In The Shadows of Christ, with Tom Holland

IN THIS EPISODE…

Holland: Religion is about what you can’t know for sure. It’s about revelation. Science is the opposite of that.

Holland: We don’t need the Christian mythology anymore. We don’t need Satan when we’ve got Hitler, and we don’t need hell when we’ve got Auschwitz.

Holland: The most controversial and tricky relationship that the secular state has to face now is what’s its relationship to its Muslim citizens.

 

INTRO

Fred: We all know the high school version of history – a bunch of boring dates and events we had to memorize, which all seem so distant and irrelevant today – almost like visiting a museum in high school – what’s the point

But there is another view of history: one where it’s still very much with us today, where the battles and debates that rage on and tear our society apart actually started a very long time ago, and are still playing out in real time all around us

This is especially the case when we look at the big picture – things like our legal and political system, our religious attitudes, and the values we claim to have as individuals and as groups

But as soon as you start looking back to understand how things got to where they are, the problems begin: take events that happened even a couple of months ago, and you start to realize: what we call “the facts” are in reality far from clear – the facts are often hotly contested opinions, they can be ordered and filtered and explained and interpreted in tons of different ways; they’re wrapped up in different stories and narratives, each of which claims to be accurate, each of which can be used and weaponized by different people toward different purposes

Take just what happened with COVID, or the last MAGA election, or today’s trade wars or the wars in the Middle East: these things all happened in the 21^st century in full public view, with thousands of cameras and the internet and social media focused on them 24/7: and there’s absolutely no consensus on the facts, and what they’re supposed to mean. Why, then, would it be any different with the French Revolution or the American Revolutions, or what really happened to the Roman Empire, or how the decline and rebirth of religion in the 21^st century really happened? We play this game where what happened in the past is supposed to be “settled”, but that’s far from being the case: even at its best, the work of historians deals with spotty and incomplete factual records, and isn’t above acting as propaganda for different agendas and ideologies today.

My guest in this episode is historian and best-selling author Tom Holland. Along with Dominic Sandbrook, he hosts the excellent The Rest is History podcast, where they do – in my opinion – as good of a job as you can find today unpacking historical events in an honest, but also a really fun and engaging way

Anyone interested in history and tired of the same old repetitive culture war debates should definitely give it a listen

In this interview, Tom and I discuss his book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, where he argues that the modern West never really transcended Christianity as cleanly as it things.

In his view, Christian ideas are deeply embedded in supposedly modern ideas like what we call the “Enlightenment” (whose name alone suggests the sudden passage from darkness to light – a very Christian idea), the of separation of church and state, the duty to protect the weak and vulnerable, and the idea that a person can be redeemed in one instant, road-to-Damascus style – as long as their heart is pure. Even the ideas we criticize religion with today tend to be profoundly and uniquely Christian ones.

His research draws fascinating connections between religion and politics, between faith and reason, and shows how ancient ideas enter pop culture, transform, and in many ways, stay the same over the centuries

Anyone interested in Western civilization, the impact of Christianity and its history on us today, and the meaning of religion more generally might find something useful here – I thoroughly enjoyed it and had lots of fun in it – here is my conversation with Tom Holland.

 

CHAPTER 1: CHISELING THE MARBLE OF DOMINION

Fred: Mr. Tom Holland, welcome.

Holland: Thanks very much for having me.

Fred: For people who wouldn’t know, it’s so funny when I talk around me and I say I’m going to interview Tom Holland, they’re like, oh, the actor. I’m like, no, no, no, the history writer.

Holland: I have heard that. I’ve heard tales of people confusing me with spider-man. I mean I could be spider-man, but I wouldn’t be able to say would I because Superheroes have to keep their identity secret.

Fred: Very True.

Fred: So I tell people: it’s a historian. For people who might not know, you’ve published a number of remarkable history books. I mean, as deeply researched as they are original and well-written covering everything from the Persian empire to the Roman empire, the history of England, the history of Islam. And of course, more recently, Dominion on the history of Christianity, where you make some pretty provocative and original arguments, which we’ll get around to.

First of all, thank you for being here today. It’s a real honor.

Holland: Well, thank you for having me.

Fred: Before we dive in, I wanted to get a sense from you of the process for researching and putting together books of this magnitude, just the sheer volume of research that has to go into it. Do you have like hidden teams of hundreds of researchers working at all hours of the day? How does it work?

Holland: No, I don’t, because I think in a sense when you’re researching, you’re panning for gold. So you’re looking at primary sources or secondary sources, but only you can know what it is that you’re looking for. And often you won’t know what you’re looking for until you find it. So you can’t kind of hand it out to researchers to do it for you. And I found that with books and I do a podcast as well, The Rest is History, which we do a couple of episodes every week. So that’s much more shallow levels of research. But again, I would never hand that over to a researcher, because only I can know what it is that I’m looking for.

 

Fred: So do you already start with like a strong premise of what it is you’re looking for? Is it like more intuitive? How do you know when one of those intuitions is like book level? Because you do make some very original arguments.

 

Holland: I think before I start a book, it’s a bit like those blocks of stone that Michelangelo was carving the images of slaves from before he died. And you can see the shape of the sculpture waiting to emerge from the stone. And I guess that’s the kind of condition of the book that I have in my mind before I start it.

I know what it’s going to be, so I have the block of stone. I’ve kind of shaped it with my thoughts, but I don’t know exactly what the lineaments are going to be until I actually get to work.

 

Fred: So, Dominion, your latest book, masterful work in my view, in it you call Christianity the most powerful hegemonic cultural system in the history of the world. And it kind of goes against this very common view of history in the West that we’re taught in schools from our earliest days: that we were once a religious society in the early days of the Roman Empire and throughout the middle ages, but then we had the Renaissance and the enlightenment and the scientific revolution and nothing was the same ever again. All of a sudden, our values and our institutions became rational, became scientific. But you argue that Christian values and concepts remain very much with us to this day, even when we critique Christianity and religion in general. You write “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.”

As you were sort of imagining the block of stone, how did you first come to this conclusion? And how did you first start drawing the links between the values of the so-called rational, scientific, even secular West and all these different branches of Christianity?

