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).
The biography behind the book repays attention. 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, and the lines themselves illustrate the thesis. 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 Times. John 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.
