In 2023 activist and writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an article in online magazine UnHerd announcing her conversion to Christianity. The reason, she said, was “global,” we are faced by various threats, including but not limited to authoritarian governments and “the viral spread of woke ideology, which is eating into the moral fibre of the next generation.”
What does Christianity have to do with this? Well, to explain why she thinks we need Christianity to save us from the various threats facing the now secular West, Ali invokes a name…Tom Holland:
But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
That legacy consists of an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom and dignity — from the nation state and the rule of law to the institutions of science, health and learning. As Tom Holland has shown in his marvellous book Dominion, all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.1
And there it is. This is, in short, is the ‘Tom Holland argument.’2 In this argument everything that gives our society value comes from Christianity, but not just that, literally everything about all our values ultimately comes from the saturating effect of Christianity. Christianity shapes you so deeply you don’t even know that when you’re defending transgender people or arguing for abortion rights or assisted dying, even though these things seem contrary to Christian beliefs, their dynamics are so dependant on Christianity a future historian will probably not see the distinction, since even our idea that there is a ‘secular’ dimension to society comes to us from Christianity. This argument, which at the time came from a relatively unknown history writer, has come to have huge influence.
I am going to argue several things in this article. Firstly, that there are essentially two iterations of Holland’s argument as he makes it, the first in his book and the second in his public events, the former is nuanced the latter gets extremely carried away but is mostly the argument that gets popular traction among conservatives and apologists. The second thing I’m going to argue is that “everything is Christian” is unfalsifiable and dubious and thirdly and most importantly I’m going to argue, after considering how it has been appropriated, that it doesn’t matter either way to the truth of Christian claims, in fact Holland’s argument if anything could be seen as a case against Christianity as being absolutely true.3
What is the Argument?
To begin, I would argue there have been three stages of the ‘Tom Holland Argument’:
Tom Holland’s book Dominion, which in lengthy historical terms argues that more of what shapes the West comes from Christianity than we take for granted or than is found in popular ‘enlightenment myths,’ while also acknowledging that Christian history is complex and full of contradictions.
Holland’s argument in public interviews in which he went on to claim that essentially everything about our modern values are so deeply saturated in Christian assumptions that we might as well describe the secular West as simply going through another phase in the trajectory of Christianity. All of our moral impulses and reflexes helplessly come out of a Christian structure.
This argument in the hands of apologists and conservatives then became a claim that everything good about our society is uniquely Christian and so that either means Christianity is true and we should become Christians or that we need to adopt “Judeo-Christian values” in order to save the West from its inevitable decline.
My argument is that 3. is undermined by 2., that 2. is a reductio ad absurdum of 1., and while 1. might have some use in dispelling certain secular myths and is certainly an interesting argument with some value, as far as an apology for Christianity it is questionable and I essentially consider it a claim not relevant to Christians who aren’t especially interested in investigating the nuances of history for history’s sake. So let us go through the arguments.
A (Very) Brief Review of Dominion
Holland’s 2019 book Dominion is not for a casual reader. It basically consists of a dense 500+ page history of Christianity and its moral influences, extending from Judaism all the way up to the modern era by way of everything from Greece to Charlemagne’s reforms to the French revolution to Martin Luther King. What perhaps makes it different to any other history of Christianity is that Holland extends that history in the last chapters to include things most people would not think of as Christian, modern phenomenon such as the Beatles, rights movements, woke and metoo. Holland’s case, based on the proceeding history, argues that the dynamics of these movements essentially borrow from and are shaped by underlying Christian assumptions and dynamics, and that many of the features of the modern world we take for granted have much more to do with Christianity than anything else.
The book is well argued, interesting and historically dense, and Holland is a great storyteller. Chunks of it tread familiar material if anyone has read Holland’s previous books, especially ‘The Forge of Christendom’ which I happened to read shortly before I read Dominion, but nonetheless the case that many of our values enter into history because of Christianity is reasonably well established. At the very least it is a significant case in overturning certain cliched myths that might suggest the modern world is the result of dispelling religious superstition and repression by reason and secular humanism. However, to many who do not hold to these kinds of myths or who already know some of the history, the response to the point that Christianity significantly influences the West after saturating it for two millennia might be ‘duh, obviously.’ You might think in some ways this book is mostly for people interested in thinking about the various nuances of historical cause, and as such it is an entertaining and interesting contribution. However strong or weak its conclusions may be, I’d recommend Dominion to anyone interested in Christian history, simply as a popular work within that category it’s readable and the case is well made.