 

Holland: It was a very long process. My prime interest and the initial focus of my writing was the classical world. I first wrote a book about the fall of the Roman Republic. So that’s the age of Julius Caesar and Cicero and Cleopatra. And it was a process by which the Roman Republic falls and the autocracy established by Augustus is planted on its ruins. And then after that, I wrote a book on the Persian Wars. So that’s the Marathon and Thermopylae and Salamis, about the Persian Empire, but also about Athens and Sparta. And I’d always identified myself with the glamour and the poetry and the swagger of Greece and Rome, and had always viewed the coming of Christianity as a slight chilling of this. In my mind’s eye as a child, I would think of Greece and Rome as clear blue bright skies and the coming of Christianity as, I don’t know, England in late November. A chilly drizzle. And this was not a substantive view, it was in a completely a synesthetic sense.

 

Holland: But I think synesthetic senses, subconscious images, vibes that you have in your mind are important in conditioning how you think about the world, and maybe particularly about the past. I wrote about the age of Caesar, who, when he conquered Gaul, it is said in figures that are quoted by a biographer of Caesar’s writing a century later, that he slaughtered a million Gauls and he enslaved another million. And Caesar took this for granted. He had no trouble with it at all. In fact, in his triumphs, placards were born boasting about how many lives he had taken in serving Rome. And then when I was writing about the Battle of Thermopylae and the Spartans, these were people who directly inspired the Nazis. They had conquered a neighboring Greek city state and reduced the inhabitants of that city state to helotage.

Although I retained my kind of admiration for the glamour of these terrifying peoples and although it was my job when writing the books to get into their minds, to see the world through their eyes, and I could because every culture, every civilization has values, has morals, but I realised that their morals, their values were not the values and morals that I had. It took me maybe six or seven years to write these two books, and the whole time, it was as though I was trying to find an itch on my back, and then when you find it and you scratch it, it feels great. And I was trying to think, well, what happened? What changed?

And it then seemed obvious to me, well, this must be something to do with the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the process by which post-Roman Britain became Christian. So I started to reflect on that and to ponder when exactly was it that the civilization of Western Europe of Latin Christendom became something so distinctive that I could trace the origins and the character and the values of the civilization in which I live back to that beginning. And I kind of was reading around it a lot, for years. I zoomed in on the 11th century, which is not a period of European history that I think most people are greatly familiar with. But that seemed to me a key moment.

It was a period of European history that, in particular, for reasons that we might come to, embedded notions that the world could be divided into twin dimensions, one of which belonged to the dimension of the saeculum, which is a Latin word meaning essentially the span of living memory, but effectively comes to mean a world in which everything is born and dies. So everything is in flux.

And also, and it’s counterpointed to the religio, the Latin word meaning the bond that the church claims joins the church to the eternity of heaven. So you have religio counterpointed to the saeculum. And this is embedded structurally in the 11th century. And it becomes, I think, a key marker of what makes Latin Christendom distinctive. And that distinctiveness endures and evolves for the thousand years that follow it so that by the time we come to the modern period what in the 11th century had been the saeculum and religio has emerged to become concepts that we today would call the secular and the religious and

Having written that book, I then went back; I would read books in which all kinds of societies that had existed before Christianity were described as being secular, having secular qualities or the religions of ancient Greece or ancient Egypt or whatever. And this brought home to me the degree to which the English language is Christianized. It’s almost impossible to use it and not find yourself expressing Christian opinions simply by using the words that you use. The more I thought about this, the more I came to think that almost everything in Britain, in Western Europe, in the West more generally, was influenced by Christianity in ways that I had not perceived and that I kind of felt most people in the West didn’t perceive.

Holland: One analogy, kind of the negative analogy if you like, was that I imagined it as a building that had been full of asbestos and had been pulled down. The building seemed to have gone but the asbestos hangs in the air and you’re breathing it in. But another way would be to say that the perfume of, say of a woman, has passed through a room and the woman’s gone but the perfume lingers in the air and the sweetness of it lingers in the air. So if you’re pro or anti-Christianity you can choose which metaphor you’d like to have, but that essentially was the block of marble if you like that I had in front of me and the more I thought about it the more I was kind of chiseling bits out. It wasn’t until I came to write Dominion that I could that I could stress test that argument because the process of writing, of chiseling out the contours of the sculpture that I wanted. I didn’t know whether the block of marble would sustain that chiselling. Maybe it would all fall to pieces. Maybe I’d chosen a dodgy block of marble. Maybe it wouldn’t work. I feel I’m possibly extending this metaphor too far. But essentially, I couldn’t know until I wrote Dominion whether the argument that I thought I was making was in fact the argument that I turned out to make. And I think it was.

 

Fred: As we start sort of zooming into the contested, the broad category of Christian values, what counts as Christian values, I wonder if this religio, this link to the eternal is also connected to the universalism and the sort of notion that this faith really sort of covers all of humanity or should perhaps cover all of humanity. If those two concepts are sort of linked, because this is something that you come back to over and over. Maybe this sense of universalism is perhaps, and this is just me wondering and I’m curious to know what you think about this, almost an expectation in the West that our moral intuitions are self-evident. They’re obvious, and they should be held by everyone. And I wonder how much of that is maybe this perfume of universalism and the religio.

 

Holland: I think that one of those things: that we take our moral assumptions to be self-evident, I think that’s pretty true of every culture that’s ever existed. I mean, every culture tends to assume that what they think is obvious. Whether you think that your views and assumptions should be held universally by people, that’s much, much more unusual. And that is something very, very distinctive about Christianity. Islam also shares it and Islam emerges from the same late antique context. The religio, the bond that joins the church to heaven, there is only the one religio, there is only the one church. That is the claim of the church in the 11th century, the Latin church.

 

CHAPTER 2: THE ROMAN REALITY

Holland: But before Christianity, there were many, many religions. There were many links that would join the worshipper to the god and a religio could be a sacrifice or a building of a temple or celebrating a festival or something like that. Across the entire world, the Romans thought that there were religiones. They had the best religiones and the proof of that was that they had conquered the world, but everybody had a religio. Christianity changes that.

