CHAPTER 3: SHAPED BY THE CHRISTIAN STORY
OCCASIONALLY I AM ASKED which of the conversations and debates I have hosted are my favorite. I often joke that the question is like asking me to choose a favorite from among my four children. But if I had to choose (a show, not a child!), then Tom Holland’s dramatic clash with A. C. Grayling will always rank as one of the best.
Holland had just published his magnum opus, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. At over six hundred pages, it is a massive but extremely readable history of the way Christianity has shaped Western culture.
It is a magisterial piece of historical writing. The central argument is that, despite the protestations of modern secularists, the Western world’s commitment to human equality, dignity, and value is intrinsically Christian in nature. Holland makes his case by galloping through two thousand years of history, from the Greek and Roman empires right up to the Beatles and the modern Me Too movement. Historical vignettes from across the centuries set the stage for the revolutions in politics, religion, science, and culture that are themselves aftershocks of the Christian revolution of the first century.
Needless to say, the faults and misdemeanors of the church down the ages are also laid bare. Yet time and again Holland returns to the “molten heart” of Christianity —the claim that God himself died the death of a slave.[1] That radical idea, says Holland, laid the foundation for the abolition of slavery, the modern welfare state, and even the freedom for people to reject religion in the modern world. Ironically, even modern atheism owes its origins to Christianity.
Consequently, it felt appropriate to bring A. C. Grayling —one of the world’s leading atheist spokespersons —on with Holland. I knew it would be a showdown, and the intellectual sparks certainly flew.
Grayling, the master of the New College of the Humanities in London, is a respected philosopher and public intellectual. He turns his hand to a variety of subjects but has often been an outspoken and eloquent critic of Christianity. His books include The God Argument, in which he seeks to demolish a range of philosophical arguments for theism, and The Good Book: A Secular Bible, an alternative (and in his view superior) library of wisdom to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, compiled from secular sources.
In the run-up to the debate, Grayling had also recently published his own magnum opus, The History of Philosophy. As in Holland’s book, Grayling sought to provide a narrative for the development of Western thought while cataloging the range of other philosophies that had emerged around the globe. Where they differed most sharply was in their assessment of the role of Christianity.
From the first page of the introduction, Grayling excoriated the church as a brake on progress historically. Having extolled the value of the art and literature produced by the Greeks and Romans, he turns to the Christians of the fourth century, writing,
Christian zealots smashed statues and temples, defaced paintings and burned “pagan” books, in an orgy of effacement of previous culture that lasted for several centuries. . . . It is hard to comprehend, still less to forgive, the immense loss of literature, philosophy, history and general culture this represented.[2]
This particular claim proved to be the first of several dramatic flash points in the debate between Holland and Grayling. Holland, a meticulous historian, repeatedly challenged Grayling to produce actual evidence of this “orgy of effacement.”
Grayling claimed the fact that we have, for instance, only seven of seventy plays written by the ancient tragedian Aeschylus is proof of the wanton destruction. But Holland pointedly repeated his request several times: How did Grayling know that “bands of Christians roamed around destroying copies of Aeschylus?” he asked. “We have no evidence for this whatsoever.”[3]
On the contrary, said Holland, it was the monks of the early centuries that Grayling so readily dismissed in his book that we should thank for preserving almost all the copies of ancient literature and philosophy that continued to be the bedrock of classical education and learning into the Middle Ages.
According to Holland, Grayling was one more atheist who had bought into a myth primarily perpetuated by the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon. Gibbon’s highly influential History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had laid much of the blame for the loss of classical civilization at the feet of censorious, marauding Christians. It is an account which later historians, like Holland, describe as “to put it mildly, not exactly what happened.”[4]
REASSESSING HISTORY
The version of history repeated by Grayling can be found in much of the literature of the New Atheists, for whom Christianity is perceived as having had a retrograde effect across the board. According to them, science, health, and ethics were all hamstrung by Christianity as it ushered in the Dark Ages and kept things dark for a long time. Only once the shackles of religion began to be thrown off during the Age of Enlightenment did rationalists, secular philosophers, and scientific pioneers get progress back on track.
But this popular narrative has increasingly been challenged by historians both within and outside the Christian fold.
One notable voice is Tim O’Neill, who runs the website History for Atheists. O’Neill is a nonbeliever himself but regularly critiques Internet skeptics who he says are mired in an “intellectually deadening and tone deaf combination of ideological bias and near total historical ignorance.”[5]
As well as regular skirmishes with atheists from the “mythicist” tribe (he may not believe Jesus was divine, but O’Neill is certain he existed), he regularly writes to correct those who parrot the claim that Christendom was responsible for a thousand years of superstition, drudgery, and persecution. In fact, says O’Neill (along with almost every modern scholar of the period), the Dark Ages were a period in which art, agriculture, and learning blossomed in ecclesiastical centers of learning established by the church.
O’Neill also writes to debunk a related skeptical assumption: that the West’s embrace of human values, rights, and democracy, and the accompanying rise of education, welfare, and science, are all the gift of a secular enlightenment that had finally managed to jettison its religious baggage.
Others have been telling a similar alternative story of how we got to where we are.
These include the late secular historian Rodney Stark, whose influential books such as The Rise of Christianity have reevaluated the countercultural nature of the early Christian communities. He has argued that Christianity was the pivot point that turned civilization in a radically new direction, from a culture in which many lives were regarded as cheap and expendable towards the valuing of every human life.
