If you don't have time to read my review
of Tom Holland's "Dominion," here it is in three words: Read this
book. A few more words: Buy this book, give this book to friends, and encourage
them to read it. "Dominion" is not only rich, seductive, eye-opening,
conversation-sparking, and occasionally surprisingly witty, it is urgently
necessary. Read this book – before it's too late.
Why do I endorse "Dominion" so
zealously? Let me tell you a few stories.
I was a schoolgirl in New Jersey. I sat
next to "Aisha." She moved like a butterfly and, quiet and shy, she
talked to no one in class except me. She was a constant doodler, and the
margins of her notebook blossomed under her pen with imaginary arabesques every
bit as lovely as she.
One spring day, as we strolled side by
side, this gentle young lady said to me, "When the time for jihad comes,
if you don't convert to Islam, I will have to kill you."
In years to come, Muslim students,
again, out of the blue, would say things like "Jews cause all the problems
in the world;" "Jews are not human like the rest of us;"
"We need to kill all the Jews;" "If a woman cheats on her
husband, it is his duty to kill her;" "Men must get a new, younger
wife once they grow bored with their aging first wife;" and, "I'm an
atheist and no longer believe in Allah. If my parents found out, they'd kill
me. They have no choice. It's their duty."
A friend was madly in love with her
Christian boyfriend. Her family discovered their relationship, threatened to
kill her, and demanded that she marry a stranger imported from the Middle East.
She hated them, she hated leaving her boyfriend, and she hated the man she
married. But she obeyed, and remained married to the man, though he beat her,
till the day he died from what she hoped everyone would believe was a natural
death.
When I mention these matters to others,
I always emphasize how nice these people were. My interlocutors explode.
"How can you call them 'nice'? Are you crazy?"
My interlocutors just don't get it. Yes,
every last one of the above-mentioned friends, students, and colleagues, were
nice people. The kind of charitable, reliable, hard-working people who
contribute to society in difficult, demanding jobs. Three have become teachers,
one is a prize-winning and published writer, and one is a soldier in the US
army. One is a doctor. Why, then, do nice people say these things? They have
been socialized by their culture and beliefs to say them.
"But, but, but," my
interlocutors insist. "Their consciences should have told them that they
were believing bad things! Why didn't they question?"
These folks think that they are
operating from objective truth. "Everybody knows" that your
conscience is primary, that anti-Semitism and placing men above women and
Muslim lives above kuffar lives are "bad things," and that
questioning assertions is a necessary step in making decisions.
In fact, none of these are objective
truths. They are cultural inheritances from the Judeo-Christian tradition. My
Muslim friends grew up in a different tradition, where unquestioning submission
to authority is valued. This tradition told them that, for example, male needs
are to be placed before females at every turn. Displayed prominently in the lovely,
suburban living room of one friend was a life-size headshot, in an elaborate
golden frame, of the family's youngest child, a boy. Around him, like
satellites, were tiny photos in more modest frames. These were his older
sisters. That wall display was just one of a thousand reinforcements of male
supremacy – a male supremacy and female inferiority that are
backed up by the Koran and the hadith.
When I urged Aisha critically to examine
what she'd been told, to, as a thought experiment, let herself think for just a
few moments that maybe Allah was not really god, and that jihad was not a moral
pursuit, she immediately told me that she had been taught that even a moment's
doubt would condemn her, as a kuffar, to eternal damnation. She cited Koran 49:15. So, no, Aisha, as a nice
person, could not even privately, silently, momentarily doubt what she had been
taught. Her job, as a good Muslima, was to submit unquestioningly to what she
was told.
Living and working overseas, I confronted
equally nice people repeatedly. Nepalis I came to love dearly supported the
caste system and did not intervene when a low-caste, orphan boy slowly starved
to death in their village, in full view. A woman was bleeding to death after
childbirth. The touch of her female blood was spiritually polluting. Spiritual
pollution causes a Hindu to be reborn into an inferior lifeform, as a loathsome
animal, or, even worse, an Untouchable. A Westerner tried to elicit help in
transporting the dying woman to a roadhead and a life-saving Jeep ride to a
Western-run hospital. No one would help the American carry her
"filthy" body. Because the American had touched her, he was now
spiritually polluted and his service in that village was over forever. In
Africa, loving parents handed their daughters over to old women, their
fingernails black with grime, armed with filthy shards of glass or even just sharpened
stones. The old women would gouge out the daughters' clitorises.