And I think that one of the reasons why Christianity proves such a successful fit for the late Roman Empire is that by the third century, every male in the Roman Empire who’s not a slave has been given citizenship, but they’re still practicing discordant religiones. So there’s a need for a single religio that can map onto everybody in the Roman Empire. And Christianity is perfect for that. And it’s really striking that centuries after the conversion of Constantine and long after most of the Roman Empire has become Christian, it’s very very unusual for people in the Roman Empire to think of Christianity as something that properly belongs to people beyond the Roman Empire. It’s seen as being distinctive to the Empire but when the Roman Empire collapses, certainly in the West, that is something that starts to emerge. So famously Patrick going to Ireland and preaching the gospel in Ireland.

Ireland was never occupied by Rome. So there you see a kind of glimmering of the notion that actually Christianity is for the world and of course there’s an enormous amount in the Christian scriptures that sustains that because Christ, when he tells his disciples to go out into the world and preach the gospel, he’s not saying just go out into the Roman world, he says it means the whole world. The universalism of the Christian gospel is something very, very powerful. And I think that one of the ways in which you can trace the descent of, let’s call them secular values in the modern West, from the Christian seed bed, is the way in which liberals in the West tend to assume that their values are indeed universal in exactly the way that a Christian centuries ago would have thought.

 

Fred: Definitely. We’re going get back to the point on secularism because I think a lot of people see it as a rejection of religion and even Christianity in the West. But you make that very interesting connection between secularism and, in fact, this sort of universalism in Christianity. Just to sort of hone-in and sort of close the loop on Rome, how much, in your view, were these Christian vows, the Roman empire sort of adopting this religio of Christianity and how it may be existed in a political form before. Maybe Caracalla being the precursor of Nicaea, perhaps.

 

Holland: Yes, absolutely, because Caracalla is the guy who says every free male in the Empire can become a citizen and sets up the problem for which Christianity turns out to be the solution. That you need a single religio for a single Empire.

 

Fred: There’s a lot of very, very early Christian values that seem to be a good fit for the Roman imperial project. To what degree do you think that these values were in fact shaped by Rome, for instance, at Nicaea, or perhaps even earlier? There’s many, many of these, but you see how many doctrines could be viewed as perhaps in the political or imperial interest of Rome.

 

Holland: I think Christianity is a really radical break with what had gone before, but obviously, it’s like an ocean into which mighty rivers are flowing. So there’s no question that the universalism of the Christian message, I think is powerfully informed by the universalism of the empire. Virgil says that the gift of the gods to Rome is imperium sine fine, empire without limit.

So it’s easy for Christians growing up in the Roman Empire to have vast horizons, much, much vaster than they would have done in a period before Rome, before the era of Rome’s universal empire. So I think that’s indisputably an influence. Obviously the inheritance from Hebrew scripture, from Jewish practice is so enormous that it barely needs mentioning. The influence of Greece is also huge.

Greek philosophy, Plato is really the kind of the godfather of Christian theology and Aristotle threw out much of the Latin Middle Ages again, massive influence. Behind much more kind of occluded influence, particularly behind the kind of the Jewish influence, is the influence of Persian dualism. The notion that the universe itself is morally constituted and that there are rival principles of good and evil.

That is not a form of dualism that either Judaism or Christianity takes up. But clearly, the sense of the cosmos as a stage for a titanic battle between good and evil, that is a great theme of the Christian mythology, and that also is a part of it. So I think you can see that all these various elements helped form Christianity, but there are aspects of Christianity that are radically subversive, particularly of Greek and Roman assumptions, I think.

 

Fred: And I suppose you would include the elevation of the weak and the dispossessed as one of those.

 

Holland: Yes, absolutely. And the paramount symbol of that is the cross, which for the Romans is an emblem of their power. It’s an emblem of a governor in a province to put to death those who are rebels against Rome. They are treated like slaves because they’ve submitted and so therefore they’ve acknowledged the mastery of Rome. If they’re rebels, then they are rebelling against their rightful masters.The cross is, paradigmatically, the fate that’s visited on a slave, because it’s not just excruciating, but it’s very, very public. It’s not just that Jesus is executed, it’s the way he’s executed that is so significant. And the maneuver by which Christians upend Roman assumptions and say that actually it’s the cross that is the emblem of the triumph of the crucified over the crucifier is a manoeuvre so mad that the first person we know who preaches it is Paul, because his letters are the earliest Christian documents, and it lies at the heart of what he is writing to the various churches across the Mediterranean. But he’s always a little bit embarrassed about it. What he’s saying, to the average Greek and the average Roman, must seem absolute madness.

What’s mad about it isn’t the fact he’s saying that a man has become a god or a man is a god, because the Romans are very familiar with that. Julius Caesar had become a god, Augustus had become a god. What is mad is the idea. Julius Caesar was a great conqueror, Augustus the first emperor. I mean these are divine figures, but somebody obscure, criminal, in a out-of-the-way place, it’s just mad to think that this guy could possibly in some way be God.

That’s what’s radical and subversive and the sense that it’s radical and subversive I think endures throughout the lifetime of the Roman Empire in the West and afterwards. It’s really only around the millennium, 1000 AD, that you start to get pictures of Christ actually dead on the cross and suffering on the cross. Up to that point it’s simply too shocking, too taboo a thing to illustrate. So the sense of taboo around it continues for a millennium.

 

Fred: You close the book, and we’ll get back to that. This strange power of Christianity is emanating from that image and how different it was from Greco-Roman values.

 

Holland: Yeah, and I think that we’re so familiar with the image of the cross that we’re inoculated against the strangeness of it, and maybe it took a thousand years for people to reach that inoculated stage.

 

Fred: Going back to Christian values, so we’ve got the universalism, we’ve got the cleansing of darkness into light, sort of a Minichian, almost like Zoroastrian perspective, the elevation of the weak and dispossessed, the last will be the first, the notion that weakness or even victimhood can be a sign of divine favor. A lot of these are discussed; you see them around. But a couple of them that are much less discussed and that you evoke in Dominion, are commonly seen as being kind of part of the rational enlightenment, but you find the link with Christianity. One is secularism or even the separation between church and state. You quote at some point an Indian historian who writes, “Christianity spreads in two ways, through conversion and through secularization.”

One may think that secularization is the rejection of Christianity and perhaps religion as a whole, but how in your view is even secularism kind of a symptom of Christianity?

