds, and this is method rather than decoration. Holland holds that premodern people experienced existence through physical terror and metaphysical intensity, and that a history which smooths this away falsifies its subject.
Rubicon
While researching The Bone Hunter, Holland read From Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age by Peter Green (1924-2024), and the book rekindled his appetite for antiquity. He had no doctorate in history, no academic post, and no prospect of one. He had Latin, self-taught Greek in progress, and a decade of learning how to make a reader turn pages.
Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (2003) made him. The book narrated the republic’s destruction through Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Crassus, Cicero, Caesar, and Augustus. It won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. The Guardian called it a model of how popular classical history should be written. Holland refused the convention of republican Rome as a dignified constitutional seminar. His Rome was a violent aristocratic society organized around competition for glory, command, family prestige, and the humiliation of enemies, and its institutions failed because successful commanders accumulated loyalties on a scale the constitution could not contain.
Rubicon fixed the pattern of his mature work. Take a familiar story. Strip out hindsight. Restore the uncertainty of the people living through it, for whom Caesar’s victory was never inevitable and the republic’s collapse was a sequence of contingent choices made by men who believed they were restoring ancestral liberty. Persian Fire (2005) applied the method to the Persian wars and won the Runciman Award. Holland presented the Achaemenid Empire as a political achievement of the first rank rather than a mere oriental menace, while keeping the drama of the divided Greek cities facing it. He wanted the reader to feel both the magnificence of Persia and the vulnerability of Greece, and he saw no contradiction in the double sympathy.
Trouble
Millennium (2008) carried him from antiquity into the centuries around the year 1000, when Viking and Magyar invasions, papal ambition, and imperial politics forged Latin Christendom. Religion here stops being one element in a political story and becomes the grammar through which medieval people understood legitimacy, kingship, sin, and catastrophe.
Then came the fight. In the Shadow of the Sword (2012) examined the collapse of Roman and Persian power in the Near East and the rise of Islam, drawing on revisionist scholarship associated with Patricia Crone (1945-2015) to question the reliability of the traditional Islamic sources, most of which postdate Muhammad by generations. Holland asked why the early Arab conquests left so little contemporary documentation of the faith that supposedly drove them, and he suggested the origins of Islam might lie closer to Syria–Palestine than to Mecca.
The academy answered through Glen Bowersock (b. 1936), the Princeton historian of the Roman Levant, who reviewed the book in the Guardian on May 4, 2012. From Bowersock’s side of the desk, the case looked simple. Here was a man with no Arabic, no Syriac, no acquaintance with decades of scholarship on pre-Islamic Arabia, ignoring recent South Arabian inscriptions and early Qur’an manuscripts, and selling a Dan Brown thesis to a mass audience on the strength of his prose. Holland replied in the same paper three days later, arguing that the origins of Islam deserved the same critical scrutiny long applied to Christianity and Judaism, and that closing the question by credential was its own kind of failure. Ziauddin Sardar (b. 1951) wrote in the New Statesman that the book flattered a rising Islamophobia. Richard Miles, in the Financial Times, found it exhilarating and asked the hard question from the other side: if early Islamic history is fabricated, how did bitterly opposed Sunni and Shia communities converge on the same fabrication?
The Channel 4 documentary Islam: The Untold Story followed, and with it abuse, death threats, police involvement, and a cancelled public screening. The episode displayed both faces of Holland’s position outside the university. He could bring an obscure scholarly dispute before millions. And the confidence that television and narrative demand could make contested arguments sound settled. He never retracted the book. He has said since that Islam enriches British intellectual life, and that his quarrel was with the exemption of one religion from historical method, not with its adherents.
The emperors
Dynasty (2015) returned to Rome and the Julio-Claudians, from Augustus to Nero. Its theme was the theater of power. Augustus built a monarchy that could not call itself one, preserving republican offices while gathering everything into his hands, and his heirs inherited immense authority with no honest vocabulary for exercising it. Holland’s imperial court runs on rumor, family rivalry, sexual accusation, and terror, with ceremony deployed to disguise domination. The classicist Emily Wilson (b. 1971) attacked the book’s lurid reliance on hostile ancient gossip, arguing that Holland converted uncertain stories into confident portraits and turned Roman history into imperial soap opera. The criticism named the standing risk of his method. The more completely he resurrects a dead man, the easier the reader forgets how thin and compromised the evidence is.
Pax (2023) completed a Roman trilogy, running from the civil wars after Nero through the Flavians, Trajan, and Hadrian. The title carried the paradox Holland likes best. The Roman peace was real, and it rested on conquest, slavery, exemplary punishment, and the standing threat of massacre.
He also worked the texts. His translation of Herodotus (c. 484-c. 425 BC) appeared in 2013, preserving the historian’s expansive, oral, storytelling quality. In 2025 Penguin Classics published his translation of Suetonius (c. 69-after 122), The Lives of the Caesars, which became the first hardback nonfiction Penguin Classic to enter the Sunday Times bestseller chart. Holland joked that Suetonius had waited two thousand years for the honor. The status detail is worth pausing on. A Penguin Classic is the format in which the English-speaking world certifies a text as permanent; a bestseller chart is the format in which it certifies a text as alive. Holland put a Roman gossip-biographer on both lists at once, and the engine that did it was a podcast.