In recent years, works such as The Evolution of the West by Nick Spencer, Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart, and The Air We Breathe by Glen Scrivener have continued to press the ways in which Western culture’s beliefs about human dignity, equality, and flourishing were shaped not by our Greek and Roman forebears nor by rationalist philosophers but by the Christian story that ultimately overtook the classical world and from which the Enlightenment itself was shaped and molded.
Holland, then, is hardly alone in championing a reappraisal of the influence of Christianity on the modern world. Perhaps the reason he has become such a prominent spokesperson is that he has straddled both the secular and Christian worlds in doing so. Like Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, and others, Holland has a story of being a secular thinker who has nevertheless become increasingly attracted to the moral and spiritual qualities of Christian faith.
A CHANGE OF MIND
Holland has been open about his own changing relationship with Christianity. When I invited him to a discussion with eminent New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, Holland explained where his love for ancient history began:
I was the kind of child who loved dinosaurs. I liked them because they were big and they were fierce and they were glamorous, and they were extinct. . . . It was a seamless movement from Tyrannosaurus Rex to Caesar. The glamor and the beauty and the power and the cruelty of the Greeks and the Romans I found very appealing.[6]
Having been raised and confirmed in the Anglican church, Holland explained how his childhood beliefs fizzled out in his teenage years as the “dimmer switch” of faith seemed to get turned down:
I went to Sunday school and was very interested in biblical history, but I found them all a bit po-faced. I didn’t like their beards. I preferred the clean-shaven look of Apollo. In a way I was seduced by the glamor of Greece and Rome, so the first books I wrote about history were about Greece and Rome.
The early books included Rubicon, Persian Fire, and Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar and established his reputation as a bestselling author of popular historical writing.
But Holland’s journey through the classical world also served as a stark reminder of how utterly different his own attitudes towards life, death, and human existence were to those ancient forebears for whom slavery, sexual exploitation, and a disregard for the weak and vulnerable were part of everyday culture. “The more you live in the minds of the Romans,” he said, “and I think even more the Greeks, the more alien they come to seem. And what becomes most frightening is a quality of callousness that I think is terrifying because it is completely taken for granted.”
By way of example, Holland described one of Caesar’s campaigns:
Caesar is, by some accounts, slaughtering a million Gauls and enslaving another million in the cause of boosting his political career and, far from feeling in any way embarrassed about this, he’s promoting it. And when he holds his triumph, people are going through the streets of Rome carrying billboards boasting about how many people he’s killed.
Holland summarized what was so troubling about this: “This is a really terrifyingly alien world, and the more you look at it, the more you realize that it is built on systematic exploitation. . . . In almost every way, this is a world that is unspeakably cruel to our way of thinking. And this worried me more and more.”
This steadily growing awareness of how little he actually held in common with the culture of the ancient world was intensified when Holland turned his attention to late antiquity and the emergence of the Islamic empire for his book In the Shadow of the Sword: “There were aspects of Islam that were very familiar, but there were many aspects of it that again seemed deeply, deeply alien.”
In fact, the book and his accompanying TV documentary Islam: The Untold Story, which questioned aspects of the historicity of Muhammad’s life and the reliability of the Koran, led to intense controversy and even death threats from radical Islamists. As a liberal Westerner committed to concepts like freedom of speech and expression, Holland found himself again reminded of how peculiar his outlook was to many cultures both past and present.
It was obvious that the modern West’s particular view of the world, so foreign to much of history and culture, had not appeared out of a vacuum. It was the product of one particular story. “I began to realize that actually, in almost every way, I am Christian,” said Holland.
HUMANIST FAITH
Unsurprisingly, when Holland began publicly talking about his intellectual reorientation towards Christianity, his ideas were not met with universal agreement.
The historian (who is a keen Twitter user) would occasionally get into online spats with humanist spokespeople. They insisted that the concepts of human dignity, equality, and justice which framed their humanist morality owed more to classical civilizations and the secular enlightenment than Christianity. Holland on the other hand has increasingly insisted that the philosophy of secular humanism itself was a direct product of the Judeo-Christian heritage that birthed it.
He drove this point home during another flash point in his debate with Grayling (a vice president of Humanists UK) by pulling out a sheet of paper listing all the international cities where world humanist conferences had taken place since 1952. After reeling off London, Oxford, Miami, Washington, Oslo, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Buffalo, Hanover, and Boston, Holland pointed out that, with the exception of Mumbai in 1999, all the locations were in “basically Christian countries.” This, he said, was evidence that “humanism is a kind of godless Protestantism. It is in that sense as culturally contingent as everything else in the vast range and span of human civilization.”[7]
Others have argued in similar ways that the very concept of human rights that undergirds the humanistic worldview is itself radically contingent upon a Christian understanding of what it is to be human.
For instance, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), drafted in 1948 and forged in the aftermath of two World Wars, enshrines in its very first article that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”[8]
When I invited well-known humanist Steven Pinker to debate human morality and progress on an episode of The Big Conversation, the Harvard philosopher insisted that the document “has not a shred of Christianity in it.”[9]
At one level, Pinker is correct. The UDHR is ostensibly a secular document, deliberately drafted to allow people of many cultures and worldviews to agree on the language used. But that doesn’t stop the language from sounding almost religious in nature when it states that human beings are “endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”[10]
Pinker’s discussion opponent Nick Spencer argued that much of the document (which had been drafted in large part by Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian) drew on the notion of a “person” as defined by Catholic social teaching.
