What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holland’s an all-absorbing story ... It takes a master storyteller to translate the development of a philosophical notion into a captivating story, and Holland proves to be one ... He doesn’t claim groundbreaking archival discoveries or archaeological revelations. Instead, Holland offers a remarkably nuanced and balanced account of two millennia of Christian history – intellectual, cultural, artistic, social and political. The book’s scope is breathtaking ... The impact of Christianity on the way we live, think and speak has been extraordinarily pervasive, and not only in the West, Holland concludes ... The humblest, the utterly insignificant, serves only to mask the extraordinary. Holland is fascinated by this. Indeed, he is so taken by it that he seems to have based his method of storytelling on it.

Holland is a supremely gifted writer ... Holland organizes this expansive and impressive book around a series of episodes that outline the emergence of Christianity, its growth, and the acceptance of its core values ... This is not a straightforward history of Christianity. Indeed, some of the most prominent events that would be central to such a volume, such as the Crusades and the Reformation, appear only in passing ... Importantly, Holland does not whitewash the extent to which Christianity has often veered far from the course its values should have demanded ... Holland’s book is extraordinarily wide ranging, and he writes with grace and verve. He blends an array of information and insights into a narrative that slowly but relentlessly builds his case that Christianity has shaped our thinking and standards in ways that we may not even recognize ... Dominion is an answer to the seemingly dispiriting times that we live in today. Though we are bombarded daily by news reports of suffering, hatred, intolerance, and violence, Holland’s view on the influence of Christianity is a hopeful and optimistic reminder.

Holland focuses on the story of Jesus’s crucifixion, which by showing God in the form of a broken and tormented human being upended the pagan worship of vitality and beauty. But if anything, this may understate the moral revolution that Christianity accomplished ... Holland is less illuminating on the relationship between Jesus and the religion he is supposed to have founded. 'Nothing was remotely as uncanny as the character of Jesus himself,' he writes. But how does he know Jesus was so unusual? ... Holland comes into his own when he shows how Christianity created the values of the modern Western world ... Dominion presents a rich and compelling history of Christendom. What makes the book riveting, though, is the devastating demolition job it does on the sacred history of secular humanism.

The book has already usefully ruffled feathers; contemporary liberals do not particularly like to be reminded of their debt to a world view that they feel they have outgrown and discarded; indeed which many regard as an obstacle in the way of social progress ... The account is peppered with particularity — anecdotes, human portraits and the traces left on the landscape by vanished civilisations, all conveyed in lyrical, vivid language ... The past comes to life in smelly ascetics, authoritarian popes, queen-saints, mad philosophers and landladies — women are prominent in this narrative ... the church has often been oppressive and persecuting, and Holland makes that point vividly. But as he points out, the standard by which the abuses are found wanting is Christianity itself ... What this book may do is persuade others to recognise the revolutionary character of the beliefs that our generation is hastening to discard.

This is an engaging book, even if its central thesis seems flawed. Holland strives to be 'as objective as possible' — the virtues and the evils of Christian civilisation are exposed — but objectivity is not the same as neutrality. He’s not remotely neutral. He insists that the goodness of western man has Christianity at its core. That seems like cultural conceit ... Are these values Christian, or are they simply humane? Holland’s thesis implies that they were not as powerful before the advent of Christ nor as prevalent in places unaffected by his teachings ... I’m not so sure. The values described as Christian seem more like simple human nature ... The idea that charity and tolerance are evidence of Christian influence seems too ethnocentric ... While I don’t remotely accept Holland’s thesis, I have to commend the originality of this book, not to mention his brave ambition. Holland, I suppose, would think that very Christian of me.

The events in those chapters, as in their 19 successors, attest to Christian ideas and principles in ferment among historical actors. Notions such as the creation of the universe by a single creator, the absolute integrity of the individual, the distinct though overlapping authorities of church and state, constant improvement of persons and institutions, among others, affected, to the point of determining, the tendencies and outcomes of historical developments as the ages rolled by. How these ideas affected the practices of slavery, freedom of expression, and political and social rights, and altered the tenor of the times as recently as the 1960s are the meat of Holland’s flowing expository style, which resembles the narration of a very engaging broadcast documentary.