Dominion
Dominion is the book on which Holland’s long-term reputation will likely rest. Its question is why modern Westerners hold certain values to be self-evident. Why should every human life carry equal worth? Why should the strong owe duties to the weak? Why does suffering confer moral authority? Holland’s answer: these convictions are neither universal instincts nor Greek and Roman inheritances. They are the residue of a Christian revolution so successful that its beneficiaries no longer see it.
The symbol at the center is the cross. Rome crucified slaves, rebels, and the contemptible; the punishment advertised the victim’s powerlessness and the state’s supremacy. Christianity took the image of a tortured man and called it God. The reversal rewired the moral imagination of the civilizations it touched. Weakness could carry dignity. The victim could judge the victor. After Jesus, the pivotal figure in Holland’s account is Paul, whose declaration that the distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female were overcome in Christ loaded a universal charge into every later hierarchy.
Christianity did not abolish slavery or empire; its institutions sanctified both for centuries. Holland’s claim is subtler. The faith placed every arrangement of power under permanent moral pressure by setting standards its own societies kept failing. Reformers condemned rich churches in the name of Christ. Abolitionists attacked Christian empires with the equality of souls. In Holland’s genealogy, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, socialism, feminism, humanitarianism, and the modern sympathy for victims all run on Christian fuel, whatever their builders believed. Secular movements keep the structure of sin and repentance, witness and conversion, a coming transformation of the world.
He had announced the thesis in personal form three years earlier. In a New Statesman essay of September 2016, “Why I Was Wrong About Christianity,” he described how prolonged immersion in antiquity had estranged him from it. Sparta practiced a murderous eugenics and trained its young to kill helots by night. Caesar was reported to have killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more. What shocked him was less the cruelty than the absence of any sense that the poor or the weak had intrinsic value, and he concluded that in his morals and ethics he was not Greek or Roman at all but “thoroughly and proudly Christian.” The Enlightenment’s founding conceit, that it owed nothing to the faith of its founders, had become unsustainable to him.
Two men and two microphones
In 2020 Holland and Dominic Sandbrook (b. 1974) launched The Rest Is History, produced by Goalhanger, the company founded by the footballer Gary Lineker (b. 1960). Holland’s brother James, already podcasting on the Second World War, helped open the door; Holland suggested Sandbrook as co-host.
The pairing works on difference. Both men went to public school; Sandbrook then went to Oxford, Holland to Cambridge, and the podcast wrings twenty-five years of comedy from the distinction. Holland lives in antiquity, religion, martyrdom, and sacred terror. Sandbrook is a modernist of postwar Britain and America who answers Holland’s apocalyptic enthusiasms with pragmatic deflation. On the page Holland commands; behind the microphone he plays the enthusiast, the impersonator, the provocateur, and the target of Sandbrook’s mockery, and the dialogue exposes uncertainty that authoritative prose conceals. In one episode Holland instructs his partner, with mock grandeur, that they must not speak in abstract nouns, and the line doubles as the show’s editorial policy. They do their own research, release episodes at a pace that alarms their peers, and hold to human will over systemic outcome. Asked to explain the show’s reach, Sandbrook gave Apple a creed in one sentence: “We don’t moralize, we don’t judge the past.”
The numbers rearranged the economics of public history. By late 2025 the show drew more than 20 million monthly downloads and views, with a paying membership club, bestselling spinoff books, international arena tours, and a television adaptation in development. In December 2025 Apple named it the 2025 Podcast Show of the Year, the first non-American program to win. On July 4 and 5, 2026, the hosts held the first Rest Is History Club Festival at Hampton Court Palace, with invited historians, performances, and reenactments: a subscription audience gathering in a Tudor palace to celebrate a podcast, a sentence no cultural economist of 2019 could have written. The model has costs. Two long episodes a week reward grand narratives and vivid individuals over subjects that resist dramatization. But the achievement stands. Two middle-aged Englishmen persuaded a global audience, more than half of it under thirty-five, to listen voluntarily to eight-part series on Custer and the Anglo-Saxons.
The cloak and the tomb
Holland’s drift toward Christianity became institutional in his late fifties. He is a trustee of the British Museum, appointed in March 2025, and sits on the board of the British Library. Then the church itself began collecting him.
On the evening of June 2, 2025, at Evensong in Salisbury Cathedral, the Bishop of Salisbury installed four new lay canons into the College of Canons. Holland took his place in the Coombe and Harnham stall of the quire as the cathedral’s first Canon Historian, the first such post in any English cathedral. The Dean, Nicholas Papadopulos, praised his erudition and range and welcomed home a son of Wiltshire. Holland’s own account of the evening, posted to his followers, ran closer to the six-year-old in Broad Chalke than to the trustee of the British Museum: “I even got to wear a cloak!” The same week he examined the thirteenth-century Sarum Master Bible, newly returned to the cathedral after a fundraising campaign bought it at Sotheby’s for 90,000 pounds.