Later, in grad school, I took a course
on Ancient Greek novels. These novels were utterly superficial. Pretty women,
valiant men, all upper class, won victories. Slaves were there to be raped,
humiliated, mocked, dehumanized, and killed without compunction. The authors of
these novels lived their intellectual and imaginative lives inside a box as
restrictive as Gitmo. It never occurred to any of them that an ugly person
could be wise or good, that a pretty person could be shallow and boring, that a
victory was no real measure of human worth, and that slaves were every bit as
human as their masters.
After these novels, our class read
"The Acts of Paul and Thecla." Though contemporaneous with the
Ancient Greek novels, this two-thousand-year-old-document, like a mustang
broken free from the corral, galloped into an entirely different mental and
spiritual horizon. Thecla, a young girl, overturns her entire surround: her
parents, her arranged fiancé, the entire Greco-Roman Pagan world. She hears the
Christian Gospel, and explodes: I am a human being, because God made me so, and
no mortal bosses me around! My life has meaning that transcends physical
reality. You can kill me for my beliefs; I will go to Heaven. Thecla concludes
this at a time when the paterfamilias had every right to declare that a female
infant could be exposed at birth.
I bubbled over, trying to share with my
professor and fellow students my excitement. Didn't everyone see the contrast
from the Pagan novels, with their shallow concerns and contempt for the mass of
humanity, for anyone who wasn't a high-born Greco-Roman, and Thecla, who had
discovered the value of her own, individual life, and was determined to
celebrate that life, even if she were immediately, as her society decreed, publicly
eaten by a lion for her defiance?
My professor and fellow students, rather
than celebrating with me, looked at me as if I'd brought bubonic plague into
class. Christianity was the bane of mankind, they insisted. Pagan women were
happy and free, they insisted – contrary to the evidence of the texts we had
all just read. Christianity imprisoned women, they insisted. When Greco-Roman
Paganism died, it set humanity back a thousand years, they insisted. Why didn't
I realize that? I was punished with a final grade of "B," the lowest
grade I ever got in grad school.
One last example of nice people doing
abominable things. When working on my book "Bieganski," I read the thinkers who
inspired Nazism, including Madison Grant, Alfred Rosenberg, and Heinrich
Himmler. Looking through their eyes, applying their facts gleaned from Social Darwinism,
Neo-Paganism, and Romantic Nationalism, one could see Himmler's
"logic" when he argued, "Whether ten thousand Russian females
fall down from exhaustion while digging an anti-tank ditch interests me only in
so far as the anti-tank ditch for Germany is finished." That the life of a
woman who is not a member of your tribe has any value at all is simply not a
Nazi concept.
We hold these truths to be so
self-evident that we don't even bother to contemplate where we got them: that
all men are created equal. And note the word "created," there. A
single, loving, creator God made all of us in God's own divine image, thus, our
lives matter. Individual conscience is primary. Assertions should be examined
critically before being accepted. Parents do not have the right to kill their
children. What we touch cannot damage our spiritual state.
Poorly educated Westerners think that
"everybody" believes these "self-evident truths." This
foolish assumption is demonstrated by a popular social media meme that states,
"Buddha was not a Buddhist. Jesus was not a Christian. Mohammed was not a
Muslim. They all taught love. Love was their religion." In some iterations, the meme features
images associated with Taoism, Hinduism, and Judaism. In other words, all
religions are one. They're all about love.
Not everyone is so blind. China is
notorious for both historic and contemporary female infanticide. Even so, the 2011 death
of Wang Yue shocked the nation and the world. "Little Yue Yue" was
two years old. She wandered into the street, was immediately hit by two
vehicles, and lay bleeding as at least eighteen adults stepped around her body.
Video
of her fatal accident went viral.
China asked, "How could this
happen? And how can we prevent it from happening again?" Chinese people
themselves offered an interesting reply, a reply that called on traditions from
both the West and the East. "We don't have a Good Samaritan tradition, and we need one
to prevent events like this in the future," some Chinese people said.