The document goes on to list numerous fundamental rights and freedoms around belief, justice, health, race, and education. In Pinker’s view, these concepts flow from the scientific fact that humans all share the same DNA along with their rational and emotional capacities: “The fact we’re made of the same stuff, we’re the same species, we all are sentient, we all have the capacity to experience pleasure and pain, we all have the capacity to reason. That is a pretty rock-solid foundation for universal human rights and universal human dignity.”[11]
But Spencer was skeptical:
I don’t doubt that many of my atheist friends are committed to human dignity or human equality. But I can’t see where the deep foundations for that are. I don’t think reason, in and of itself, let alone science, acts as a sufficiently robust foundation for that commitment. . . . I would push back on the idea that simply being rational or being made of the same stuff is enough to justify our humanism.[12]
Like Spencer, I find it hard to justify the idea that such lofty concepts as the inherent freedom, equality, and dignity of all humans can be grounded in abstract scientific facts or our capacity for reason.
What exactly is it about being born with the genetic identity of Homo sapiens that suddenly confers the UDHR’s long list of inalienable rights and freedoms upon an individual? Science itself has nothing to say on the matter. And when it comes to atrocities such as the Nazis’ eugenics programs, science has frequently been employed to the detriment of these rights.
An even more famous document, the United States Declaration of Independence, states that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”[13]
In this case, the framers of the Declaration were happy to employ religious language. But in reality, the “self-evident” nature of human equality and rights only seems self-evident to those who have inherited the same Christian assumptions that the founding fathers brought with them to the United States.
Contrary to the claims of contemporary humanists such as Pinker, the existence of these rights and freedoms is not at all self-evident in the absence of God. They do not present themselves simply by an act of rational reflection or by recognizing that we are made of the same stuff. For most of human history they were not recognized by the vast majority of cultures and are still not in many parts of the world today.
A notable atheist thinker who seems to have truly recognized the contingency of our embrace of human rights is Yuval Noah Harari. Commenting on the Declaration of Independence in his bestselling book Sapiens, he writes, “The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’? Evolution is based on difference, not on equality.”[14]
As Tom Holland has stated, secular humanists who believe in the existence of human rights and treat them as sacrosanct are being just as theological in their assumptions about reality as the Christian who believes they are conferred by a divine Creator.
EXPLAINING MORALITY
So how do we explain the grounding for this widespread belief in the moral value of humans? When it comes to human morality and how atheism tries to account for it, there are two separate arguments to be parsed out. The first one concerns the notion of morality itself and whether it is even a coherent concept in the atheist worldview.
In my first book, Unbelievable?: Why, after Ten Years of Talking with Atheists, I’m Still a Christian, I spent a chapter explaining why I don’t believe atheists have good grounds for believing in objective morality. Please note that this is not the same as saying that atheists are not moral. Most atheists naturally adhere to the same moral codes of behavior as the people around them. Indeed, some of my atheist friends are among the most ethical people I know.
However, in the absence of God, I don’t believe there are grounds to believe that such moral codes amount to anything more than subjective opinions or the fashion of the age. In a godless universe there is no ultimate moral standard against which our efforts can be measured. We are all making it up as we go along. The atheist may be happy to agree with this. “Morality changes with the times,” they may say, “just another subjective product of the socio-evolutionary forces that shape our cultures.”
The problem with this account of reality is that none of us actually behave as though our moral beliefs are simply the latest instance of a constantly evolving moral zeitgeist. In fact, when it comes to the most heinous acts of evil and the most generous acts of goodness, we treat morality as having a very fixed and real nature. When we declare racism to be wrong, we aren’t merely stating our current feelings about the issue; we mean that it has always been wrong and always will be. Our forebears who didn’t recognize this in the past were gravely mistaken, and we know better now.
But this view of a fixed and objective nature to morality is at odds with the atheist worldview. In a purely naturalistic account of things there is no moral arc embedded in the universe, no “ought” to the “is” of physical reality. How do we square this circle? In summary, I argued that, if there is indeed a “true north” to our moral compass —a highest ideal towards which life should be lived —then it must find its home in something beyond ourselves. If there is a moral law, then there must be a moral lawgiver. And the best candidate for that job is God.
However, whether or not an atheist is convinced by that somewhat philosophical argument, there is a second and separate issue that needs addressing: How did we arrive at the morality we currently inhabit? This is a historical rather than a metaphysical question. But the answer, in my view, still points back to God.
As historians such as Holland have made clear, there is a very specific story of how modern Western values were shaped by the Christian revolution that took place two thousand years ago. For the sake of brevity, I will sketch out just two key moral beliefs in our Western culture, the development of which were profoundly influenced by Christianity. First, our belief in human dignity and equality, and second, the belief in our duty to protect the weakest in society.
HUMAN DIGNITY AND EQUALITY
The first moral belief we’ll examine is the concept of the intrinsic dignity and equality of all human beings. Arguably, these are ideas that had their genesis (forgive the pun) in the very first page of the Bible. In its poetic opening chapter, Genesis 1:27 states,
So God created humans in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
Other ancient Near Eastern religions and pagan mythologies had their own creation stories too, but this one was different.