Durham followed. On May 25, 2026, at festal Evensong for the feast of the Venerable Bede (c. 673-735), Durham Cathedral inaugurated Holland as its first Bede Librarian, an honorary post created to champion the cathedral’s archives and the legacy of the monk whose bones lie in its Galilee Chapel. Holland framed the appointment as the closing of a circuit: “Bede is the father of English history,” and here was an English historian honored in the church where he lies buried. The next evening more than 700 people filled the cathedral to hear him speak on Cuthbert (c. 634-687), Bede, and the renewal of culture.
None of this makes him a churchman. It makes him a steward. Cathedrals concentrate what Holland has spent a career arguing: that the past is physically present, that worship, architecture, music, and memory belong together, and that the question facing such buildings is whether they remain living centers of meaning or decay into museums of a civilization that has forgotten why it built them.
His personal position remains suspended, and the suspension is the point. He calls himself a cultural Christian, a Protestant agnostic, a man stranded in the shadowlands between faith and despair. Since researching Dominion he has worshiped regularly at St Bartholomew the Great, the church of the Christmas prayer. He told an interviewer in late 2025 that he still lacks belief in the supernatural and feels the lack as an ache, adding that if belief ever came it could only come as Christianity; he was not going to start sacrificing to Athena. The clearest reading of his condition may belong to his mother. Asked in 2026 whether her son is a Christian, Janet Holland, then ninety-two, answered without hesitation: “Yes, I do. But he never quite acknowledges it, does he?”
What is coming
Holland’s next major book, The New Reformation, is scheduled for 2027 from Abacus in Britain and Basic Books in the United States. It will run a line from the Protestant Reformation to the revolutions of the 1960s, arguing that modern radicalism continues Christianity’s capacity for moral self-criticism rather than breaking with it. The project extends Dominion while narrowing its aperture to Protestantism, conscience, and authenticity. The ambition places him near an older tradition of civilizational history, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) and R. H. Tawney (1880-1962), though Holland is less systematic and less confessional than either. The nearer ancestor is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), whose genealogy of morals Holland has in effect inverted: where Nietzsche traced Christian values to slave resentment and called for their overcoming, Holland traces them to the cross and asks the West to notice what it might be discarding. A joint book with Sandbrook, A History of the World in 51 Heroes and Villains, arrives in September 2026 and examines the instability of historical reputation.
The ledger
Holland still bowls medium-slow for the Authors XI, a cricket team of British writers, and once took a batting masterclass from his hero Alastair Cook (b. 1984) for the Financial Times. Cricket suits him: a game structured by ritual, statistics, inherited memory, and an acute awareness of time. He has kept the fossils, the churches, the sacred music, and the dinosaurs.
His strengths and his risks are the same faculty seen from two sides. He connects theology to politics, ritual to hierarchy, and ancient assumptions to modern conflict at a scale few working historians attempt, and he restores strangeness where most popularizers manufacture familiarity. The cost is that narrative coherence smooths jagged evidence, that a novelist’s confidence makes conjecture read like observation, and that centuries of argument get compressed into single vivid careers. Bowersock, Wilson, and the Economist each caught it. The opposite fault is fragmentation, the specialist so absorbed in correcting details that no one is left to say what the details mean, and Holland’s career is a wager that the public’s demand for orientation is legitimate and that someone competent had better meet it.
His significance can be stated without the thesis of Dominion being conceded. He rebuilt the market for serious narrative history, moved it into subscription audio, and put translations of Herodotus and Suetonius into bestseller charts. And he forced a large modern readership to sit with a question most of it had never been asked. The values Westerners treat as the natural furniture of the mind, equal dignity, the authority of the victim, the duty of the strong to the weak, did not fall from the sky. They were made, slowly, at cost, by a particular history, and much of that history is Christian. A man who began with a brachiosaur in the Garden of Eden ended kneeling in a Lady Chapel, unsure whether anyone was listening, certain that the kneeling itself had a history, and that he had written it.
Notes
Salisbury installation, June 2, 2025, stall name, Dean’s remarks: Salisbury Cathedral; and the cloak line plus Sarum Bible detail: Salisbury & Avon Gazette.
Durham inauguration, May 25, 2026, the Bede quote, the 700-person lecture: Durham Cathedral and Yahoo News UK.
Cancer diagnosis, midnight mass, the prayer, “give it a go,” reversal: Christian Evidence, plus The Spectator, the “sense of humour” line, and the CNN Easter 2026 profile with the surgery details, the brother’s specialist, and his mother Janet’s quote.
The 2016 essay, Sparta and Caesar passage, “thoroughly and proudly Christian”: Tom Holland, “Why I was wrong about Christianity,” New Statesman.
Bowersock review and Holland’s reply, plus Sardar and Miles: In the Shadow of the Sword, whose Wikipedia entry links all three primary reviews.
Apple Show of the Year, first non-US winner, Sandbrook‘s “we don’t moralize” line: Apple Podcasts naming The Rest Is History the 2025 Show of the Year.
20 million downloads, Hampton Court festival dates: The Rest Is History and Supporting Cast.
General career, cricket, Cook masterclass, wife and daughters, the “abstract nouns” episode reference, dinosaur quote: Wikipedia, Tom Holland, and the New Statesman appreciation that cites episode 557.
