'Dominion' Doesn't Support Conservative Complaints About Decline

Tom Holland's book is often referenced but it doesn't give credence to claims commonly made about it.

Tom Holland’s recent interview with Tom Holland: The Rest is History/YouTube

In a recent interview with Ross Douthat for his New York Times podcast, Orthodox writer Rod Dreher was asked about the consequences of the decline of Christianity and why we should worry about a post-Christian world. His response was a refrain you will hear often: “I would direct people to Tom Holland’s book Dominion.”

Likewise when activist and associate of the New Atheists Ayaan Hirsi Ali announced her conversion to Christianity in an essay for UnHerd, she first declared that the reason we need Christianity is because it has built our societies and without it we are at risk from “formidable forces” ranging from authoritarianism to wokeism. Once again, she says this is shown by Tom Holland in his “marvellous book” Dominion. She says from it she learned “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.”¹

It’s an oddly common refrain then: Christianity is declining, our societies are suffering because of it, I learned this from the wonderful book Dominion. It sounds convincing, but the problem is that Tom Holland never made this argument. In fact the argument of Dominion is a far more radical one than any of these soundbite really seem to internalise, Dominion is not an argument that Christianity gave us some good stuff and its expiring now we’ve stopped being Christian, rather the argument of Dominion and the subsequent arguments Holland has made is instead that Christianity so saturates the soil of our assumptions and instincts that everything that we think morally and culturally is ‘Christian’ in derivation, so much so that we might as well think of the modern secular world and the changes that we are experiencing as a kind of reformation within a Christian society.

In the book Holland charts the way Christianity has shaped many things we take for granted, although even Ayaan’s description seems to miss the point. She says, again: “all sorts of apparently secular freedoms — of the market, of conscience and of the press — find their roots in Christianity.” Take that phrase “apparently secular”: in it is the assumption that there is a distinction between Christian things and secular things, and that we wrongly assume that freedoms and so on are secular when actually they are Christian. But for Holland there is no distinction: secular is a word that comes from the latin word for century, employed by Augustine in the City of God to describe the transience of Rome as opposed to the eternal Kingdom of God, picked up by the church in the eleventh century emphasising the role of the church in relation to Kings and Emperors, employed in the enlightenment and up to the modern era: for Holland secular is a Christian category grown from Christian soil.

Holland even argues in Dominion that what Ayaan in her essay calls the failing “liberal order” can essentially be thought of as the separation of Christianity from what came to be deemed as its more regressive aspects, citing things like the Beatles and their “all you need is love,” sexual rights movements and so on as essentially Christian in derivation.

In fact what characterises much of Dominion is not the idea that there is a stable and unmoving Christianity from which various things bloom, but more like the idea that Christianity is a reforming, evolving set of ideas synonymous with the development of the West. This is what makes it possible for him to argue that we should still call many of the things going on in the modern world ‘Christian’ even though they may seem long disconnected from Christianity and their connection to it may only be one of analogy. Part of what Dominion seems to essentially argue for is a broadening of the word ‘Christian’ to make it more synonymous with a word like ‘Western,’ such that all of the ideas that shape the modern world, be they antagonistic towards a more conservative Christianity or even to Christianity as a whole, should still be given the label Christian.

His argument seems to be that the modern world presents Christians with a kind of paradox. Many of our liberal ideals are drawn from Christianity, many of them contradict Christianity, and liberalism itself constitutes a kind of Reformation like those that have convulsed Christianity throughout its history, like those of the eleventh century, like the Protestant Reformation, like the Enlightenment which Holland also casts as Christian: modern liberalism is another of these convulsions, except that what it sweeps away is the beliefs of Christianity from which it seems to come. There is thus no ‘going back’ to a stable point, such change is a defining feature of Christianity, he describes this process of the twentieth century:

The concept of progress, unyoked from the theology that had given it birth, had begun to leave Christianity trailing in its wake. The choice that faced churches — an agonisingly difficult one — was whether to sit in the dust, shaking their fists in impotent rage, or whether to run and scramble in a desperate attempt to catch up.²

The nature of Holland’s argument then is to see Christianity not as a single idea: while the central image of the cross no doubt defines it, various interpretations of Christian ideas have convulsed history, giving us everything from abolition to feminism, even humanism and certain forms of atheism, he writes:

Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberations across the world. First there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by St Paul. Then there came the aftershocks: the revolution in the eleventh century that sent Christendom upon its momentous course; the revolution commemorated as the Reformation; the revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the aspiration to enfold within their embrace every other possible way of seeing the world.³

In a notion of Christianity that includes within it “the revolution that killed God” is the absense of the kind of essentialism that conservatives are arguing for, after all, to go back is to reject the notion of progress that Holland sees as derived from Christian theology, to claim we can is to do something Holland does not: to seperate a ‘real’ Christianity from its various influences as they reach into every part of the marrow of the modern West. For the ‘Dominion’ argument there is no such separation, it’s all Christianity. The most glaring irony that illustrates this may well be that one of the things Ayaan complains about in her essay is “woke ideology.” The title of the last chapter of Holland’s book and the crescendo of his claims about the Christian nature of the West? Woke.

A paradox then, that these figures are claiming we need Christianity to counter wokeness and referring to a book that argues wokeness is fundamentally Christian. The confusion rests on a mingling of theology and history, of an argument from cause with an argument from goodness. In Holland’s thesis is not just the claim that good values come from Christianity, it is that the values that come from Christianity are not remotely self-evident, and that our belief that they are is itself the result of the conditioning of Christianity. For those wishing to reclaim something that seems to be slipping away from our societies, Holland gives you only a weathered history, akin to thinking we can save the evolution of our species into another by looking back at our past evolutionary history. To search for the magic point where things went wrong will, by the lights of such a view of history, always be futile.

Then again, who knows, perhaps Holland is right. Perhaps what we are experiencing really is another reformation within an ever evolving Christianity, and those arguing we return to it as an essential source has something in common with Reformers arguing the problems of an errant church be solved by Sola Scriptura. In both cases the instability is solved by an appeal to a basis for a reforming principle that places something at its heart to which we can return to solve our problems, to the Reformers the scriptures as the sole revelation of God, to the conservatives Christianity as a sole source of the values that construct our society. The issue is that for the Reformers, the problem to be solved was already theological and they could make clear claims about the relation between scripture and theology, yet for the conservatives the claim remains a general complaint solved by an essentialism whose relationship to it is ambiguous. Does the principle at the heart of Christianity tell us to love the stranger and the alien or to cast them out of Christendom lest they dilute its cultural essentialism? For Rod Dreher it seems the answer is clear, for Tom Holland, as far as his argument goes, Christian history has given us both. The answer of Dominion isn’t what these figures want it to be, instead it is straightforward: conservative or liberal, pro or anti-immigration, it doesn’t matter: you’re Christian either way.

1. Ayaan Hirsi Ali “Why I am now a Christian, Atheism can’t equip us for civilisational war, UnHerd, 2023

2. Holland, Dominion: the making of the Western mind, Little Brown, 2019

3. ibid