Old Testament scholar John Walton writes, “Mesopotamian literature is concerned about the jurisdiction of the various gods in the cosmos with humankind at the bottom of the heap. The Genesis account is interested in the jurisdiction of humankind over the rest of creation as a result of the image of God in which people were created.”[15]
This uniquely Jewish idea —that humans, both male and female, bear the image of the creator God and exist to become cocreators within his creation —placed an unprecedented deposit of inherent value and dignity on the human race. No other origins account put humans at the apex of the creation narrative, nor invested them with this unparalleled status.
Again, Walton writes, “Since all people are in the image of God, all deserve to be treated with the dignity the image affords.”[16]
Admittedly, many books could be filled with how inconsistently this ethic has been applied throughout history by those who claimed to be inspired by the Scriptures. Nevertheless, despite Christendom’s frequent failures to live up to its ideals, the assumption of an “Imago Dei” residing in each human being has been foundational to today’s secular framings of human dignity and equality.
However, the road from Genesis to our modern embrace of human rights didn’t run through Rome or Athens; it ran through Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Jerusalem.
Slavery in the Ancient World
The belief that all people should be treated with inherent dignity and equality of status regardless of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, economic status, or any other characteristic is so taken for granted by most people in the modern West that we barely question it. Yet to the majority of previous civilizations, it would have been regarded as bizarre in the extreme.
For most of human history the treatment of some types of people as less valuable than others has been the norm. The institution of slavery is one of the most obvious examples.
In the Greek and Roman world, slavery was regarded not only as essential to economic prosperity but also as part of the natural order of things. Aristotle summarized the attitude of his peers when he wrote, “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”[17]
In the early Roman empire, as many as one in five people were slaves. The buildings, infrastructure, and commerce essential to its civilization would have been built upon the backs of slaves who did the jobs no one else wanted to do. The slave trade was a booming market, and successful military campaigns were commonly the entry point for whole swaths of people to become enslaved to the victors.
While some slaves held positions of authority and would sometimes be able to work towards freedom, in general a slave was regarded as less than a person. They were not allowed to own property, had little recourse to justice or basic rights, and were typically subject to corporal punishment and, in some cases, summary execution. When the senator Lucius Pedanius Secundus was murdered by one of his slaves, the senate approved the execution of all four hundred of his household slaves as punishment.
What to our modern ears and eyes seems unconscionable was, to the ancient world, simply the way things worked. The life of a slave was cheap. This was especially true of the sexual exploitation of slaves. Whereas women were generally expected to remain faithful to their husbands, a male master was at liberty to satiate his desires with as many prostitutes and slaves as he wished. During his debate with A. C. Grayling, Tom Holland graphically described the uses to which slaves were put:
They were expected to be used as sexual objects. The Romans had the same word for “urinate” and “ejaculate,” and essentially the mouths, the vaginas, the anuses of slaves were regarded as akin to urinals; these are objects in which bodily fluid can be ejected by the master. And that is their role, absolutely taken for granted.[18]
Spending time immersed in the world of Greek and Roman culture was what had caused Holland to begin to appreciate the radical distinctiveness of Christianity. Now, to see the apostle Paul write, “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28) struck home as a revolutionary egalitarian statement about ethnicity, gender, and social status.
Likewise, Holland believes that the early Christians’ insistence on monogamy for both husband and wife and sexual abstinence for the unmarried was groundbreaking, especially because of the dignity it meant for slaves who joined the Christian community alongside free citizens:
The doctrine on sexuality that Paul preaches is deeply founded in this idea that slavery is something to be overcome and that everybody has been liberated by the sacrifice of Christ. He is saying that every human being, by virtue of Christ’s sacrifice and death, now has a value. And he specifically says that they have a bodily integrity. . . . That gave a dignity to a household slave that he’d never been given before.[19]
Many modern eyes have looked back on Paul’s insistence on chastity, monogamy, and the longstanding Christian sexual ethic it birthed as repressive and puritanical. But set in the context of ancient Rome, it was a rule of life that offered dignity and stability both to women and to slaves. The fact that most secular societies now observe mutual consent and fidelity as a minimal expectation of sexual propriety is a reminder of how deeply entrenched that Christian ethic remains, even when societies have discarded its other prohibitions. Holland even makes the case that contemporary movements like Me Too, which denounce the sexual abuse of women, are still fundamentally appealing to the virtues and values of self-control and mutual personhood that Christianity first brought to the table.
In recent years, other secular writers have also been recognizing the unique value of Christian monogamy in shaping the Western world. In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich argues that the Christian “Marriage and Family Program”[20] of the church was largely responsible for the development of the uniquely WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) nature of Europe. Likewise, in her book The Case against the Sexual Revolution, feminist author and journalist Louise Perry has written a spirited critique of the porn-saturated, hypersexualized, hookup culture of the modern world. She argues that a return to a Judeo-Christian sexual ethic of chastity and monogamy is in the best interest of both men and women. At the root of all these books is a basic recognition that Christianity changed how we think about the value of men and women, slaves and free, and the way we should treat them.
Responding to an Important Objection
At this point a skeptic may naturally (and rightly) point out that Christian history and the Bible itself don’t have clean hands when it comes to slavery.