Extrapolations without links, all self-evident from place or profession: the candles and incense at a midnight mass in a Norman church, Smithfield‘s history as an execution ground, the chalk landscape of Broad Chalke, what a Penguin Classic signifies, and cricket’s ritual character. One judgment call to flag: the Nietzsche inversion in the “What is coming” section is my framing, though Holland himself has discussed Nietzsche as the thinker who saw Christianity’s genealogy most clearly. The Wilson and Economist criticisms are paraphrased.
If John Mearsheimer is right in his anthropology, then Tom Holland’s central project in Dominion becomes a study of how a single, powerful “value infusion” fundamentally rewired the tribal instincts of Western man.
Holland argues that the modern, secular West—including its obsession with human rights, its egalitarianism, and its emphasis on the individual—is not the product of rational evolution or historical inevitability. Instead, he contends these values are the direct, historical descendants of the Christian revolution.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology provides a stark lens for this thesis. If humans are tribal beings who are socialized into a moral code long before their critical faculties develop, then the massive, centuries-long process of Christian proselytization was not just a change in religion; it was a total override of the existing tribal software of the Roman and Germanic worlds. Holland describes a transformation that is not intellectual, but visceral — a new way of feeling and being that eventually became the default environment for Westerners.
For Holland, this means his own “secular” values are not neutral, universal truths reached through reason, but the deeply ingrained tribal code of his specific culture. Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that Holland cannot stand outside his own history to assess it. He is a product of this long, intense socialization, just as much as his Victorian ancestors or the medieval monks he writes about.
If Mearsheimer is right, then the “liberal dreams” Holland critiques are not merely mistakes—they are the inevitable moral conclusions of a tribe that has been socialized to value the underdog, the martyr, and the individual. These values are not “rational” in the sense of being pragmatic or biologically optimal for group survival; they are the result of a profound, non-rational value infusion that occurred over two millennia.
The friction Holland explores in his work arises because the West is trying to live by a code that demands universal human rights—a code that contradicts the older, more primal tribal instinct to prioritize one’s own group. Mearsheimer would argue that Westerners are in a constant state of internal conflict: they are socialized by their Christian-inflected culture to act as universalists, but they are biologically wired to act as tribalists.
In this context, Holland’s work is a diagnosis of why the West finds itself in such a precarious state. He maps the “value infusion” that created the modern Western man, while Mearsheimer maps the hard-wired, tribal reality that Western man is now struggling to ignore. If Mearsheimer is correct, Holland is documenting the slow-motion collision between a learned moral identity and our underlying human nature.
Applying David Pinsof’s framework to the historian Tom Holland reveals him not as a man trying to cure a “misunderstanding” of the past, but as a strategist navigating a competitive intellectual landscape.
The mainstream view of Holland is that he is an educator. When he writes books like Dominion, the perception is that he wants to correct the modern misunderstanding of how Christianity shaped the West. He wants readers to see that their secular, liberal values are not self-evident truths, but are instead the inheritance of a Christian evolution. Critics often debate whether he gets the history “right” or if he is biased toward a specific cultural narrative.
Pinsof’s essay suggests that this entire debate over his “accuracy” misses the point.
Holland is not a historian driven by a pure, disinterested desire to solve the puzzle of Western civilization. He is an animal operating in the high-stakes marketplace of contemporary intellectual status. His work provides a service: it offers his readers — many of whom are traditionalists or conservatives — a coherent, status-enhancing account of their own origins. In a culture where their values are under constant assault, Holland gives them the intellectual armor they need to feel superior to their rivals.
His focus on the “Christian roots” of liberalism is a savvy tactical move. By re-centering the narrative, he positions himself as the only one who truly understands the “hidden” logic of modern society. This establishes his authority. When he engages with progressive critics on social media or in print, he is not merely “correcting their ignorance.” He is fighting for control of the coercive apparatus of cultural legitimacy. He is signal-jamming his rivals, using his massive, scholarly prose as a tool to dominate the discourse.
His “biases” — often noted by secular critics as an over-attachment to Christian tradition — are, under Pinsof’s lens, perfectly rational. They help him maintain his specific, high-status niche in the literary hierarchy. He is not “mistaken” about the secular nature of the world; he is using the “misunderstanding” of the secular as a lever to elevate himself above them.
Those who complain that Holland is “romanticizing” the past or “ignoring” the brutality of the Church are falling for the mistake Pinsof describes. They assume Holland wants to fix the world’s view of history. They confuse his stated goals—truth and historical understanding—with his actual motives: establishing a dominant reputation as an intellectual authority, securing his position within his coalition, and winning the zero-sum competition for influence.
Holland is not in a hole because he fails to see the truth. He is in the hole because he is an effective, rational combatant fighting to win. The “misunderstanding” is not in his books; it is in the minds of those who believe he is writing for the sake of history, rather than for the sake of power.
The Historian at the Threshold: Tom Holland and the Buffered Self
Charles Taylor opens A Secular Age (2007) with a question that sounds simple. Why was it almost impossible not to believe in God in the England of 1500, while in the England of 2000 belief is one option among many, and for most educated people not the default? His answer runs to nearly nine hundred pages, but its load-bearing distinction can be stated in two words each. The man of 1500 possessed a porous self. The man of 2000 possesses a buffered one.
