The Making of the Western Minds

Readers unconnected to the Twittersphere may be unaware that, in a recent furore around eugenics, hardened New Atheist Richard Dawkins concluded “we could breed humans to run faster or jump higher. But heaven forbid that we should do it.” A quirk, perhaps, of language – Dawkins was hardly begging a God in whom he does not believe to intervene in the world. But it is also possible that Dawkins’ Christian upbringing, and immersion in Christian society, may have more to do with his objection to eugenics than just the language with which he deplores it.

Tom Holland’s latest book, Dominion, proceeds from a very similar premise. It is a book, for those who haven’t heard of it, all about how the history of the West is stamped with the unmistakable and distinctive mark of Christianity. Holland tours readers around an unlikely (and yet meticulously curated) succession of specimens, in an attempt to argue that the ethical and moral fabric of our society is much more deeply Christian than secularists and liberals would like to think.

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Dominion is alive with the subversive delight of its author. Holland takes evident pleasure in reading Christian values into the Church’s most unlikely allies. He points out for example, that participants in the 2017 Women’s March, in spite of their apparent hostility to a Church perceived as patriarchal and repressive, ‘were summoning men to exercise control over their lusts, just as the Puritans had done’. The expression, indeed, of criticism for the Church’s patriarchal and repressive tendencies, is also apparently founded on Christian values. This is a typical example of Holland’s central point: modern secular liberals, who may see themselves as enemies of Christianity, unknowingly vindicate its values in the way they go about opposing it. America’s culture wars, over issues of foreign policy, transgender rights, abortion, and so on, are to Holland ‘less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions.’

It is hugely tempting to read a book like Dominion as if it is a happy hunting ground for Christian apologetics. Christians in evangelistic settings have long enjoyed quoting CS Lewis and Solzhenitsyn to surprise listeners with the unexpected beauties of Christian doctrines, and the apparent compatibility of Christianity with people’s existing worldviews. Perhaps evangelists will add Holland to their burgeoning bibliographies.

There are, I think, problems with using Dominion like this. Although Holland establishes very clearly and thoroughly the essential parts to his thesis (the distinctive Christianity of values like charity and protection of the weak, and of the scandalous moral superiority of the oppressed over the oppressors), it is sometimes less than clear that the outcomes of value systems so constituted are in themselves Christian. Ben Sixsmith’s excellent review of Dominion (available at https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/the-origin-of-the-secular-species/) hits the nail when he writes that Holland ‘squints too hard’ in his attempt to find Christian motives everywhere. The good-humoured prose occasionally picks out parallels that are self-consciously facile:

‘Band Aid were hardly the first to ask whether Africans knew it was Christmas time. In the nineteenth century, the same anxiety had weighed heavily on evangelicals.’ (p482)

‘John Lennon… offered the watching world a prescription with which neither Aquinas, nor Augustine, nor Saint Paul would have disagreed: “all you need is love”.’ (p472)

Robespierre’s bloodthirsty ‘ambition of eliminating hereditary crimes and absurdities, or purifying humanity, of bringing them from vice to virtue, was redolent not just of Luther, but of Gregory VII.’ (p387)

Of course, Holland’s argument does not rest on the strict accuracy of claims like these. His case is built on thousands of years of history, and I am not trying to reduce his thesis to these 3 examples. Nonetheless, his narrative method does use this technique often, with varying degrees of plausibility. Countless episodes are narrated to bring out parallels, usually with either the Cross, the Reformation, or both. Holland’s point is not necessarily that the characters in his book are Christians, or even that their actions serve to advance Christianity. Rather, subtract all Christian assumptions and metaphysics from them and they make little sense. Take the example of Robespierre. Moral fervour for the establishment of a just and even-handed social order is not in itself a Christian phenomenon. The universality of Jacobinism – the desire to purge society of the offending ideas and people, the conviction that such activity brings about an objective and undeniable improvement – is what marks it out as being heir to Christian assumptions. The many facile parallels in Dominion are not meant to stand as true in themselves. Holland instead invites readers first to scoff at them, and then to ponder how there is a truth buried in them that belies their ludicrous appearance. Over 525 pages, and 2,500 years, it’s very effective.

Nonetheless, I think an important question for readers of Dominion is ‘What is Christianity?’. Holland insists on reading Christian motivations into stridently atheist Enlightenment figures, contemporary social justice activists, even early persecutors of the Church. Readers will search in vain for a tight and explicit definition of Christianity in his pages. Instead, they are left, by the weight of numerous episodes, with the general impression that earnest search after transcendent truth, and bold defence of the weak against the strong, is Christianity, rather than being convinced that these things derive from something else which is the essence of Christianity.

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John Gresham Machen lived and wrote in a time of great controversy on this very question. Expelled from Princeton Seminary and the Presbyterian Church, he founded Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. During a great conflict between the ‘liberals’ and the ‘fundamentalists’ in the American church, Machen refused to take an explicit side, highlighting multiple problems within the ‘fundamentalism’ of many of his friends and allies, including his mentor, Benjamin Warfield. His book Christianity and Liberalism was an attempt not to vindicate fundamentalism as constituting the true church, but to draw clear lines between the contents of the Christian gospel and the motifs of liberalism which often claimed Christian heritage for themselves. Although first published in 1923, Christianity and Liberalism reads at times as if it were written as a direct response to Dominion. The following quote exemplifies this perhaps most clearly:

“The great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology”. (p2)

What Holland presents as derivative of the Christian faith – especially implications of the spirit of reformatio and the moral superiority of the downtrodden, but more generally attitudes and events which are framed in Christian terms – Machen calls ‘destructive’ of it. 