In the latter case, the Old Testament certainly assumes slavery as part of the status quo in the ancient Near East and, at various points, affirms its place through the laws in the Torah. But as many scholars have pointed out, the regulations laid down for the treatment of slaves in the Hebrew Scriptures were leagues ahead of those adhered to by surrounding nations. This was not the chattel slavery of the transatlantic slave trade (which we shall come to) but something more like indentured servitude. Frequently, to sell oneself into this form of service was the only way of ensuring survival or economic stability.
Was this the ideal for humans envisaged by Genesis 1? Certainly not. But as many theologians have pointed out, in bringing about his purposes, God may choose to accommodate the cultural norms of a society as it is rather than move it immediately to where it should be. Much of the Old Testament is the story of God gradually drawing hardhearted and sinful people out of the practices of the pagan cultures around them towards a radical new awareness of his moral law and his perfect love. But the work of changing human hearts and human culture is a marathon, not a sprint —it takes time. This plays out throughout the whole story of the Jewish people. Having been slaves under the Egyptians themselves, they were reminded time and again that they were to be a light to the nations, bearing the promise of a future freedom. But that light would take a long time to break through in its fullness.
Fast-forward to the New Testament, and we still never receive an explicit denunciation of the institution of slavery. In some instances Paul seems to condone it by giving advice in his epistles on how relations between masters and slaves should be conducted. But it would be a mistake to assume Paul was advocating for the status quo. Certainly he would have entertained no illusions that within his lifetime the Christian community could disestablish the institution of slavery in the society they were part of. And yet his reworking of the household codes was remarkable for the way in which they commanded Christian masters and slaves to recognize each other as brothers and sisters in Christ. And when he sends the runaway slave Onesimus back to his master Philemon, it is with the instruction to receive him “no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother” (Philemon 1:16).
But what about the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and the fact that Christian slave masters and financiers often used Bible verses from both the Old and New Testaments to justify their actions?
From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century the transatlantic slave trade saw between ten and twelve million enslaved Africans transported to the Americas, many perishing in the inhuman conditions of the ships, while those who survived faced brutality and servitude. It was one of the greatest evils our world has ever known. The complicity of those who called themselves Christians is not something we can sanitize or wave away. The centuries-long subjugation of Black Africans is a scar that will always mark the conscience of Christendom.
With that in mind, it’s worth remembering that the same Scriptures that were misused by those who plucked verses out of context to justify slavery on the plantations also inspired the Quakers and evangelicals such as William Wilberforce and Frederick Douglass in the abolition movement that would eventually bring an end to the transatlantic slave trade and ultimately outlaw slavery entirely. Likewise, the champions of the later Civil Rights Movement such as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were deeply inspired by the Israelites’ own exodus from slavery in the Old Testament and Paul’s vision in the New Testament of Jew, Gentile, male, female, slave, and free being united in Christ.
Paul was moving in the natural direction that Christ’s own ministry had established —the Christ who in his incarnation took on “the form of a slave,” according to Philippians 2; the one who lived among the poor and downtrodden, ministering to both masters and servants; the one who ultimately died the kind of humiliating death reserved for rebellious slaves and criminals. The trajectory for emancipation was established by the Christian revolution even though it took several centuries for it to be brought to completion. Slavery was first dissipated with the fall of the Roman empire in the fifth century, and then the impetus moved through Europe and Britain, until by medieval times, slavery in the Christian West was effectively a thing of the past.
Note, however, that this was something only achieved in Christendom. Slavery existed unchallenged for millennia in many other civilizations. It was only formally outlawed in many Muslim countries in the latter half of the twentieth century, and arguably in these cases because of pressure from the Christian West. As historian Rodney Stark said, the “moral potential for an antislavery conclusion”[21] was only possible within Christian thought.
Sadly, there are still many parts of the world where slavery, while not state-sanctioned, still exists in practice through human trafficking, especially in the sex trade. Many Christians continue to work at the forefront of modern antislavery campaigns.
CARING FOR THE WEAKEST
Contrasting our own world with that of antiquity serves to highlight how radically Christianity has changed our view of human equality. The same is true —perhaps more so —of the second moral belief I want to sketch out: the importance of serving and protecting the most vulnerable.
Christ’s repeated commands to his followers —to serve rather than be served, to love the outcast, to treat the poorest and weakest with special respect —were revolutionary in his own day but were backed up by his own example of compassion and love.
Jesus’ description of a kingdom in which the first will be last and the last will be first still sounds topsy-turvy, even to modern ears. But we have at least become accustomed to the idea that no one should be left to starve when others have food to eat, that the sick or disabled should be looked after if there are people to care for them, and that those who are threatened by violence should be defended by those able to stand in harm’s way.
These moral views manifest themselves in all manner of practical ways —the safety net of the welfare state; charities dedicated to serving the poor; hospitals and infirmaries; public vaccination programs, soup kitchens, food banks, and homeless shelters; international peacekeeping forces. The list goes on. All these humanitarian enterprises exist on the assumption that the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable deserve our compassion and respect. But, again, we didn’t inherit these views from the ancient Greeks and Romans.
The ancient historian Rodney Stark is well-known for his thesis on why the early Christian church grew so quickly as it spread across the Mediterranean world. As already described, it naturally held an attraction for slaves and the underclass. But the number of women who committed themselves to Christianity, of both high and low rank, was also unprecedented.