"What we do have is shao guan xian shi, that is, don't get
involved if it's not your business, and guanxi, that is, the network of
people who are important to you." These Chinese concepts inevitably call
to mind Confucianism, a tradition that emphasizes family and a social order
built on rigid hierarchies and each person assuming his or her superior or
inferior place, as assigned at birth.
In contrast, Jesus tells the Good
Samaritan story in the New Testament. It's not just one parable among many.
Jesus tells it in answer to the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?"
The Good Samaritan ethic is central to Christianity. Jesus was, of course, a
Jew. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks said that
"The one command reiterated more than any other … thirty-six times said
the rabbis, is love the stranger for you were once strangers in the land of
Egypt." In most cultures, there is a morality for those close to oneself,
and another morality for outsiders. Jesus was preaching an exceptional morality
that transcended tribal boundaries.
In recent years, woke culture has
denigrated Western Civilization as racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic,
imperialist, Orientalist, etc. One university professor told me that the very
words "Western Civilization" are racist and should be uttered only in
condemnation.
At the same time, prominent New Atheists
including Steven Pinker and Michael Shermer have
aggressively peddled the fiction that anything they like that has arisen from
the Judeo-Christian tradition is merely the result of the unseen hand of "progress." Martin Luther King's famous
quote, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice" encapsulates this myth. There is some force out there, some
unseen hand, maybe it's "the universe," that makes everything,
including people, improve as time passes. Other New Atheists, including James Lindsay
and Helen Pluckrose, with a religious fervor, depict anything they like about
life today as a generous gift from a handful of French and English
Enlightenment-era atheists.
That these New Atheists are wrong is
readily apparent. Ancient Egypt lasted about three thousand years. The Palette
of Narmer is an artwork frequently cited as evidence of Egyptian stability, if
not stasis. It was created c. 3200 BC and its aesthetics would work in Egypt
three thousand years later. Australian Aboriginal culture lasted for tens of
thousands of years, and might have continued unchanged for tens of thousands of
more years had Europeans not arrived. The posited unseen hand of progress, that
somehow magically arrives with the passage of time, would never have brought
modern medicine, electricity, universities, Andy Warhol, Suffragettes,
Abolitionists, Shakespeare or the "Me, Too" movement to Egypt or
Aboriginal Australia.
Something happened that made the West
different. What was that something? Christianity, or, perhaps more accurately,
the Judeo-Christian tradition, is Tom Holland's unambiguous and richly
supported reply. In offering this reply, Holland marks himself with the scarlet
letter of heretic. Cultural relativism? No, he insists, not all cultures are
the same. If you share Western values, you will inevitably identify some
cultures as better than others. Are you a hip, wokester globalist, and do you
believe yourself to be beyond Christian ethics? Get over yourself, Holland
insists. If you are a cutting-edge, atheist multiculturalist, you have still
been formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition.
But wait – Holland is not offering any consolation
or reason to hope to those still clinging to the "old time religion."
Institutional Christianity is "cratering," he acknowledges, Pew
Research shows that the "religiously unaffiliated" are perhaps
the world's fastest growing religious identity group. Holland is not sanguine
about this; in fact, his prognostication is as grim as that offered by
Dostoyevsky, "Without God, everything is permitted."
Holland's prediction is as terrifying as that in William Butler Yeats' 1919
poem, "The Second Coming." "Things fall
apart; the center cannot hold … what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to
be born?" The rough beast in question is a Pagan one, reborn after the
marginalization of the savior born in Bethlehem. Maybe Nietzsche was correct, Holland
has said in recent interviews. The Nazis showed us what
a Western power that completely overturned its Christian inheritance could be
like. Maybe things will go very bad very quickly once the religiously
unaffiliated dominate culture. Or maybe not. It may take centuries to see.
No, Holland is not a grand inquisitor
brandishing a cross and wearing a scarlet Monty Python costume. In fact,
Holland, an atheist, is neither a Christian nor a believer. He grew up
infatuated with the Ancient world and dinosaurs, not angels or saints. His
study of the Ancient World brought home to him how alien the pre-Christian and
post-Christian populations were to each other. Romans thought and did things
that would be unthinkable to us, he realized. He had the same epiphany that I
had when I read "The Acts of Paul and Thecla."