Beyond Dominion: Everything is Christian
In various podcasts and interviews discussing the book, Holland has been much more radical in his claims. Almost everything about the way you and I act and react morally, all our ideas, from humanism to secularism, atheism, marriage, gay rights, transgenderism, love, freedom, science: all thus stuff is basically an iteration of underlying Christian thought. As he put it in a debate with AC Grayling: “almost everything that you and I think is down to theologians and fragments of scripture.”4 In another interview with Louise Perry he rejected the idea that what is happening now can be called post-Christian, thinking of our time simply as another convulsion in the history of Christianity, so shaped are we by its moral ideas.5 Apparently anti-Christian ideas like gay rights, abortion or assisted dying rely on Christian ideas such as the valuing of the oppressed, concern for the individual rights of women or the individual right to choose. Debates like gay or trans rights feel like progressives vs Christians or conservatives, but actually both sides essentially represent some form of Christianity, so infused are they by its assumptions. We are Christian, whether we like to admit it or not.
What are we meant to do with this argument for extreme cultural and moral determinism? Holland himself said in a public event with Nick Cave that this opened up somewhat of a relativistic pit in his own thought, and gave him the sense that he had no choice about being Christian, so dependant was he on Christian assumptions. He states that personally, while he remains agnostic about believing God is actually there, has essentially decided to go with it and pretty much describe himself as Christian.6
To defend this case that we can’t really be rejecting Christianity Holland at times makes some questionable claims. One of these is using the Nazis as an image of what it must look like to fully repudiate Christianity, citing the influence of Nietzsche and his distain for Christianity. The obvious objection is that there are many ways to not be Christian, or the observation that Holland himself has paradoxically elsewhere made, that Nazism itself contains Christian history, not the least its long relationship with antisemitism. This argument feels too extreme to be serious, and the idea that you cannot reject something unless you are its opposite extreme is just a bad argument. It may be true that Nazism is something like the opposite of Christian moral value, but that doesn’t mean you can’t not be a Christian unless you’re a Nazi.
Not only that but Holland sometimes has a tendency to arguments that depend on a feeling of similarity rather than proof of a cause, and even to someone sympathetic to the general argument he seems to get carried away. Do pink haired trans activists only care about trans rights because Christianity taught them to care about the oppressed? Perhaps, but that’s also quite a reductive and vague claim, you might equally argue it’s because of post-Marxist thought7 in the twentieth century that divided oppression into sexual classes, which Holland would also argue is rooted in Christianity in a more indirect sense, but the question is how indirect before it isn’t Christianity? What about all the other social, economic causes, what about non-Christian thinkers?8 And if it doesn’t have to be that direct, shouldn’t we go back to the things that feed into Christianity?
The point is, if you take this argument too far it becomes reductive, deterministic and essentially becomes unfalsifiable. Consider how you could go about arguing that trans activists are not motivated by Christian assumptions. Prove that they weren’t raised Christian and have never read the bible? Holland would say they still are, and there is no way to argue against it. Almost any objection that is made can be answered by how some thing that seems like it isn’t Christian actually is because of some way in which it is like something Christian. I would argue that this claim then essentially talks itself out of legitimacy by essentially monopolising the definition of Christianity, and thus is circular and epistemologically weak. As I said, it is a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the interesting case made in Dominion, and if everything is Christian and there’s nothing we can do about it, then it’s a bit like believing you have absolutely no free will, what can you do except shrug and carry on like you do? It doesn’t matter. If everything is Christian, even those who appear to be rejecting it, then nothing is. As you were.
The Poundland Tom Holland
Tom Holland’s argument has had quite an impact, not the least among Christians. Some have seen it as a gold apologetic for Christianity, since if all the things we apparently value are unconsciously Christian, surely all we have to do is point out what the source of those values is. People don’t realise they are Christian, but they can.