This, says Stark, was because of the way women (commonly viewed as second-class citizens in the ancient world) were treated differently within the fledgling Christian community. “Christianity was unusually appealing because within the Christian subculture women enjoyed far higher status than did women in the Greco-Roman world at large.”[22]
Stark posits another remarkable reason for the preponderance of women in the movement, stating that “an initial shift in sex ratios resulted from Christian doctrines prohibiting infanticide and abortion.”[23]
“Exposure” was a common practice in the ancient world, one that was legal and advocated by the greatest minds of the day (such as Plato). Newborn babies were left on hillsides or refuse dumps to die of starvation or at the mercy of wild animals. Parents supposedly believed that because they were not directly killing the infant, they were innocent of their death. Fate, the gods, or a passerby could theoretically intervene to save them.
The most frequent victims of this practice were either baby girls or those born with physical deformities due to the economic disadvantages that their disability or gender carried in that culture. Stark states that “exposure of unwanted female infants and deformed male infants was legal, morally accepted, and widely practiced by all social classes in the Greco-Roman world . . . even in large families ‘more than one daughter was practically never reared.’”[24]
While such a practice may appear utterly abhorrent to our modern instincts, it appears to have been almost entirely unremarkable to the ancients. A letter from a Roman soldier to his pregnant wife gives a sense of how cheap the life of a newborn was: “I am still in Alexandria. . . . I beg and plead with you to take care of our little child, and as soon as we receive wages, I will send them to you. In the meantime, if (good fortune to you!) you give birth, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, expose it.”[25]
Rescue and Adoption
So what changed between then and now? In a word, Christianity.
“Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born” was the command given in the early apostolic teaching of the Didache,[26] and it was embodied in the actions of Christians who scoured sites where infants were typically abandoned in order to rescue them. Christians became well known for the rescue and adoption of these children and, as Stark indicates, the number of infant girls rescued significantly contributed to the prominent place of women in early Christian communities.
Opposition to infanticide was not unprecedented. Jews were forbidden from the practice, and Jewish writers such as Josephus and Philo of Alexandria expressed abhorrence at the behaviors of their Greek and Roman counterparts. The significance of the Torah’s doctrine that all people, male and female, were created in God’s image ran deep in Jewish thinking.
However, it was that same view of the sacred nature of all human life as expressed in the activism and mission of the early Christian communities that actually changed the world. Gradually, the practice of exposure came to be seen as barbarous and was legally forbidden in the Roman world by the late fourth century. In due course, churches became the place where children who were unwanted or could not be cared for were left, and Christians founded the earliest orphanages. Many of today’s leading fostering and adoption agencies have a Christian heritage that was founded in this tradition of rescuing abandoned babies.
Poverty and Plague
If orphaned newborn infants represent an obvious example of the most vulnerable form of human life in the early centuries, then so do widows, the poor, and the sick. In a patriarchal culture in which ownership of property and economic independence lay in the hands of men, the life of a woman who had lost her husband was precarious. If she had no independent means, her best hope was to be remarried as soon as possible or face economic destitution. Likewise, in the absence of a welfare state, the lives of the poor would have hung in the balance.
It’s significant, then, to see that, from the birth of the Christian church as described in the book of Acts, provision for widows, orphans, the poor, and the sick was prioritized: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need” (Acts 4:34-35).
The remarkable thing about the almsgiving described is that, unlike the other cultures of the time, it was not predicated on ethnicity or familial ties (early disputes described in Acts involved ensuring the equal treatment of widows from different ethnic backgrounds) and was radical in its generosity. This marked out the nature of Christian charity from the beginning. It would go on to be expressed in the way Christians cared for the poor and sick outside of their own communities.
Another significant example of this is the way Christians responded to epidemics (something we’ve become all too familiar with on a global scale in recent years). When plagues swept through the cities of the Mediterranean world in the first and second centuries, the upper and middle classes fled for the safety of the countryside to escape disease. In contrast, the early Christians headed in the opposite direction —into the plague-ridden cities and towns to care for the sick and destitute. Rodney Stark writes,
Indeed, the impact of Christian mercy was so evident that in the fourth century when the emperor Julian attempted to restore paganism, he exhorted the pagan priesthood to compete with the Christian charities . . . noting that “the impious Galileans [Christians], in addition to their own, support ours, [and] it is shameful that our poor should be wanting our aid.”[27]
N. T. Wright explains why the appeal of Christianity became so strong under such conditions:
[People] looked at these funny Christians who they’d always thought were weird, for all the usual reasons —and they said, “Why did you do that? Why did you come and nurse us? We’re not your family. We’re not your tribe.” And [the Christians] would say, “It’s because we follow this man called Jesus, who went about doing good and touching lepers and touching corpses and risking uncleanness in order to bring health.”[28]
It’s difficult to overstate just how radical this active commitment to the value of all human life was. Rich and poor, male and female, Jew and Gentile, slave and free were all included in the embrace of the new community of Christians. N. T. Wright has coined an extended description to encompass its unique nature:
It was known, and was for this reason seen as both attractive and dangerous, as a worship-based, spiritually renewed, multi-ethnic, polychrome, mutually supportive, outward-facing, culturally creative, chastity-celebrating, socially responsible fictive kinship group, gender-blind in leadership, generous to the poor and courageous in speaking up for the voiceless.[29]
In a word, it was the church.
