Andrew Norton's Reviews > Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

In my teenage years, to use one of the many nice turns of phrase in Tom Holland’s Dominion, ‘like a dimmer switch being turned down I found my belief in God fading.’ But despite no longer praying or going to church I still saw myself, even in a militant atheist phase, as a small-p protestant. My upbringing shaped me too much to pretend that Christian ideas did not still influence how I saw myself, how I behaved towards others, and the content of my political beliefs.

Dominion argues for a radical version of this self-perception– that ideas sourced from Christianity are everywhere in the West, ‘like dust particles so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye’. Western atheists who never step foot in a church think within a conceptual framework Christians created.

Holland’s comparison points in explaining how Christianity departs from other beliefs are the ancient philosophers, the beliefs of the pre-Christian Middle East and West, Jews, Muslims, and Indians and Chinese in the colonial era.

I described these comparison cultures as peoples rather than religions because, Dominion argues, the very idea of religion is Christian. The Latin word ‘religio’ referred broadly to rules, rituals and customs, and not just beliefs about a god or gods. Other non-Christian peoples similarly did not, and do not, make the Christian distinction between beliefs and practices. The Western language of ‘isms’ – Judaism, Confucianism, Hinduism, etc – over-emphasises belief as a way of understanding other cultures.

Without this distinction between beliefs and practices it is hard to get to the Western categories of the religious and the secular, or to the separation of church and state.

Christianity as a belief, along with Christ’s teachings on treating others well regardless of social status, contributed to its universalist aspirations (very early on, a bishop described the church as ‘katholikos’; Greek for universal). Anyone can hold a belief, regardless of who they are or where they are from.

Universalist beliefs in the value of all people still struggle against the tribal instinct, including in the minds of believing Christians. But Christianity created ideas that transcend tribes and communities that cross cultural, economic and political divisions.

From a modern Western liberal perspective, the implications of these Christian ideas for political practice have been mixed. Slavery was denounced and eventually abolished largely on Christian grounds. But the idea that everyone could be a Christian also segued into the idea that everyone must be a Christian, justifying colonisation and the Inquisition. Christianity both prompted terrible cruelty and laid the foundations for a broader idea of ‘human rights’.

Holland explains how Christianity created a new sexual morality, sanctioning only sex in a monogamous marriage. In Rome, Holland writes, ‘men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of the road as a toilet’. This kind of behaviour was reclassified as a sin, reducing sexual pleasure but also sexual cruelty. ‘Implicit in #MeToo’, Holland writes, ‘was the same call for sexual continence that had reverberated throughout the Church’s history’.

Christianity promoted marriage for love, rather than to create or cement relationships between families. Priests being able to marry couples without their family’s agreement undermined the power of patriarchs. It made the nuclear family, rather than the extended family, the key unit in society.

Holland notes how ideas based in Christianity often appear on both sides of an argument. In the recent gay marriage debate, biblical verses against men sleeping with other men competed against the Christian idea of monogamous, love-based marriages.

Holland also suggests that modern ‘woke’ politics is based on ideas that come from Christianity. The Christian concern for the weak and downtrodden has turned into the woke celebration of victims. Woke intolerance of other views has, I think, many parallels other than Christian persecution of non-believers, but the similarities are there.

Despite empty pews in Europe and Australia, taking small and big-C Christianity together it seems very much alive. Holland quotes the observation of an Indian historian that ‘Christianity spreads in two ways, through conversion and through secularisation’. Through birth and conversion, it is growing in Africa, Asia and South America. Through the secular descendants of Christian ideas, it is alive and well in the West and influencing the elites, at least, of many other countries. I am still more of a Christian than I realised.