 

 

CHAPTER 3:

Holland: Well, I talked about how it emerges from the great convulsions of the 11th century and just to go into a bit of detail about what they were specifically. What happens in the 11th century is that revolutionaries, and you can call them revolutionaries I think, seized control of the commanding heights of the most prestigious of all the churches in the Latin world, and that’s Rome. They capture the papacy and they use the prestige and authority of the papacy to lay claim to an authority that no previous pope had ever thought to aspire to. And their ambition in doing this is in a sense to baptize the whole world, to cleanse the world of sin and join every Christian soul to the radiance of heaven. That’s the religio that they see the church as embodying. To do that they have to separate the church from the flux and filth of the fallen world, of the saeculum. And that includes emperors and kings. This is the radical moment, because up until that moment, emperors and kings, and indeed aristocrats more generally, had taken for granted that they not only had a right but a duty to participate in the dimension of the supernatural, as well as of the earthly.

It’s called inheritance. Every king had taken this for granted. Every ruler across the whole of Eurasia, across the whole world took this for granted.

Fred: They were all gods on earth.

Holland: It’s not that they’re gods on earth, but say a Roman emperor, so Constantine or his heirs or Charlemagne who seeks to reconstitute the Roman Empire or the emperors who rule in the 10th and 11th century, they don’t think they’re gods but they think that they’ve been given their throne by God. That they therefore have a duty to the church and that if there’s if a pope is misbehaving then they have a possibility to get rid of him and appoint a new one.

This is unacceptable to the reformers because their argument is that the church is the only religio, the only bond to heaven, and therefore you cannot risk having that contaminated.

If you like, the church is like a kind of virgin dressed in radiant pure robes and every attempt by an emperor or a king to interfere with that is like a kind of greasy smudged fingerprint from a rapist pouring at the virgin purity of the church. That’s how it’s conceptualized and therefore their grubby fingers have to be removed completely and the stains that they’ve left cleansed.

And to do that the emperor has to be forced to submit and there’s a kind of iconic moment in this in 1073 when the emperor Henry IV kneels in the snow outside the great fortress of Canossa in Italy and the pope absolves him of his sins because the pope has excommunicated the emperor and essentially dissolved the authority that he had enjoyed. It’s a great clash of wills. And the clash between Empire and Pope continues for decades and decades and decades, and in a sense is never entirely resolved. But essentially by the middle of the 12th century, the notion that the dimensions of religion, the dimensions of the cyclone are distinct, is really starting to bed down. And that’s that that understanding survives the Reformation.

 

CHAPTER 3: THE PROTESTANT INFLUENCE

Holland: And the Reformation gives it a new spin. In Protestant states, in the 17th into the 18th century, religion comes to have a kind of dual meaning. On the one hand, religion is something that is private. It’s the individual thing that you feel in your heart that joins you to God. I mean, a very Protestant idea that it’s focused on the individual’s experience of grace.

 

Holland: At the same time, a religion is also something public. So you could say, what is the religion of England? Its a massively political topic throughout the 16th and 17th century. And this is then an understanding that the British settlers export. The British settlers in Canada bring this understanding to Canada and equally to what will become the United States.

Also British merchants and then soldiers who are going to a very ancient country like India, they’re taking it as well. Protestant missionaries and politicians and fact-finders go to India and they say, what is the religion of, they don’t call them Indians, they call them the Hindus because they’re going to Hindustan. So what is the religion of the Hindus?

And it’s a mad question because people in India don’t have a concept of religion. It doesn’t exist. It’s something that’s very distinctive. It’s a Protestant understanding of how you divide the world up. But you can only see the world through the eyes that you have, through the lenses that you have. And so British administrators in India look around and they say, well, the Hindus have all these beliefs, they have all these understandings of the divine and of man’s purpose and of time and all kinds of things. So this must be the religion of the Hindus. They coin a word Hinduism to explain what it is that the Hindus have.They frame Hinduism alongside Christianity and Islam as being religions that are distinct from something called the secular. In India this makes no sense at all, until it does because the British rule India for 200 years or whatever. They institute English as the language of power in India and so the elites who take over India when the British leave are speaking English. It’s like that asbestos or the perfume whatever you want to use. They have breathed it in without realizing it and so India, when it becomes independent from the from the British, is nevertheless constituted as a secular Republic, both of which are Latin words. And India remains a secular Republic to this day, but there are obviously massive tensions there, which you can see in the premiership of Narendra Modi. Modi’s idea of Hindutva, the idea that the British called Hinduism is not a religion, but is something that properly should be the air that everyone in India breathes. This is deliberately counter-pointed to the secular inheritance that the founding fathers of India had inherited from the British without realizing that it was a very culturally contingent inheritance.

 

Fred: Wow, very interesting. Do you see part of that as surviving today? Even our conception of science has the, if you want the perfume or the asbestos to it, right? Do you see it today as sort of the expectation that the secular state, as distinct from the right to practice whatever religion you want in your private life, that the secular state now is like the sole locus of legitimacy. That for the political community this right kind of flipped over from the church to now the secular state being the one that is 100 % legitimate inside of a political community to have all the power. Is that also kind of a remnant of this wall?

 

Holland: Well, I think that although the notion of the secular does not evolve as an answer to the problem of what you do with a state that contains a large number of competing religious perspectives, that is the role that it comes to have. So again, to stick to Britain, there is a national church, a Protestant national church is established because it is assumed that this is what every country needs. The assumption that there can be only one religio. Even after the Reformation, Protestants hold to it just as much as Catholics do.

There are lots of people in England who feel that the national church is almost as bad as the Catholic church. And this is a crucial factor in the collapse of England into civil war in the 1640s and the establishment of the abolition of the privileges of the Anglican church under Cromwell, the removal of the monarchy. A kind of proto-secular understanding that essentially everybody should have the right to practice what they want and that no one church has the right to impose its convictions and its beliefs on other people.

This is kind of challenged when Cromwell dies and the monarchy is restored and the Church of England is restored, but it is kind of written into the settlement that prevails in England that people who come to be called independents or dissenters or whatever, so that’s Quakers, Baptists, Methodists, whoever, that they have the right to practice outside the Church of England. And many of these have emigrated from England and have been doing so since the end of the 16th century and the time of Elizabeth I and going to New England, to Massachusetts, where you have a kind Presbyterian system or to Pennsylvania, if you’re Quakers.

That notion of the secular is kind of inherent in the freedom of religion that is established in America and on both sides of the Atlantic. Therefore you can see how a sense of a secular state serving as a kind of neutral space that allows Anglicans and Quakers and Methodists and in the long run Catholics as well, and Jews, all to do what they want to do.