In due course the church would go on to establish the earliest hospitals, almshouses, and centers of learning for medicine and nursing that would be the foundation for the modern health service in the West. Likewise, there is barely any other aspect of modern life and culture that has not been deeply influenced by our Christian past. Education and schooling; family and marriage; music, literature, and art; government and democracy; international law; and even technology and science (as we shall see in later chapters) have all been shaped in the wake of the Christian revolution.
More than anything, however, it was the fundamental moral instincts of the West that were shaped by this countercultural community, founded on the example of a messiah-king who lived among the poor and died the death of a rebel slave. When we exalt humility and compassion, or champion the equality and dignity of every human being, we are walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.
OUR MORAL INSTINCTS
This claim was at the center of Holland’s debate with Grayling: that the rights and values espoused by secular humanism are not a product of the Greeks and Romans, or the enlightenment rationalism which Grayling stands in the tradition of, but are instead entirely dependent upon the Christian vision of the West.
Like the proverbial goldfish who fails to realize there is such a thing as water, we are all swimming in the moral water of Christianity, even if most people don’t recognize it. It acts as a constant filter to our vision of reality, like the pair of spectacles we forget we are wearing on the end of our nose.
At various points in their debate, Grayling (quite justly) raised the failings of Christendom’s history. From crusades and inquisitions to modern-day sex scandals, there is much that the church should be ashamed has happened on its watch. Yet ironically, to even recognize these events as moral failures is only possible because we are judging them on the basis of Christian values and virtue. When modern people rightly condemn the hypocrisy of Christian slave traders of the past, or even the morality of the Bible itself, they are doing so through the moral filter they have inherited from Christianity and the Bible.
This is why, when I later interviewed Tom Holland about his personal journey of faith, he likened the moral vision the West had inherited as more akin to a set of “instincts” than “values.”[30] Today, the idea that all humans are equal in dignity and worth and are deserving of compassion and protection is simply assumed by everybody, not something that needs arguing for.
However, Holland’s time spent in the company of the ancient Greeks and Romans made him realize that those instincts were entirely contingent on the Christian story of reality. They were not the instincts of other ancient civilizations, nor were they handed down through the rational observation of a materialistic universe, as many of his atheistic peers seemed to believe.
“The tenets of secular liberalism are as fantastical as the tenets of the Christianity from which it’s emerged,” says Holland. To that extent, “faith” in something supernatural is exercised by the atheist who believes in the existence of immaterial realities like human rights as much as by the Christian who believes in God, according to Holland.
But the historian’s journey has not only been an intellectual one. He told me how his deep dive into Christian history had left him feeling “bored” with an “anemic” form of secular liberalism:
I find abstract principles quite dull. Christianity is not only the source of these, but the explanations that it gives for why we believe these things are infinitely more dramatic and interesting and beautiful and complex. The experience of researching Dominion meant that I had to read an enormous amount of Christian writing from an enormous range of sources and over an immense span of time. I found the process of doing this very, very seductive. I found them incredibly impressive.
ISIS, THE CROSS, AND THE ANGELS
Ultimately, it was a journey to the frontline of the Islamic State strongholds in Northern Iraq that most dramatically led Holland into a deeply personal appreciation of the Christian story of reality.[31]
In 2017 Holland presented a Channel 4 television documentary ISIS: The Origins of Violence covering the plight of the persecuted Christian and Yazidi minorities who had been overrun and forced to flee their homelands. At the time, ISIS was still in command of large swaths of territory. Bloodcurdling stories of atrocities against men, women, and children had regularly been in the news headlines. The documentary itself asked serious questions about whether the violence of the Islamic State was at odds with, or intrinsic to, Islamic thought.
Throughout the filming, Holland was by turns inspired, convicted, and sickened (literally) by what he encountered. He told me of a few particular incidents that left long-lasting impressions upon him.
The first was his encounter with Father Yousif Ibrahim, a Syriac Orthodox monk who oversaw the nearly 1,700-year-old Mar Mattai monastery perched on Mount Alfaf overlooking the Nineveh plains. Built like a fortress, it had provided a bastion of shelter for persecuted minorities fleeing terror. Holland described Father Yousif as “a man of palpable holiness and bravery.” The way his faith led him to serve the most vulnerable struck Holland forcefully.
The second incident was a visit to Sinjar, a town which had only recently been liberated by Kurdish forces. It had been completely decimated by ISIS, whose frontline was still only a couple of miles away. The evidence of their campaign of persecution was everywhere: Body parts poking out from the rubble that lined the streets. Blown-out doorways, daubed with the graffiti emblems that showed that Christians or Yazidis lived there. The homes of fathers and sons who had been rounded up to be shot; mothers and daughters captured to be sold as sex slaves.
It was also a town where ISIS had crucified people.
As a historian of antiquity, Holland knew all about crucifixion. It was an agonizing, brutal, and shameful form of public execution, used for centuries by the Roman empire to advertise the power they held over conquered peoples. Jesus was just one of hundreds of thousands of people who died by crucifixion under the Romans.