Nor does Holland attribute Christianity
to any supernatural power. Holland presents a Christianity that is stitched
together of pre-existing parts, including Roman emperor worship, Greek
philosophy, Zoroastrian concepts of good and evil and European Paganism. In
Holland's view, it is Christianity's innovative use of those pre-existing parts
that changed the world. Throughout his book, Holland eschews any supernatural
influence. Groundbreaking, history-changing saints, conquerors and popes
respond to material conditions in pragmatic ways, given what they have to work
with. What they have to work with is a remarkable tradition that elevates a
crucified savior. This is the process that changes the world: influential people,
for thousands of years, at all levels of society, struggling to conform, or at
least appearing to conform, their behavior to Christian teaching.
Christians will like some of the
movements and attitudes Holland associates with Christianity. These include the
scientific revolution, the concept of the individual, freedom of choice, a
"rare dignity" and security accorded to women, the weakening of the
patriarchy and tribalism, the elevation of romantic love, the suppression of
incest, the strengthening of the nuclear family and the weakening of extended
families, separation of church and state, hospitals, universities, the ideal of
equal justice under the law, the question mark, education of the masses, innovation,
linear time, freedom of conscience, the abolition of slavery, the elevation of
reason, and human rights. Christians may like some others less: secularism, gay
rights, Richard Dawkins, John Lennon's "Imagine." Holland commands a
massive library of material, and when he argues for Christianity's influence on
Dawkins' evangelical atheism and Lennon's egomaniacal messiah complex, one must
treat his arguments with respect, a respect he earns.
This reader was genuinely touched by
Holland's compassionate approach. Holland works to see the world through the
eyes of the people about whom he is writing, including people, like the Marquis
de Sade and Konrad von Marburg, whom the reader will easily loathe. Yes, it
makes sense for Ancient Persians, Greeks, and Romans, who do not share the
"man is made in the image of God" concept, to torture and crucify
their enemies. Yes, it made sense for Catholic Cardinal Thomas Cajetan to
struggle, but gently, to rein in Martin Luther. And, yes, it made sense for
Luther, given his personality, agenda, and beliefs to resist the Catholic
Church. This is the first time I've read about the Reformation in a book that
sees, not bad guys versus good guys, just human beings acting on their limited
perceptions.
No, Holland does not present a
whitewashed version of Christianity. I found utterly fascinating how he identifies
the tremendous challenges Christianity presents believers, and how those
challenges were handled by believers over the course of two thousand years.
Love your neighbor as yourself. The Samaritan, that is, the despised, is your
neighbor. In Christ there is no male nor female, no Jew nor Greek. It is easier
for a camel to go through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter
heaven. There is only one God; when horrors occur, that one good, loving God
was in charge. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. How did
believers handle these explosive teachings? How did they affect the status of
women, homosexuals, and Jews?
Holland uses larger-than-life figures to
show how Christians have lived their interpretation of these teachings. He
revivifies Boniface, a seventh-century missionary who brought Christianity to
Pagan Germanic tribes. Boniface was attacked by armed men during his final
mission. He told his Christian companions to lay down their arms and accept
death without resistance, as per Christ's words to overcome evil with good.
Holland also presents Christian warriors like Charles Martel, the Hammer, who
defeated invading Muslims at Tours in 732. We read of Princess Elizabeth of
Hungary, who gave away her wealth to the poor, who built a hospital and worked
in it daily, who put a leper in her own bed, and who refused to eat anything
"that might have derived from exploitation of the poor." We also read
of a succession of popes who heeded the temptations of worldly power, including
private steam rooms. We read of Pope Innocent III, who green lit the
Albigensian Crusade, a shameful episode and low point of Catholicism, but who also
made it a point to extend charity to prostitutes. Innocent endowed a hospital
and specified that it "offer refuge to sex workers." Innocent also
offered remission of sins to any man so charitable as to marry a prostitute so
that she could escape sex work. We read of a Catholic Church, that, for
centuries, dismissed as ignorant fantasies any talk of Satan-worshipping
witches, and we read of that same church succumbing to hysteria and the
burnings of alleged heretics. And even then, in the allegedly "dark"
twelfth century, Peter the Venerable traveled to Muslim lands to work on a
translation of the Koran. Peter would, he said, address Muslims "not with
arms, but with words; not with violence; but reason; not with hate, but with
love." In the eleventh century, Saint Anselm referred to Jesus, Saint Paul,
and himself as a "mother," and he invited Queen Matilda to take on
the role of Christ. Matilda was "a woman as indomitable as she was
pious." In spite of institutional misogyny, priests "knew that their
Lord, risen from the dead, had first revealed himself, not to his disciples,
but to a woman." "This weak woman," Pope Urban said of Catherine
of Siena, "puts us all to shame." He invited Catherine to lecture his
cardinals. The contradictions, complexities, richness, are all dizzying. The
reader is grateful to Holland for his guidance through this garden, bursting
with flowers, thorns, bugs, exotic and yet familiar life.