The porous self lives open to the world. Meaning does not sit locked inside his skull. It resides in things: in relics that heal, in hosts that must not be dropped, in curses that take, in demons that enter through grief or sleep or an unguarded oath. The boundary between mind and world leaks in both directions, and the porous man is therefore vulnerable in a way his descendants can barely reconstruct. He can be blessed. He can be possessed. Fear of damnation is not a doctrine he affirms; it is weather.
The buffered self has closed the border. Meaning happens inside minds; the world outside is matter and law. Nothing gets in. The buffered man can entertain the idea of demons the way he entertains the idea of dragons, with a pleasure that depends on the impossibility. He has gained invulnerability and a kind of dignity, the dignity of the disengaged reasoner, and he has paid for it with what Taylor calls the malaise of immanence: the flatness, the suspicion that something was lost in the transaction, the inability to say what.
Taylor’s third term names the container. The immanent frame is the constructed order, natural, scientific, humanistic, in which modern people live whether they believe or not. The frame permits two readings. It can be taken as closed, a cosmos with nothing beyond it, or as open, a cosmos with a door somewhere. Nothing inside the frame settles the question. Most people inherit a reading rather than choose one, and the closed reading arrives wrapped in a story Taylor spends much of the book dismantling. He calls it the subtraction story: the tale in which modernity is what remains once superstition has been scraped away, and secular man is natural man, man as he always was beneath the priestcraft.
Tom Holland is the most successful living dramatist of this structure, and he is also its test subject. His books force buffered readers back inside porous worlds. His life runs the experiment in reverse: a buffered man standing at the border he has spent a career describing, pressing on it, and finding that it flexes without opening. No public figure of his generation better rewards a reading through Taylor, and none more requires that the reading do work Holland’s own self-account leaves undone, because Holland knows this terrain. He has walked most of it in print. The task is to see what the map shows that the walker cannot.
Begin with the method, because the method came first. Holland’s histories operate by a discipline that might be called enforced porousness. His Romans read entrails before battle and the reader is not permitted to smile. His year-1000 Christendom waits for the world to end and the waiting is rendered as sane, because within that world it was sane. His Persians, his Vikings, his desert monks receive the same treatment. The standing temptation of popular history is to make the past familiar, to find the modern man under the toga. Holland does the opposite. He makes the reader feel how a mind works when the border is open, when gods act, when a relic is not a symbol of anything but a live conduit, when the anger of heaven is a public-safety question. The estrangement is the product. Readers pay him, in effect, for supervised visits to the porous world.
Taylor predicts this market. The buffered self, he argues, misses what it walled out, and buys enchantment back in forms that carry no risk: fantasy, horror, the Gothic. It is worth remembering what Holland sold before he sold history. For most of the 1990s he wrote vampire novels, Byron with fangs, the undead loose in Victorian London. The books were enchantment as commodity, porousness with a safety catch, and their commercial logic was Taylor’s: a disenchanted public will pay to feel the old vulnerability so long as the border holds. When Holland moved from fiction to history he kept the same customer and changed the offer. The vampires were imaginary and safe. The porous Romans were real and safe, safe because dead, and the shiver they deliver is finer for being true. Both careers serve the same hunger, and the hunger is the malaise of immanence looking for a licensed outlet.
Dominion raised the stakes, and this is where Holland’s project and Taylor’s converge. Both books attack the subtraction story. Taylor’s version: exclusive humanism did not lie waiting under Christendom like a statue under marble; it was built, and built largely out of Christian materials, out of Reform’s drive to make ordinary life holy, out of agape rerouted into philanthropy, out of the discipline of the confessional migrating into the discipline of the self. Holland’s version says the same thing in narrative: the equal dignity of persons, the authority of the victim, the duty of the strong to the weak, all of it forged on the cross and mistaken by its heirs for the furniture of reason. When Holland wrote in 2016 that his morals were “thoroughly and proudly Christian,” he was announcing, in six words, the conclusion Taylor’s nine hundred pages defend. Dominion is A Secular Age rebuilt as story.
Taylor writes from inside the house; he is a Catholic, and his book is partly a believer’s account of why belief became hard. Holland writes from the doorstep. Taylor’s mode is analysis; Holland’s is sensation. Taylor tells you the porous self existed and shows you the arguments; Holland makes you spend four hundred pages being one. And Taylor’s book ends in hope, in the conviction that the immanent frame has doors and that people keep finding them. Holland’s ends in genealogy, which is a different thing. To show that your values descend from Golgotha is not to show that anyone died there for you. Holland has been candid that the book proves the second nothing. The gap between those two propositions is the exact space in which he now lives.
Because the personal arc, read through Taylor, is a controlled demonstration of cross-pressure, which Taylor names as the signature condition of the secular age: the state of being caught between the closed reading of the frame and the open one, unable to rest in either, haunted from both sides. Holland inherited the closed reading young and in its classic literary form. A child’s faith, punctured at six by a brachiosaur in a children’s Bible; an adolescence spent with Gibbon, absorbing the subtraction story from its most seductive stylist; a young man’s settled picture of Christianity as the gray thing that drained the color from the classical world. This is the standard biography of the buffered intellectual, and Holland has told it against himself many times. What broke it was not an experience. It was research. The longer he lived imaginatively among the Romans, the less he could locate his own moral reflexes in them, and the closed reading failed for him on historical grounds before anything happened on religious ones. He did not feel a presence. He noticed a debt.