This is very convenient for people. Voltaire, when he visits England, he saysif there was one religion, there’d be tyranny. If there were two religions, there’d be war. But in England, there are kind of like 400 and they all live coexist very happily. And the same thing is experienced by people who go to the New World, who go to New England.

 

Holland: In the Anglo-American world, that notion of the secular has grown and grown. Today, Canada would be a prime example of a state whose line of descent from Protestant England is very clear. Its understanding of secularism is very Protestant.

You have freedom of religion and by religion it means what you personally believe in. But that imposes on those who are not Protestants a requirement to become that little bit more Protestant. That’s true of Catholics, so I think the Catholic Church in the Anglosphere has become ever more Protestant, but it’s also true of Jews, it’s true of Muslims.

 

 

Holland: So, I mean, this is probably the most controversial and tricky relationship that the secular state has to face now is what’s its relationship to its Muslim citizens. Because what the secular state is saying to Muslims is you can have freedom of religion, but that requires you to accept that Islam is just religion. What a secular state is not saying to Muslims is you can have an Islamic state. You can go back to how the caliphate existed in the 16th century where, kind of like the Hindutva that Modi wants, you have Muslims who want literally an Islamic state where everything is determined by Islam. That’s not what Canada is offering. It’s not what Britain is offering. It’s not what America is offering. So what those states are offering it to Muslims is freedom of religion, but you have to be religious. And the same is true, mutatis mutandis of other Western states as well. So France would be kind of a contrast, but also not.

Holland: Its route to secularism, to laïcité as the French would call it, is a different one but I mean fundamentally it’s the same deal when you have the French Revolution. Jews who previously had identified themselves as a people, the nation of Israel, are offered citizenship of France but the deal is that they no longer consider themselves as belonging to the nation of Israel. They have to consider themselves as belonging to a religion called Judaism and no Jew had ever called what they belonged to Judaism because that was a Christian word it had been coined by a Christian writer in the second century as “Judaismos” and it had been kind of counter-pointed to Christianismos, Christianity. Essentially what the French Revolution does in France is to force Jews to French Jews rather than Jews who live in France and citizens of the state.

 

Fred: Citizens of the state, you write in the book, everything to the Jews as individuals, but nothing, right?

 

Holland: Correct and obviously the same thing is now happening with Muslims in France and you can see again that there are massive massive tensions there because actually, you were asked right at the beginning.

Is Christianity’s universalizing tendency unusual? Yes it is and secularism has inherited that. Secularism is also universalizing and assumes. I think, secularists assume that everything can be kind of a big tent. Everyone can be brought into the big tent, including Islam, even though Islam is a civilization that’s just as ancient, just as complex, just as sophisticated, just as full of contradiction and complexity as Christianity.

 

Holland: But liberals and secularists in the West tend to think of it as a religion and that therefore as a religion it can be brought into the big tent without acknowledging the fact that historically Islam was not a religion, it was something quite different.

 

Fred: That’s right. We’re telling you, you have to practice a religion. You can’t cross over into overtly political activism or changing the law in fundamental ways that would make it in your view more compatible with Islam. So does the West in a sense just need to be more honest about the fact that it is imposing a limit?

 

Holland: Well, I mean, this is the question. Does it need to be or should it maintain its hypocrisy? Because I think that stating bluntly to Jews or to Christians or indeed Catholics, well, you’ve got to become a bit more Protestant if you want to live in the secular state. I don’t think that that would help that would help the secular state one little bit.

 

Fred: Right. That’s what I sense in your writing.

 

Holland: I think it’s fundamental for the success of the secular state that it pretends to be neutral. That is what it claims. We are neutral between religions. But of course it’s not, because it’s siding with one particular understanding of what a religion is.

 

Fred: But if I may offer a little defense to Protestantism, and I have a lot of Protestant friends and I myself am Jewish, I appreciate the thinking and the philosophy of a lot of Protestant thinkers. One of the habits I find there is almost to-a-fault, a humble and almost self-deprecating tendency. That’s what I find.

But in the defense of this Protestant sort of way of understanding the split between religion and let’s call it the religio and the secular state, is there not something properly universal from the following standpoint, from the standpoint that we live in very, very large states, which are, whether they should be or not, they are, as a matter of fact, extremely diverse in bringing together people from very, different parts of the world, with very, very different belief systems.

And if we start with the idea of peaceful coexistence, then we would almost need to impose a kind of a limitation on the right to pursue your religion, which some of them emerge from very, very political projects in the past, projects of conquest, so on and so forth.

 

Holland: Of course. Every empire has had a kind of dominant philosophy.

It’s not possible to live in a state and not have a controlling orthodoxy that provides the frameworks in which people say of different beliefs or faiths or whatever coexist.

Holland: The question is can any of these frameworks ever be truly neutral. I don’t think they can be.

 

Fred: Agree.

 

Holland: I just don’t see how they can be. The Romans are often praised for their tolerance. And they’re tolerant in a certain way, because they assume that everybody is worshipping the same gods, effectively. So why would you not be in favor of that? But if there are people who cause trouble or whose beliefs and practices are not compatible with Roman order, then they wipe them out. Of which the Druids would be an obvious example in Britain.

And in due course, the Romans also come to have a very troubled relationship with the Judeans, the people of Judea, who I actually think that their coexistence with the Romans was perfectly fine. I mean, the Romans thought they were mad and weird, but they thought everybody was weird.

The Jews may only have one God, the Judeans rather, because I think that using the word Jew muddies the water because it brings in all kinds of anachronistic assumptions. The people of Judea are odd in the opinion of the Romans, but the Syrians are odd because they dress up as women and cut off their testicles, and the Egyptians are odd because they worship gods with animal heads and so on. The Judeans end up, for complicated reasons to do with extortionate tax demands from Nero, getting in a riot and then committing the fatal error of wiping out a legion, which means that the Romans are then duty bound to exact a terrible vengeance. And they obliterate Jerusalem in a way that the previous city that they’d obliterated in that manner was Carthage.