In the UK, one of the great advocates of the Tom Holland argument is evangelist Glen Scrivener. He published a book called The Air We Breathe that in Scrivener’s own words in an interview is a “poundland Tom Holland,” and that Christian interviewer Justin Brierley slightly awkwardly called “Dominion for Dummies”9: the book transparently not offering in depth historicism but instead arguing as an apologetic that Christianity is true because it has given us the values we take for granted: the subtitle of the book is How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality. Glen argues for “values” that have “shaped us”: equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom, progress. Glen says “where do they come from? Well we can trace them all back to the Jesus revolution.”10
You can see we are already a long way from a complex history full of contradictions. One might suggest that a “dummies” reading of Dominion would say “Christianity influences us but it’s complicated” rather than “Christianity gave us kindness so you should be a Christian,” but such is the strangeness of the argument as it has mutated, and part of the reason I consciously call it ‘the Tom Holland argument’ rather than Tom Holland’s argument or the argument of Dominion.
As Ayaan Hirsi Ali represents, this has also had similar ripples across the conservative political world where it seems to emerge with equally as caricatured an appearance. In a debate for the free press Ali argues we need a Christian revival, that Christianity is “foundational creed” of America, its culture and constitution are Christian, Buzz Aldrin took communion on the moon, when we reject Christianity “we die in droves” and when we accept it we are “unstoppable.”11
Again, like Scrivener this has gone from a complex historical argument to something so generic it is bordering on absurd. What does it mean that we “die in droves” when we’re not Christian? Is Buzz Aldrin taking communion somehow meant to be an argument that Christianity gave us space travel? Apparently so, this may be a punchy debate format, but these are Ali’s claims. All this is starting to sound like Dominion for dummies by other dummies.
Why these arguments are wrong
There are two problems I have with these arguments:
Historical causation doesn’t prove anything to be true, or even that re-appropriating it will have the same consequences. Thus, the political/cultural argument for Christianity is a bad one.12
Historical contingency, or the original argument of Tom Holland, claims that it isn’t just our inheritance of “values” that comes from Christianity, but the inheritance of why those values are appealing to us. This argument is dangerously circular: Christianity is good because it gave us our values. So Christianity is true then? No, because if we were from another culture we wouldn’t have those values and we wouldn’t find them appealing. Reductionist arguments argue down not up. The historical values argument for Christianity is a bad one.
Let us take an absurd example to illustrate the first point. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, often called the father of Russian rocketry and astronautics was influenced in his work by Nikolai Fyodorov, an Orthodox Christian and philosopher who believed that the work of science was part of God’s plan by which we would learn to literally physically resurrect all of the humans who have ever lived. Tsiolkovsky realised that if this were to be possible, as he believed it should be, we wouldn’t have enough planet for everyone to live in, thus part of the cosmicist project must be the building of rockets to get people off and make space.
Great, so in the Eastern church’s Dominion Russian Orthodox cosmicism gave Russia rocket science. Does that mean it’s true? Is the belief that we are going to physically resurrect the long dead vindicated by the pragmatism of the consequences of the belief? Should Eastern Orthodox Christians argue we need cosmicism and belief in an engineered literal resurrection to save science?
Granted, that is a weird example,13 but it’s not that far away from arguing that Buzz Aldrin taking communion on the moon means that Christianity gave us space travel. And even if, as is a much more legitimate argument nearer to Holland’s original case, science originated and is rooted in Christian society and beliefs, that isn’t an argument for its truth, it’s just a historical fact. It doesn’t support a conservative argument for being Christian, and it doesn’t support an argument for Christianity being true. Making this argument is a misuse of history.
I think the second problem is perhaps more important for apologists. If the reason we are moved by Christian values is simply because of the conditioning of history, this diminishes the idea that those values are fundamentally true. It would consist only of a limp pragmatic argument for a cultural-political project rather than a direct argument for the truth of a personally transforming faith. It confuses the question about whether we have moral sense and whether morals really exist by reducing morals to historical contingency.
Tom Holland has often told the story of his visit to Iraq for a documentary to see sites where ISIS had crucified Yazidi men. Holland was in the early stages of writing the book, and seeing the remains of the sites moved him existentially, causing him to consider the incredible nature of the historical claim that a man suffering the death of a slave and being crucified would have some kind of moral power over those doing it. He came to realise that for him this was a true myth.
Yet it seems the point remains relative. In a recent podcast with Sam Harris Holland tells the story again, and again says that the reason it moves him seems to be because of the “weathering” of two thousand years of Christian history. In other words he simply stood on a different side of the history of ideas to those who held moral beliefs that made him sick to his stomach.