Then, in December 2021, the experiment left the library. The sequence has been told; what Taylor’s categories expose is its structure. A man receives a cancer diagnosis in a season when overwhelmed hospitals cannot tell him how bad it is. Mortal pressure is the classic solvent of the buffer; Taylor notes that death is where the immanent frame’s consolations run thinnest. And observe what this particular man does. He does not pray in his kitchen. He goes at midnight to the oldest church in London and kneels in its Lady Chapel, at the one spot in the city where the Virgin is reported to have appeared, and prays there. The choice is a historian’s choice. If the border has a weak point, it will be where the records say it once opened. He selects the most porous coordinates available to him and makes his petition like a man addressing a door at the place where it was last seen ajar.
The diagnosis reversed within weeks. And here the buffered self resumed custody, on schedule. Holland has never claimed a miracle. He points out, unprompted, that his brother had found him a specialist, that coincidence covers the facts, that no skeptic need move an inch. The event sits in his keeping filed under two descriptions at once, answered prayer and administrative luck, and he declines to collapse the file. Taylor could not have designed a better exhibit. The porous man would know what happened. The confidently buffered man would know too. Holland, cross-pressured, knows both accounts and holds neither, and what he reports feeling is not conviction. It is delight at the joke, and beneath the delight, the same condition he has named in calmer settings: a lack of supernatural belief that he experiences as an ache.
The ache is the most Taylor-shaped word in Holland’s vocabulary. Settled unbelief does not ache. The malaise of immanence does. It is the phantom-limb sensation of the excised transcendent, and Holland’s honesty about it separates him from the two camps that both claim him. He will not perform the certainty of the apologist. He will not perform the closure of the humanist. He attends Evensong at the church of the midnight prayer, a regular in the pew who cannot say the creed without crossing his fingers, and when pressed he reaches for the language of position rather than belief: shadowlands, threshold, the edge. Even his hypothetical conversion is historically disciplined. If belief ever came, he has said, it could only come one way: “I’m not going to start offering sacrifices to Athena.” The line gets laughs and deserves a second look, because it concedes Taylor’s deepest point. There is no generic enchantment on offer. The porous world was always a particular world, and a man formed by Christendom who feels the pull of transcendence feels it in Christendom’s shape. He cannot shop. Even his openness has a genealogy, and he wrote the book on it.
Critical history, the discipline Holland practices and popularizes, is not a neutral window through which a buffered or a porous self might equally look. It is one of the technologies that produced the buffered self, and it cannot be operated from the porous side. The historian’s method requires that testimony be evidence rather than witness, that a reported miracle be a datum about the reporter, that the supernatural appear in the ledger only as belief in the supernatural. Bede could record that a saint’s relics healed the sick and mean that the relics healed the sick; his history had room for the porous world because he wrote from inside it. Holland, who now holds an honorary post created in Bede’s name, in the cathedral where Bede lies, cannot write such a sentence except in quotation. The rules of his guild forbid it, and the rules are constitutive, not incidental. Strip them out and he is no longer doing history; he is doing chronicle, or testimony, or church.
Holland’s gift, the thing his readers pay for, is the rendering of porous consciousness from outside, with a fidelity no insider needs and no other outsider matches. The gift depends on the border. Only a buffered self can represent porousness as an achievement, because only for the buffered is it distant enough to require representing. A Holland who crossed over, who could pray without the historian in him taking notes, might gain his soul and lose his subject; the strangeness he trades in would dissolve into ordinary furniture. And a Holland who closed the question the other way, who settled into the untroubled unbelief of his twenties, might lose the ache that powers the prose. The cross-pressure is not an obstacle on his way to some resolution. It is his working capital. He cannot think his way back to porousness because thinking, in the disciplined mode that made him, is the buffer, and every attempt to reason across the border is performed by the very faculty the border exists to protect. The door he presses on is one his own profession helped install, and it opens, if it opens, only to those who stop pushing in the way he knows how to push.
Taylor traces how, after the frame closed, the sense of fullness that once had a divine address migrated into art, into the sublime, into music and architecture that deliver the shiver of transcendence without the invoice of doctrine. Holland’s present religious practice sits squarely on this ground and he does not pretend otherwise. Evensong, candlelight on Norman stone, the Sarum Bible under glass, sacred music he loves with a fan’s unguarded love; cathedrals as the places where, in his own account, the past stays physically present and the frame wears thin. He has accepted stewardship of these places, a canonry at Salisbury, the librarianship at Durham, and the roles fit him because a cathedral is the one institution that does not force his question. It welcomes the porous and the buffered into the same pew and asks nothing at the door. Taylor’s judgment on the aesthetic halfway house is gentle and firm: it is an experience of something, and it cannot say of what, and for most of its residents it is not a road but a residence. Whether it is a road for Holland is the one fact about him that no method he possesses can establish in advance.