The Carthaginians without their temples, without their mother city, although people continue to speak Punic, the language of the Carthaginians, they effectively fade away. They cease to be. The civilization of Hannibal fades away. And I think the Romans, when they destroyed Jerusalem, assume the same thing will happen. But it doesn’t because the Judeans have this inheritance of scripture that enables them to endure and kind of mutate and become, I guess you could call them Jews. A people defined not by a temple with ritual sacrifice as they had been, but the people who were defined by their inheritance of scripture.

And so the Romans, they have to kind of put up with them. And then for Christian Europe, what do you do with Jews? Very difficult question. I mean, there are many different solutions, lots of which aren’t great for Jews.

And then the Muslims come and the Muslims have what the Christians don’t have, which is a divinely sanctioned framework for ruling people who are not Muslims. The Quran dictates that those who are not peoples of the book, by which essentially the Quran means Christians or Jews, you gotta get rid of them, wipe them out. But Christians and Jews, they’re fine, they practice an accepted form of worship, but they have to pay a distinctive tax and they have to acknowledge their inferiority.

Holland: Because this is kind of hardwired into the Islamic scriptures, in a way it provides a much more stable basis for ruling a multicultural empire than say Christianity does, because the Christian scriptures have no sense that they’re going to be holy to states that are going to have to rule people who aren’t necessarily Christians. It’s not something that Jesus is worrying about or the gospel writers are worrying about but Mohammed, or wherever the dictates in the Quran are coming from that, does provide that rubric.

Holland: And in similar way, everywhere you go, whether they’re cities or empires or secular states, you have to have a controlling framework. A sense that a particular understanding of the state is in power and determines how the various peoples who live within that state should relate to one another. And I don’t think that the secular state of a Western liberal democracy is any different to that. It’s as culturally determined, as culturally contingent as the caliphate or medieval Spain or wherever you want to look at.

 

Fred: So is it fair to say it’s the hypocrisy of neutrality that you take issue with?

 

Holland: I don’t take issue with it, I merely observe it. I note it. I don’t even call it out, because as I say, it’s perhaps not very helpful to call it out. I think that States often depend on self-deception. A state is a kind of a mythic structure. And if you prod and poke too much at the myths that govern a state, then that can generate problems. I don’t always think that educating yourself is necessarily what’s good for a state.

 

CHAPTER 4: BREAK WITH TRADITION?

 

Fred: Okay, so interesting. I want to see if you have similar thoughts about another idea that’s part of our mythology as the, let’s call it secular, rational, and scientific, and rock and roll loving, pop culture loving, Western society, but that also you see as having roots in Christianity. And that is the idea of the break with tradition or the break with the past.

Religion, Christianity in the West is often equated with tradition, right? And to reject the past, it’s viewed like we’re breaking with that. We’re moderns, right? We’re progressive. That’s what we do. We break with tradition, therefore we are not Christian. But you’re right that even this is a Christian move in certain ways. From Paul teaching that, for example, strict adherence to Jewish ritual is not necessary, the idea that all you need is love in your heart, and of course Christ himself turning away from the Jewish authorities at the time. So there is a strand of breaking with tradition that’s deeply sort of embedded inside of Christian values.

 

Holland: Paul, who is the earliest witness to Christianity, talks of a kind of blinding moment of revelation where he sees the risen Christ and is transformed and is born again. Many, Christians since have experienced that. the idea of being born again or of being baptized, having your sins washed away, this is an individual expression of something that Christians over the course of history have often wished to see for the entire world.

And so that’s what the papal revolution of the 11th century is all about. It’s an attempt to give to Christian Europe the experience of being born again that individuals experience. That process of revolution, where the 11th century, the papal revolution is Europe’s foundational revolution, it establishes a template that every subsequent revolution in a sense has kind of rehashed. It’s characterized by scholars and intellectuals seizing the commanding heights.

It sees warriors enthused by a renewed sense of mission and purpose going out to fight the enemies of this, they call it reformatio, a remaking of the world. So warriors going out and fighting in defense of this reformatio to help cleanse the world beyond the limits of its power, and these are what we call the Crusades, whether the Crusaders are fighting in Holy Land or in Spain or in the Baltic or wherever. Also you see the ambition to humble, particularly kings, to bring them low, to overthrow classes of people who serve as a block on the aspiration to see a new Jerusalem built on the face of the earth. You also see a desire to kind of write new rules, a sense that old laws are inadequate, that you need to kind of write new ways of behaving.

In the 12th century you start to see people gathering from across the whole of Europe in places that come to be called universities. The idea that these are universal meeting points for scholars is kind of hardwired into the name. And throughout the 12th century, they’re formulating what Judaism and Islam has, which is a kind of framework of law, but Christianity doesn’t have. What laws do you have for a Christian people? You can’t rely anymore on the secular laws, on the laws of the common law of England or the Roman law that prevails in Italy or France or whatever. So you need a framework of law that enables you to understand what God’s understanding of law is. And this comes to be called canon law. The scholars are going through all the various canons and decrees of the various church councils that have met, but they’re also looking at the gospels and Christian scriptures and they draw a very momentous conclusion from their study of Christian scripture. In the gospels they read that Christ says that the rich have a duty to give food to the hungry, and water to the thirsty, and clothes to those who are naked, and shelter to those who are homeless.

These scholars in 12th century Italy, in Bologna, extrapolate from this the conclusion that if the rich have a duty to give these things to the poor, then the poor have the right to the things that the rich give them. Essentially, the poor have a right to food and to water and to clothing and to shelter and so on. And that these rights are fundamental because all human beings are created in the image of God and so therefore humans have rights. This again is a very radical notion that is born out of this convulsive process of revolution, and which again will have a very very long afterlife. And so the Middle Ages in Europe, which conventionally I think are seen as a benighted period of superstition and backwardness, it’s the opposite. This is Europe in a revolutionary state and the processes of revolution work themselves out for centuries and centuries and many of these consequences are terrifying.

So the Crusades being a kind of an example and the anxiety that the new kind of the revolutionaries have about those who have been left behind. So you might say call them the deplorables, people whose understanding of Christianity is superannuated, who’ve been practicing the kind of Christianity that was practiced in the 9th century, in the 13th century and you can’t have them.