And that's just the Middle Ages. With
the Reformation come men like Jan Zizka, a one-eyed, Czech Hussite general who
commanded that a drum to frighten his Catholic enemies be made of his corpse's
skin. "Christian teachings, far from blunting hatreds, seemed a
whetstone" in the subsequent two hundred years of religious wars between
Catholics and Protestants. "Men who come after us will never believe what
miseries we have suffered," wrote one survivor of countless atrocities
committed in the name of Christ. Jesuit astronomers bringing advanced science
to Chinese royal courts; conquistadors in the New World confronting horrific
human sacrifice and committing atrocities of their own; Puritans forbidding the
celebration of Christmas and befriending, and then making war on Indians; the
life cycle of parasitic wasps; the anarchist Diggers; the Bone Wars of
competing paleontologists; "Lord of the Rings," and Jewish atheist
Spinoza's respect for Christ, a Quaker woman, crossing borders alone and on
foot, and walking into the Turkish Sultan's presence and sharing with him the
Good News: Holland juggles it all with the grace of a ballet dancer. He finds
the common threads that unite these events and render them, as distant as they
are from each other, into integral chapters of the same long book that began
with our dating system: anno domini, the year of Christ's birth.
"Dominion" is 611 pages long,
notes and index inclusive, and it covers 2,500 years of history. Holland
commands the legerdemain necessary to conjure a page-turner out of material
that might be lugubrious in other hands. Holland's style is always "in
media res;" that is, he begins each passage right in the middle of
some key historical event, without, initially, providing the reader with exhaustive
orientation.
The reader has just gotten comfortable reading about American
Quaker, vegetarian, and abolitionist Benjamin Lay, a four-foot-tall hunchback.
Turn the page, and suddenly you are reading about Jean Calas, an
eighteenth-century French cloth merchant, who has been accused of murdering his
own son. Then, like Paul Harvey, Holland sketches in "the rest of the
story." In fact Calas' grisly execution for a murder he probably didn't
commit became a cause célèbre for Voltaire. Holland thus creates an
impressionistic view of his material. Like Monet, Holland doesn't draw every
vein on every leaf in the garden; rather, he sketches major scenes in ways that
suggest the larger landscape. Holland doesn't outline every skirmish between
every Enlightenment figure and Catholicism; rather, he focuses on gripping
stories, like Calas', and big name celebrities, like Voltaire. I found
Wikipedia to be my constant companion in reading Holland's book, because I
craved more of the "who, what, when, where, why, how" background than
Holland provides.
I absolve Holland of any failing. Had he provided those
details for every person or event he mentions, his book would grow to
encyclopedia length. I am entirely confident that Holland could write the
encyclopedia; he is a one-man library. Just the
tower of bookcases rising behind him in a recent YouTube video is
intimidating.
"It will vanish and shrink. I
needn't argue about that; I know I'm right, and will be proved right." The
speaker predicting Christianity's demise could have been Pontius Pilate,
Robespierre, or Himmler. In fact it was John Lennon, who was, in his own
estimation, "more popular than Jesus." In recent interviews, Holland
has been asked what will happen to Western Civilization once the religiously
unaffiliated outnumber believers. Holland, along with Douglas Murray, has toyed
with the concept of atheist Christian, that is, someone who doesn't believe,
but clings to the best of the tradition. I, for one, don't think this will
work. I am a person of faith, and Christ's sacrifice informs my behavior. I'm
very aware of my own inner Marquis de Sade, my own inner Himmler, and, no, I
wouldn't be the same person without the example of the creator of the universe
undergoing horrific torture for my account, and saying, from his cross,
"Father, forgive them." Holland can't predict the future and neither
can I, but his book is a priceless introduction to a past too precious for us
to let go.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
This review first appeared at Front Page Magazine here