His mother, asked whether her son is a Christian, answered yes, and then added the qualification that carries the entire analysis: he never quite acknowledges it, does he. The porous reading of that sentence says a believing woman sees the grace her son cannot. The buffered reading says a mother mistakes temperament for faith. Holland, who loves her and has told the story on himself, keeps both readings in the file, undecided, which is by now the only place he keeps anything of this kind.
Taylor closes A Secular Age by insisting that the immanent frame does not enforce its closed reading, that the sense of its solidity is a construction, and that the age’s characteristic honesty is to live at the crossing point without forcing the verdict. By that standard Holland is not a curiosity of the age. He is its representative man, distinguished only in degree: he has made the crossing point articulate, staffed it, given it a bibliography and an audience of millions, turned the ache into an oeuvre. A boy who found a brachiosaur in Eden and took it, correctly, as evidence of something, became the writer who tells a disenchanted civilization where its enchantment went and what it bought instead. He kneels, when it comes to it, at the exact spot where the records say the door once opened. The kneeling is porous. The site selection is buffered. The prayer is both, and no one, least of all the man praying, can pull them apart. Taylor’s frame cannot tell him whether anyone heard. It can tell him, and us, why he cannot tell, and why the not-telling now feels, to a man of his formation, less like emptiness than like standing in a doorway built by his own ancestors, facing a room the blueprints insist is there, holding a lamp that lights everything except the threshold under his feet.
The Guardian: ‘Dominion by Tom Holland review – the legacy of Christianity’
Terry Eagleton writes on Nov. 21, 2019:
Dominion packs an astonishing amount of stuff into its 500 pages on Christianity’s enduring influence. Holland has all the talents of an accomplished novelist: a gift for narrative, a lively sense of drama and a fine ear for the rhythm of a sentence. He also has an intense, sometimes rather grisly feel for the physical: the book is resonant with the cracking of bones, flaying of flesh and shrieks of small children tossed into fires. Some of this was inflicted on Christians, and some of it inflicted by them.
Rather than unpack complex theological debates, the book gives us a series of vivid portraits of some key figures in Christian history: St Paul, St Augustine, Peter Abelard, Catherine of Siena, a former playboy known as Francis of Assisi and a host of more modern luminaries. Yet this is not just a galaxy of Christian superstars. They are all embedded in their historical contexts, as the book moves from Caesar Augustus to the #MeToo movement. There is even a medieval forerunner of feminism in the figure of the Milanese noblewoman Guglielma, who announced that she was the Holy Spirit made flesh for the redemption of women, and with engaging modesty baptised them in the name of the Father, the Son and herself.
Other intriguing details abound. When Notre Dame was being built in medieval Paris, a collective of prostitutes offered to pay for one of its windows and dedicate it to the Virgin Mary. Followers of Satan around the same time were obliged to suck on the tongue of a giant toad and lick the anus of a black cat. Galileo had a craving for celebrity and was an inveterate social climber. Yet, though the book is full of such titbits, there is a seriousness at its heart. Holland argues that all “western” moral and social norms are the product of the Christian revolution. He is haunted by St Paul’s claim that God chose the weak and foolish things of the world to shame the strong, and to drive the point home he might have looked at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. We encounter there an obscure young Jewish woman called Mary who is pregnant with Jesus, and Luke puts into her mouth a cry of praise that some scholars believe is a Zealot chant. It speaks of how you will know who God is when you see the poor coming to power and the rich sent empty away. It is this which must be weighed in the balance against the killing fields of Christendom.
Peter Thonemann writes in the WSJ:
If Christian ideas about wealth, gender, sexuality and power have been in constant flux over the past two millennia, how can we speak of a single, distinctively Christian moral sensibility to which we are the heirs? Here Mr. Holland is, I fear, somewhat evasive. In his introduction, he draws out three examples of Christian “trace elements” in the modern world: “the conviction that the workings of conscience are the surest determinants of good law, or that Church and state exist as distinct entities, or that polygamy is unacceptable.” All well and good: but that hardly constitutes a comprehensive blueprint for Western civilization.
The trouble is that Christian ethics, like Walt Whitman, are large; they contain multitudes. Take, most obviously, the great fissure in post-medieval Christianity, between the reformed and Catholic churches. Is each individual entitled to seek out the truth for herself, by the light of her conscience, or is conformity to church authority and dogma the surest route to salvation? It is hard to imagine a disagreement with more fundamental ethical implications. Did Christian ethics take a disastrous wrong turn in 1517? Or was that when they got back on the right track after a millennium-long detour?
Mr. Holland’s argument about the continuing legacy of Christian sensibilities involves selecting one particular winding strand of Christianity—the one that happens to terminate in our present-day value system—as the “real” one. Mr. Holland postulates a golden thread of Nice Christianity, directly linking Jesus’ teachings with the civil-rights movement, the end of apartheid, #MeToo and so forth. When large numbers of actual Christians between Paul and Pope Francis turn out to have subscribed to Nasty Christianity (butchering Albigensians, incinerating sodomites and suchlike), Mr. Holland blithely comments that “the Christian revolution still had a long way to run.” This argument—that everything Nice in our contemporary world derives from Christian values, and everything Nasty in the actual history of Christendom was just a regrettable diversion from the true Christian path—seems to me to run dangerously close to apologetic.
