This is the name of a 1995 movie starring Richard Dreyfuss. My reference, however, is to a 600-plus page book titled Dominion by historian Tom Holland (not to be confused with the British Spiderman actor). His tome came out in 2019 and is also an opus (large-scale work) with a very ambitious topic — how Christianity has influenced Western civilization for over two millennia. My son gave it to me as a Christmas present this year (you now know how I spent my spare time during the holidays).
The author
Tom Holland (in spite of his name) is British and lives in London, England. He is a 54-year-old award-winning historian of the ancient world. His previous six books include Rubicon (about the Roman Empire) and Persian Fire (about ancient Persia). He was educated at Cambridge University where he almost earned a doctorate. He quit because he was “fed up with universities and fed up with being poor”. Holland is married with two grown children. He began his writing career with novels and then turned to history.
The thesis
Holland’s book Dominion has the subtitle “The Making of the Western Mind”. This was tweaked to “How the Christian Revolution Remade the World” for North American markets. I find both subtitles are helpful, concise summaries of the book’s topic. The picture chosen for the front cover is Jesus hanging from a cross. Interesting. With a title like Dominion, one would expect a picture of the risen, sovereign Christ ascending to heaven over his creation.
The book has three parts — Antiquity, Christendom and Modernitas. Each part has seven chapters with one-word summary titles linked to a specific year and place. In his preface, Holland asks, “How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?”
He continues, “My ambition is… to explore how we in the West came to be what we are, and to think the way that we do.”
Holland hints at the shifting of his own perspective when he writes, “… many in the West (are) reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins. I assert this with a measure of confidence because, until quite recently, I shared in this reluctance… Yet over the course of the past two decades, my perspective has changed.”
The reviews
The American magazine The New Yorker commented, “This lively, capacious history of Christianity emphasizes the extent to which the religion still underpins Western liberal values.” The British newspaper Sunday Times named it the “History Book of the Year” saying, “If great books encourage you to look at the world in an entirely new way, then Dominion is a very great book indeed.”
Pastor (and author) Tim Keller wrote, “It is hard to overstate the importance of Holland’s book… (He) punctures common myths about Christianity and secularism in every chapter. In no way does he let the church off the hook for its innumerable failures. Nor will he let secular people live with the illusion that their values are just self-evident, the result of reason and scientific investigation.”
I’ll close with Holland’s own summary of his work: “The ambition of Dominion is to trace the course of what one Christian, writing in the third century AD, termed ‘the flood-tide of Christ’: how the belief that the Son of the one God of the Jews had been tortured to death on a cross came to be so enduringly and widely held that today most of us in the West are dulled to just how scandalous it originally was.“
Holland continues, “This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain — for good and ill —thoroughly Christian. It is — to coin a phrase — the greatest story ever told.”
Rob Weatherby is a retired pastor (and avid reader).