So you set the Inquisition onto them, you set the Crusades onto them, you get rid of them. But equally another challenge is reformers who say that the process of reform hasn’t gone far enough and that the Roman Church is giving up on its revolutionary spirit. That the magma of revolution and reformatio is calcifying and becoming something frozen. in the 16th century, this breeds another process of reformatio, which we call the Reformation. This time it takes as its target the revolutionary state that is the papal, the Roman Church. The Pope, far from being seen as the standard bearer of revolution, comes to be seen as the whore of Babylon, the Antichrist.

 

Holland: Again, Christian revolutionaries in the Reformation are kind of doing the same thing as the reformers back in the 11th century had done. They’re saying we need a rebirth, we need to be born again. You see kind of new orders of scholars who need persecution in a way to kind of force their message through. They need to stamp down on those who are recalcitrant. And I think, you see the same thing repeating through the French Revolution, through the Russian Revolution, even in a kind of very attenuated form, in what we’re going through now. There is a certain inquisitorial zeal about those who are kind of hyper-progressive. And I guess who would hate to think that they stand in a line of descent from medieval inquisitors, but they do I think. And I mean we are all of us consequences of our history. We can’t buck our history. We grow up in cultures that are shaped by it. We have the DNA of the past in our brains and in the fabric of the societies that we live in and we can’t buck it. It’s just the way it is.

 

Fred: It’s hard to acknowledge that sometimes. You see that in the culture war, right? You mentioned that this was almost functioned as a kind of a civil war inside of Christianity. You mentioned, some people, for example, more on the Christian right would not perhaps find that troubling because they claim their Christianity very proudly. But on the left which views itself as progressive, as scientific, as rational, as standing against Christian scripture, for example, you also have  revolutionary zeal that you also think is connected to that history.

 

Holland: Yeah, I mean, and I think the key decade is the 60s, which I think in the history of…

 

Western Christianity is almost as important as the 1520s, which sees the Reformation take off. What’s interesting is that you have the shadow of the Second World War and the Holocaust and fascism. And the fascists and particularly the Nazis had actively repudiated not just institutional Christianity, but its most fundamental values. So the French revolutionaries and the Russian revolutionaries had turned against the institutional church, but they still believed that the last will be first and the first will be last. That was the kind of essence of it.

But the fascists didn’t believe that at all. I mean, they thought that might was right, that the strong should prevail over the weak, that the strong absolutely should trample down the weak. And also, of course, they repudiated the universalism, which was also a part of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. The idea that their revolution was for everybody.

The Nazis absolutely repudiated the Paulite the notion that there should be no Jew or Greek. Of course, the Nazis thought absolutely that Jews and Greeks were completely different. And the Nazis identified the Greeks with the Aryans and they saw the Jews as people who had infected the Aryan world with the kind of sanctimonious, pucelle unanimity of Christianity. And therefore, if the new Aryan right was to last for a thousand years, they had to get rid of the Jews.

One of the most gruesome paradoxes of Christian history is that the Jews were persecuted for having given the world Christianity. And the consequence of that in the 50s and 60s is that Europe exists in the shadow of the Nazi repudiation of Christian values so thoroughly that they ironically no longer need Christianity.

Before fascism, most people in the West, even if they didn’t believe in, or weren’t practicing Christians, would say, what would Jesus do, and do it. That would be how they would decide what was right or wrong. But after the war, people say, what would Hitler do and do the opposite? And I think that’s been the determining morality that has governed the West and certainly Western Europe since the war.

 

Holland: We don’t need the Christian mythology anymore. We don’t need Satan when we’ve got Hitler, and we don’t need hell when we’ve got Auschwitz. And simultaneously in the 60s, you have the kind of civil rights movement, which is a very overtly Christian movement. It’s the last great Christian, consciously Christian, campaign to influence politics of a major Western state and it’s incredibly successful. It’s steeped in Scripture, the Old Testament and the New Testament.

 

CHAPTER 5: THE HOLY CULTURE WAR

Holland: Martin Luther King called Jesus an extremist for love but of course the language of slavery and liberation that he drew from Exodus was also fundamental to his rhetoric and his imagery. What happens in the 60s is that feminists and gay rights campaigners and so on, they see how successful the civil rights campaign for has been for black Americans and they want a bit of it as well but the problem or fact is that for feminism and even more for gay rights campaigners this is much less ostensibly compatible with the heritage of Christian scripture than the campaign for civil rights for black Americans had been.

Martin Luther King was trying to wake white Protestants to a sense of their moral responsibilities that white Protestants, properly, they needed to recognize it. But it was obviously much more contestable whether the sympathy for the oppressed, the sense that the last should be first, was this applicable to feminist campaigners? Was it applicable to gay rights campaigners?

Essentially that is the kind of the fissure that has opened up in Western liberal societies between conservatives who are perfectly content to continue to identify themselves as Christian and indeed increasingly come to glory in that title and progressives who are on the opposite side of that ideological divide. It’s not just that they’re not Christian, they actively see Christianity as part of the problem, as something to be rejected. And yet their impulses and their assumptions remain unbelievably Christian.

That I think explains a lot of the confusion that people feel amid the culture wars at the moment. I say in Dominion that the culture wars, it’s not about Christians against progressives. It’s about an argument within people of Christian heritage about what aspects of theology matter more. To maybe fix on the most combustible one: the argument over trans rights.

On one level, this clearly seems a repudiation of Christian doctrine and indeed of Jewish doctrine because we’re told in Genesis that God creates man and woman separate and there is no tolerance at all throughout the Bible for any notion that men can become women and women can become men. But equally, in the campaign for trans rights, and notice that word rights, where is the notion of rights coming from? It’s a Christian inheritance.

 

Fred: Derechos humanos.

 

Holland: Absolutely and the trans rights are framed as being important because trans people are the most persecuted in society and there’s a sense that gay people had been persecuted. They now have their rights, so properly trans people deserve their rights because they are now in a position of persecution and that is taken for granted I think by people who push that argument, that this is indeed an argument.

But why do people think that? Why is the fact that they’re persecuted? Why is the fact that they don’t have acceptance? Why is that in and of itself an argument for them having these, being granted these rights?

It’s really only an argument that makes sense if you assume as Christ had taught that the last shall be first. Without that, it makes no sense. There’s nothing obvious about it at all. And it suggests, however odd it may seem to both sides of the argument, the rocket fuel in the arguments of trans right campaigners is as fuelled by the inheritance of Christian scripture as the arguments against trans rights.

