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Lucas Williams's avatar

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.

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MJR Schneider's avatar

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.

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