Consider Christian attitudes to slavery. It is perfectly possible to spin a thread that connects the radical egalitarianism of Jesus’ teachings with the abolitionist movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. It is quite true that the earliest organized opposition to slavery came from within Christian communities, above all the Quakers. For Mr. Holland, the abolitionists’ arguments “self-evidently went with the grain of Christian tradition,” with their opponents reduced to “grop[ing] after obscure verses in the Old Testament.”
But if opposition to slavery is really hard-wired into Christianity, why did nothing resembling an abolitionist movement—or even a coherent intellectual critique of slavery—emerge anywhere in Christendom at any point between the first and 18th century? In late antiquity, as Kyle Harper showed in his extraordinary “Slavery in the Late Roman World” (2011), when the church was faced with the problem of adapting itself to the existing Roman social order, it “fundamentally accepted the practice and ideology of slavery.” In only a single early Christian text—Gregory of Nyssa’s sermon on Ecclesiastes 4:1—do we find anything resembling principled opposition to slavery, and Gregory was concerned with the ethical consequences of mastery for the slave-owner, not with the human rights of the slave. It takes a great deal of special pleading to argue, as Mr. Holland does, that the abolitionists of the Enlightenment were drawing on “a principle that derived from the depths of the Catholic past.”
…A second problem with the notion of a specifically Christian sensibility, as Mr. Holland notes in passing, is the difficulty of drawing a hard line between Christian and Islamic moral teachings (to say nothing of Judaism). Muhammad’s God taught him that the steep path is “to free a slave, to feed at a time of hunger an orphaned relative or a poor person in distress, and to be one of those who believe and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion.” The Christian and Islamic ethical systems are not identical, but in each case the levels of variation within each religious tradition (from Greek Orthodoxy to Mormonism, or from Alevism to Salafism) are far greater than the differences between the Christian and Islamic systems as a whole. In both cases, sacred books provide sanction for an immensely broad spectrum of possible behaviors (regarding the correct use of wealth, appropriate gender relations, the ethics of violence), along which later Christian and Islamic societies have shifted unpredictably back and forth over time.
The truth is that throughout its history, Christianity—like Islam and Judaism—has been both censorious and “woke,” egalitarian and repressively hierarchical.
The Guardian: ‘In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland – A swashbuckling study of the origins of Islam’ (May 4, 2012)
He has written his book in a swashbuckling style that aims more to unsettle his readers than to instruct them. I have not seen a book about Arabia that is so irresponsible and unreliable since Kamal Salibi’s The Bible Came from Arabia (1985). Although that work was depressingly misguided in replacing biblical places with their homonyms in the Arabian peninsula, it at least revealed an accomplished scholar who had gone badly astray. Holland has read widely, but carelessly. He starts out with an irrelevant, though arresting, account of a defeated Jewish king in Arabian Himyar (Yemen) killing himself by riding his horse into the Red Sea. It is typical of Holland’s style to lead off with this fanciful story when an inscription from the time of the king’s death records that the Ethiopians killed him.
Holland explodes with indignation over the traditional term, jahiliyya (age of ignorance), for the time before Muhammad. After a tabloid view of Arab culture in that period, he declares: “The effect of this presumption was to prove incalculable. To this day, even in the west, it continues to inform the way in which the history of the Middle East is interpreted and understood.” This was partially true in Gibbon’s time, but it is quite false today. Research and publication on pre-Islamic history, archaeology, art and languages may be found in many western universities, such as Oxford, as well as in many Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria.
The past 30 years have seen lively controversies in the scholarship on early Islam, much of it emanating from the revisionist work of John Wansbrough in analysing the text of the Qur’an and its possible links with both Christian and Jewish language and thought. This is catnip for Holland, as is the revisionist work by Wansbrough’s disciple, Andrew Rippin, and, much more idiosyncratically, by the pseudonymous Christoph Luxenberg, who dares not speak his name. Although these debates are all solidly grounded in close textual study, they can do little more than titillate uninitiated readers because the dust has not yet settled.
Holland’s failure to follow Gibbon in examining French scholarship means that he has missed many of the most important recent discoveries, above all the large number of inscriptions from late antique south Arabia that Christian Julien Robin and his associates in Paris have been publishing in a steady stream. We now know much more about the Judaism of Himyar, the conflict with Christian Ethiopia and the Persian occupation of western Arabia. In discussing early Qur’an manuscripts Holland has missed the collaborative manuscript, in five different hands, which François Déroche has dated to the third quarter of the seventh century. It appears to antedate the Qur’anic inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.
The scattershot nature of Holland’s investigations is particularly apparent in his breezy reference to the Qur’an manuscripts that were found in Sana’a, Yemen, in 1973. He hints darkly at censorship to explain publication delays caused by textual variants in a palimpsest but is unaware that the palimpsest itself and two other manuscripts are actually now with the publisher. He is also unaware that a second cache of Qur’an manuscripts was discovered five years ago in renovations of the Great Mosque in Sana’a and that in February 2010 the Yemeni authorities granted permission for them to be studied.