But walking through streets where “people had been put up on crosses and left in the burning sun like chunks of meat” suddenly transported Holland from something he had “understood in the abstract” to a far more concrete reality:
It’s possible to spend your whole life studying the Romans and never breathe in the dust of a town where people have been crucified. But when I did, I felt ashamed at the lack of historical empathy that I’d shown. And also the lack of curiosity in not wondering what it was that had changed since the time of Caesar and the time in which I was standing. To the Islamic State these crosses served as symbols of their power, and that’s what they were to the Romans as well.
Standing in Sinjar I realized that the existential abyss that I was feeling wasn’t just my sense of dread and terror that I was close to the people who had done this. It was more profound than that. It was realizing the reality of a world in which the cross serves as a symbol of the power of the powerful to torture, torment, and kill the powerless, when instinctively to me, as someone who had grown up in a fundamentally Christian society, the cross served as the opposite.[32]
Seeing crosses used once again for the awful purpose for which they were first invented suddenly brought home to Holland the power of the cross, interpreted through the death of Jesus:
We have to think ourselves into the sandals of the Romans to understand and properly appreciate just how unfathomably weird it is that today the cross, of all things, should instantly be the most recognizable cultural symbol that any human culture has developed. And that it symbolizes not power, but the opposite. That the victim will triumph.[33]
And finally, there were the angels.
While in Sinjar, Holland visited an Orthodox church originally built by refugees of the Armenian genocide a century before. The building had been gutted and the sanctuary “systematically desecrated” by ISIS, who had smashed statues, trampled icons underfoot, and even used power drills to destroy the stone altar.[34] Holland recalls picking up a picture lying in the rubble. It depicted the Annunciation —the angel Gabriel, wings unfurled, delivering the message to Mary that she would bear Jesus, Immanuel, God-with-us.
By his own admission, Holland says, “It was very hot. I was very jumpy, I was quite ill, and my mind was saturated with biblical stuff.” But something strange happened:
At that point I was open to the idea of there being angels. I was in a space where it didn’t seem remotely impossible. It was a sweet sense of intoxication, that perhaps, actually, everything was weird and strange. And the moment you accept that there are angels, suddenly, the world just seems richer and more interesting.[35]
After his return home, and fully recovered, Holland says he was easily able to dismiss the experience on psychological grounds. But he found that he didn’t really want to. “The memory of thinking that they might exist, was a really powerful one,” he said. “It’s like the memory of taking a drug. Everything seems more intense, more vivid, more beautiful, and you remember it wistfully. I think that was very transformative, because suddenly, I really wanted to believe it.”
CHOOSE YOUR MIRACLE
To Holland, believing in the existence of human rights —the intrinsic equality of all humans and the duty to protect the vulnerable —is just as much an article of faith as belief in miracles, the existence of angels, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Finding himself unable to imagine a world without the former has led to an openness to a world that includes the latter.
So does Holland believe in Christianity —the story that God took on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and through his life, death, and resurrection reconciled the world back to himself?
“Sometimes,” he says with a wry smile. “Definitely at Easter, definitely at Christmas. At certain times and in certain places.”[36]
Holland isn’t being evasive or coy, just honest about the fact that integrating a “beautiful and complex” Christian faith into the less-contested but more mundane secular world around him is not without its challenges. He describes moments “when a bucket of cold water comes” and none of it seems possible. “There are times when I surrender to the power of this. And there are times when I just think no.”[37]
Holland’s hesitancy reminds me of the words of the man who comes to Jesus for the healing of his son and declares paradoxically, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). We are all a mixture of faith and doubt. Nevertheless, Holland seems to have become captivated by a story which speaks to his innermost desires and the nature of the world around him. “It makes sense in the most complete way of any metaphysics I can engage with.”[38]
For Holland, the moments where belief seems most able to trump his doubts are when he enters into the story —not as an observer but as a participant in an ancient drama.
He loves old churches where the stones are soaked in the hopes, fears, and prayers of bygone worshipers. He has become a communicant member at one of London’s oldest churches, where the choral tradition and Anglo-Catholic ritual seem to chime with his lifetime’s work of imagining himself in the shoes (or indeed, sandals) of our ancient forebears.
“I want mystery. I want weirdness. I want strangeness. That’s exactly what I want. I want everything that by and large, in its public manifestations, churches often seem to be a bit embarrassed about,” he says.[39]
To that extent, Holland stands directly in the tradition of the earliest Christians. Their mysterious belief in the intrinsic dignity and worth of every human being —slave or free, male or female —was strange. By the standards of the day, their desire to serve the weakest and most vulnerable in society was weird. And all of this flowed from the strangest and most mysterious belief of all: that the Son of God had taken on flesh and surrendered himself to the humiliation of being crucified.
As Holland writes in Dominion, “The belief that the Son of the one God of the Jews had been tortured to death on a cross came to be so enduringly and widely held that today most of us in the West are dulled to just how scandalous it originally was.”[40]
The citizens of the modern West have almost completely forgotten their founding story. Along with others, Holland has been helping them to remember the weirdness of the story that shaped their world. And, by comparison, how weird the world before the Christian revolution now appears to them.
In doing so, a world which (like Holland) increasingly finds itself dissatisfied with secular materialism and in which the foundations seem to be coming apart has perhaps begun to ask itself whether the story of Christianity could be true after all.
If the church is willing to risk being weird once more and to unapologetically tell its story of the God who became human, lived an exemplary life, suffered crucifixion, and was raised to life again, a new generation may yet find meaning in the midst of the rubble.