Surely, though, any apologist would reject this argument. They would argue Holland was moved not because of historical contingency but because there is something fundamentally true about the image of the suffering God, true not just pragmatically or historically but morally. After all, we all share a moral capacity, we all share emotional valences, we all have a bond of likeness of our inner experiences: in spite of history, there are universal human experiences. The more the ‘Tom Holland argument’ has been popularised and popularised, the more I am convinced it should be the role of believers to reject it in its popular form and argue up instead of down. I do not believe we can still be moved by the image of the cross because we in the West happened to be shaped by history, but because there is something about it that encapsulates the complete fulfilment of transcendent moral truth. The Glen Scrivener argument, that “you already are a Christian but you don’t know it yet” should have nothing to do with history and everything to do with present conscience, self-reflection and the cultivation of compassion and moral humility. If you believe fundamentally that that is what Christianity is, its presence in history is transferred from a linear set of causes to a transcendent one and ‘Christianity’ as a historical set of events full of contradictions is replaced by the Christianity of genuine faith. Christianity throughout history has been spread by the Roman spear and the conquistadores sword, but if you are a Christian, this is adjacent to the fire of faith that is spread by the out-workings of a truth which is behind all history. Christians should see real Christianity not in the sequences of events but in individuals whose lives are changed and who burn with the love of God for those around them. If we fail to do this, Christianity becomes a cultural-political project more suited to the ARC conference than to the transforming of the individual through grace. Dominion is about ‘the West’ and its messy history. Christianity is about the soul, and so is about now, and always.
*
‘Why I am Now a Christian’: https://unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-am-now-a-christian/
I’d like to emphasise less this be misinterpreted that outside of the ‘everything is Christian’ argument, I think Tom Holland is brilliant; his podcast with Dominic Sandbrook in particular is gloriously entertaining.
Perhaps evidencing this is the fact that Holland himself remains agnostic about the actual existence of God.
Premiere Unbelievable: Tom Holland vs AC Grayling • History: Did Christianity give us our human values?
‘In search of Wild Gods’, Nick Cave and Tom Holland on UnHerd (subscription required) https://unherd.com/in-search-of-wild-gods/
I think there is an interesting parallel to Marx in some of Holland’s arguments, Marx’s view of history is materialistic and so reductionist, reducing apparently unrelated events to the universal cause of class struggle. In this same sense Holland is reducing the universal cause of all of the West’s moral values to Christianity.
Holland uses people such as the Marquis de Sade in Dominion to evidence what the repudiation of Christianity must look like. This may be valid if you believe Christianity to be true, because the world is simply a dynamic between acceptance and rejection, but for a secular historian this is a terrible argument, it’s like saying the only way to not be a bin-man is to throw rubbish everywhere all day instead of just being literally anything else except a bin-man.
Premier Unbelievable: Bart Ehrman v Glen Scrivener: Did Christianity give us our belief in equality, compassion & consent?
ibid.
The Free Press: Does the West Need a Religious Revival?
Arguing that if we become Christian all our problems will be solved overnight ignores Holland’s argument that the process of causation and saturation is long, contradictory, erratic, strange and complicated.
To throw in a more simple example: the story of Isaac Newton getting hit on the head by an apple (if it was true) might explain how the theory of gravity entered history. It however has no bearing on whether the theory of gravity is true, nor that dropping apples on people makes them have scientific realisations.
Your second point strikes me as a bit unfair. From speaking with people who found Dominion moving, they saw the history of Christianity not as happenstance but as providence. Particularly when considering the oddity of such success and impact coming from a man who was tortured and killed in public.
Everyone is looking for some sort of proof and validation for their beliefs, and readers of Tom Holland see such validation in history. I don't think that's as mercenary, or uninterested in fundamental truth as you make it out to be.
I recall Tom Holland has said before that his approach to Christianity was largely inspired by Nietzsche. But while Nietzsche uses the historical contingency of Christianity as a way of arguing that both Christian morality and the secular values he claims are descended from it are arbitrary, Holland turns this around and makes it a positive: if you believe in modern Western values you are in some sense on the side of Christianity. He’s far from the first person to argue this, but he is arguably its biggest popularizer.
I don’t think it’s an illegitimate claim, but it is a singularly unuseful line of argument for the purposes for which it is being deployed by apologists, namely to defend Christian values against the woke left (which is also just as much the inheritor of Christianity by Holland’s standards) or to establish why we should want to defend these values. If anything, if you dislike modern liberalism you could very well turn this book into an anti-Christian polemic about how Christianity created wokeness and Marxism and we should therefore return to paganism.