 

Fred: I think they’d be horrified to come to that realization. In a sense, the trans bear the cross today. That’s the sort of the view, right?

 

Holland: In modern politics, so much of modern politics today, is an argument about who is on the cross. Who’s on the cross? If you’re on the cross, then you have power. You see it also in the debate over Israel and Gaza. There’s a sense in which the argument, the massively polarised arguments over that conflict, are about who is on the cross.

Fred: That’s right. And both sides play to that. Because that’s how you curry favor from Europeans and the Christian world and the Western world.

 

Holland: Absolutely. I mean, back in the previous Israeli incursions into Gaza, when was it? 2014, I think.

 

Fred: Yeah, 2014, 2015.

 

Holland: The Hamas Information Ministry said to people who were online talking to Arab sympathizers to emphasize the degree of the struggle, martyrdom, the fight against the Israelis. They said, but if you’re talking to people from the West, emphasize how many babies have died, how many women have died, are suffering. Reading the cultural assumptions of both societies very very shrewdly.

 

Fred: And in a sense reading them better and more accurately than those societies receiving the message see it in themselves.

 

Holland: If you’re a goldfish in a goldfish bowl you don’t realise “I’m in water”.

 

Fred: Harder to see your own blind spots. Very interesting. And perhaps because we’re coming up on time, the last perspective that I found super, super interesting is the same kind of pattern of the blind spots that we see with science, the idea of science itself as a new reformation, right? So you write in the book that science is in a sense, the doppelganger of Christianity. It emerged out of Christianity and in sense saw itself as the negative of Christianity or sought to define itself in opposition to it. I find that a very, very interesting argument is the view of science that I see almost operating as a dogma that is defended as an article of faith, for example, in the inherent material nature of the universe. The universe is inherently material. There’s a dogma you cannot contest.

When I read that argument in your book, I felt like, wow, that it seems like almost a great overcorrection for the notion that the universe is inherently divine. How can we sort of distinguish that in a new identity?

 

Holland: I said right at the beginning of this talk how the English language is so freighted with Christian assumptions that we don’t really notice it. And science is a classic example of that. Science only takes on the meaning that it has for us in the 21st century, in the middle of the 19th century. Still in the middle of the 19th century, science could be, say, at Oxford to describe the philosophy of Aristotle. And it comes to have the meaning that it does. The signification gets cemented in over the course of the 19th century precisely because, as you say, it is counterpointed to religion. So religion is about what you can’t know for sure. It’s about revelation. Science is the opposite of that. And so it is defined by what it’s not. It’s defined by religion. But religion itself, of course, is a word that is freighted with all kinds of Christian implications. And what you see in the 19th century, it’s a notion that’s promoted by Thomas Huxley in Britain, Darwin’s bulldog and the man who coins the word agnostic, he kind of pushes this idea that religion and science are things that have always existed and that they’ve always been in conflict.

But the thing that’s so interesting about this is that although Huxley defines himself against the church, against any notion of being a Christian, he’s such a Protestant figure, because this is also an argument that is starting to be incubated by the Protestant churches, and they see it as a way of attacking the Catholic Church. It’s particularly popular in America where there’s a growing anxiety about the influx of Catholics into the United States.

This idea that you can see how it’s not religion per se, it’s Catholicism has always persecuted science. And the exemplar of this is Galileo, and Galileo is kind of enshrined completely erroneously as someone who’s tortured by the Inquisition or whatever. I mean, he absolutely isn’t. And actually in that whole argument, you could say that it’s the Inquisitors who are playing the part of the agnostics, because they’re simply saying we want proof.

Galileo couldn’t provide the proof but it’s still a very very popular conviction among say evangelical atheists, and I use that word evangelical advisedly, that there’s always been something called science. That the ancient Greeks had science, there was science in the library of Alexandria. If the library of Alexandria hadn’t been burnt down by Christians, then scientists in the library of Alexandria would have invented space rockets. This is such nonsense that is being promoted.

 

Fred: It’s a mythology. It’s a new mythology.

 

Holland: It’s a mad mythology. It’s even less historically based than the maddest myths that Christians are promoting and essentially so much of evangelical atheism is essentially Protestantism without a belief in god.

 

Holland: So the idea that Christmas, say, is a pagan festival, the origins of that lie with Puritans who are being anti-Catholic. I think a lot of modern evangelical atheism is a form of kind of anti-popery that doesn’t recognize its own origins, ironically, because invariably they’re great enthusiasts for evolution.

But they tend not to recognize that their own convictions and assumptions and prejudices are themselves the product of evolution.

 

Fred: The church bells that Richard Dawkins enjoys listening to.

 

Holland: I admire and respect Dawkins because he does recognize that to a degree that most atheists don’t. Nietzsche, the greatest of all modern atheists, he recognized it too.

 

Fred: Very, very interesting. I mean, we could keep going on. There’s just so many layers and so much depth to your argument and not only in this book, but in other books. And I really invite people to put in the work because it’s most definitely worth it. I’m just curious to know, have you started embarking on your next significant piece of work at the moment? Or is it just still at the blocks level? Where are you at with that?

 

Holland: My life has been taken over by the podcast I do. It’s very, very demanding and relentless. I’m going to carry on doing that, but I need to carve out the time to start on my new book, which I’ll be doing in the new year. And that is a book about the 1960s as the new reformation. And the provisional title is All You Need Is Love.

 

Fred: Aha, very interesting. And I saw that right when you started talking about Paul and the notion of all you need is love. From Paul to the Beatles right there, the connection point is such a powerful vector.

 

Holland: Right, so the Beatles will certainly have a role to play in the story.

 

Fred: That’s amazing. Wow. Thank you so much. This was as insightful as interesting. And I can’t wait to go back to the transcript and just re-study all the different layers and the distinctions because I find that it adds so much richness and so much depth to our understanding of ourselves as a society. Like you say, it’s the DNA of our history, sort of intuitively embedded in us in ways that we are still not fully conscious of. And I think one of the best ways to become conscious of this is the kind of historical work that you do. I’d like to thank you on behalf of your many, readers who get a lot of value from this work and I hope we get to talk again.

 

Holland: That is so kind of you to say so. Very flattered that you think so and thank you very much for having me.

 

Fred: Thank you so much and I hope we get to speak again in the future.

 

Holland: Me too. Bye bye.

 

Fred: All the best, bye bye.