Consider, for example, the realm of things which might be called ‘supernatural’. First, here is Machen asserting the vital importance of something supernatural in the constitution of the Christian faith:

“No product of sinful humanity could have redeemed humanity… But a Saviour has come from God. There lies the very root of the Christian religion.” (p90)

To Machen, the supernatural occurs when God intervenes in the world with direct creative power – outside of normal means. Rejecting deistic and pantheistic ways of describing God, Machen attributes all natural laws to God’s power through means, and all miracles to His power expressed directly. The foremost miracle is the redemptive miracle of the Cross and Resurrection. Central, then, to Machen’s expression of what Christianity is (and this from a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant), is things from the realm of the supernatural. By way of contrast, here is Holland writing about the denial of Christ’s divinity and resurrection in Spinoza’s “Theological-Political Treatise”:

“Even the most scandalous of his claims…were merely Protestant assumptions pushed to a radical extreme… Spinoza was privately disdainful of any notion that Jesus might have risen from the dead.” (p363)

Holland designates this view of Christ as a ‘variant’ of Christianity because he draws a parallel between Spinoza’s unwillingness to affirm the supernatural with the Reformers’ disdain for extra-biblical practices in the Roman Catholic Church. To him, this is sufficient to qualify the Theological-Political Treatise as a ‘Christian’ work. But the stripping back of Jesus’ uniqueness and authority, by denying the central redemptive miracle of his work, totally disqualifies Spinoza from this epithet as far as Machen is concerned. 

This example fits rather neatly into Machen’s wider point – that Christianity and Liberalism are different and ultimately irreconcilable systems of thought. This is how he defines liberalism:

“The many varieties of modern liberal religion are rooted in naturalism – that is, in the denial of any entrance of the creative power of God” (p2)

Remember also how he defined the ‘root’ of Christianity:

“No product of sinful humanity could have redeemed humanity… But a Saviour has come from God. There lies the very root of the Christian religion.” (p90)

Machen draws out the differences between Christianity and liberalism across a wider number of dimensions than is practicable to discuss here. But his central point – that Christianity rests on doctrine, and thereby on specific views of what God is like and what people are like – asks an interesting question of the thesis of Dominion: where should we draw the line between things which seem to proceed from Christianity, and things which are Christian?

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Holland and Machen, of course, have entirely different purposes in their writing. In a sense, everything I have written above poses absolutely no problem to Holland. His thesis is about what modes of thought occur only in societies with a Christian heritage, and where those modes of thought come from. Machen sets out to do something so utterly different that it might seem strange that I’ve written about both in one post. His examination of Christianity is done with the express purpose of discovering what it is necessary to believe in order to be a Christian, and whether some popular strains of liberal thought are reconcilable with this basic gospel. But I think the contrast is useful, for the following reasons.

What Holland points to as the crisis of liberalism (its dearest preconceptions are derived from the Christian history of its society) can also be seen as a crisis for Christianity. He challenges those of us who subscribe to institutional Christianity to deal with the reality that many around us unknowingly subscribe to Christian doctrine. I say in response, after Machen, that Christianity from the start has not been an ethical movement, but a historically rooted relational teaching about Jesus Christ. That teaching is that he is Lord and Saviour. The problem faced continually by Christians is that we must hold to the fundamental tenets of Christainity’s historical and objective basis, while also working in society for the good that we believe God wants us to uphold. This reaches a crisis point when the society around us accepts much of what we believe to be good, but wants nothing to do with its foundation. Christianity in the West faces a crisis of relevance even as our society wakes up to its Christian heritage. Today, Christian ethical teachings are either taken as read or entirely repudiated. Meanwhile, the foundational claims of Christianity – that Jesus died for our sins and rose for our forgiveness, as the rather simplistic formula has it – remain as subversive and counter-cultural as ever. It would be a great shame, for both the West and for Christainity, if the truly foundational currents are left by the wayside.

While Holland drives repeatedly at things which Christian metaphysics require to be true, he is habitually loose with the label ‘Christian’. His case is therefore overstated. Christainity is often the soil in which his seeds germinate – it establishes a moral legitimacy to the social and political activities which he describes – but this does not mean that the seeds themselves are Christian. Modern secular liberalism is not a Christian phenomenon – even if a substantial part of its metaphysics and ethics looks Christain in origin. John Gray, reviewing Dominion in the New Statesman, salutes the book as a “devastating demolition job…on the sacred history of secular humanism.” He argues with glee that “social justice warriors…would not exist without the moral inheritance of Christianity.” I would gently question that, for the reasons I set out in the above section about Machen. The distinctive moral character of Christianity springs from the way that Christianity frames humans’ relationship with God – here is Machen again:

“If we would follow truly in Jesus’ steps, we must obey the first commandment as well as the second that is like unto it; we must love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength” (p80).

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I conclude by urging anyone who has read this far to read Dominion. It is a wonderfully compelling book – for a weighty non-fiction title, it reads with the pace and excitement of a novel. It’s also hugely important for anyone taking an interest in contemporary western politics and culture because its reach is so wide. You may never come across a book which so adeptly moves from St Paul to Darwin to Angela Merkel. In the words of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, it’s “monstrously erudite, wickedly joyful and ahead of the established consensus, on average, by four years, three months and two days”. I couldn’t have put it better.