Dominion’s most important contribution is in emphasizing how terms we take for granted, even concepts seemingly as fundamental as 'religion' and 'secular,' come 'freighted with the legacy of Christendom' ... provides a helpful corrective, a reminder of how liberal values find their origin in some of the abstractions of Christianity, as astutely argued by an author who makes clear that he has no sectarian allegiances to the faith itself ... In a mostly convincing way, Holland argues that concepts like human rights, socialism, revolution, feminism, science, and even the division between religion and the secular (which then allows for ecclesiastical disestablishment and toleration) find their origins specifically in the gospels, the Pauline epistles, and the writings of the Church Fathers ... If there is a deficiency in Holland’s interpretation, it’s that sometimes his triumphalism renders an almost secular supersessionism regarding Jewish contributions to this project ... Though Holland promises not to write a history of Christianity, that’s effectively what he’s done, offering explanations throughout of how those various modern categories he associates with Christianity did indeed find their ultimate origin in the religion. Certain arguments reoccur throughout his book, and while he doesn’t equally make his case for why certain concepts must have an origin in Christianity, one which he unassailably provides biblical genealogy for is socialism. Far from being the bane of faith, Holland provides ample evidence that socialistic thinking, indeed revolutionary thinking in general, would have been nonsensical to the ancient Greeks and Romans ... If Holland is largely convincing about the Christian genesis of human rights through a language of natural law, and of the revolutionary socialism implicit in the rhetoric of Acts and the scandal of the crucifixion itself, Dominion’s argument is less clear when it comes to the genealogy of science and feminism ... makes some evocative conjectures that are worth taking seriously as concerns the relationship of sexual equality to Christianity ... Where Dominion is unequivocally correct, and possibly most helpful to those still enraptured by the delusion that modernity signals a clear break with a Christian past, is in his excavation of the deep roots of secularism. Here is where Holland’s argument will be the most objectionable to strident humanists, atheists, and agnostics, while ironically also being the most accurate of observations in the entirety of the book.

In Dominion Tom Holland is excellent at showing how Christianity overthrew antiquity .... Holland shines in his panoramic survey of how disruptive Christianity was for the ethical and political assumptions that preceded it ... Holland astutely shows just how transformative for the west Christianity in particular was. And Christianity really was essential in the making of some modern values, such as the stress we lay on equality or love ... Holland brings the past to life through his characters, which are always vividly drawn, and with accessible scene-setting, which is always lush with detail. Yet the illustration of the conquest of the west by Christianity risks becoming so total that it explains everything and nothing ... The danger in seeking to claim modernity for Christianity is not that it is exaggerated, but that it wants us to acknowledge that there is no relation between the west and the rest that is not religious in form ... Fortunately, that choice is false. Even if the 'West' is 'moored' to its Christian past, it is also unmoored from it, and Christianity made this departure possible...

Look closely at the motifs of almost any modern movement, from the communist hammer and sickle to the dictums of Islamic State, and you can, Mr Holland argues, discern the shadow of the cross ... Proving this takes Mr Holland on a sweeping narrative that runs from the fifth century bc via Luther, Voltaire and the abolition of slavery to #MeToo. The occasional purple patch is forgivable, for he is an exceptionally good storyteller with a marvellous eye for detail. He opens with an account of an ancient Persian torture in which prisoners were eaten alive by maggots. It is excellent fun ... Whether you agree may depend on whether you want to. Mr Holland...is a superb writer, but his theory has flaws. For one, he uses the word 'Christianity' as though it is obvious what that means. It is not. Christianity is a broad church and the Bible is a big and incoherent book. It has furnished verses to suit those who have wanted to enslave Africans or emancipate them, save infidels or slay them. And merely to see the form of Christianity in a movement is not to prove it is there. Correlation is not causation. Some people, after all, discern the shape of the Virgin Mary in a piece of burned toast.

Nobody can accuse Tom Holland of shying away from big subjects. Dominion is nothing less than a history of Christianity with an underlying theme. The subtitle says it all ... An argument so paradoxical provokes thought, whether one agrees with it or not. This one is sustained with all the breadth, originality and erudition that we have come to associate with Holland’s writing ... The problem is that Dominion is a work of history, not moral theology. It is not always easy to trace essential Christian values through the alternating highs and lows of Christian history ... The ‘western mind’ is too large a concept for any one thing to have ‘made’ it. But on any view, a rejection of revealed authority and a belief in empirical enquiry are a fundamental part of the ‘western mind’ as it has developed since the 17th century. It is difficult to accept that Christianity has contributed anything to that. It may even have hindered it.

Dominion is an immensely powerful and thought-provoking book. It is hard to think of another that so effectively and readably summarizes the major strands of Christian ethical and political thought across two millennia ... herein lies a crucial problem for Mr. Holland’s case. If Christian ideas about wealth, gender, sexuality and power have been in constant flux over the past two millennia, how can we speak of a single, distinctively Christian moral sensibility to which we are the heirs? Here Mr. Holland is, I fear, somewhat evasive ... The trouble is that Christian ethics, like Walt Whitman, are large; they contain multitudes ... This argument—that everything Nice in our contemporary world derives from Christian values, and everything Nasty in the actual history of Christendom was just a regrettable diversion from the true Christian path—seems to me to run dangerously close to apologetic ... The truth is that throughout its history, Christianity—like Islam and Judaism—has been both censorious and “woke,” egalitarian and repressively hierarchical ... Mr. Holland is right: Something wholly new did come into the world with Jesus of Nazareth. Are we really his moral heirs? Just asking the question makes me weep with shame.

In his sprawling and detailed look at the ways that Christianity grew to be such a powerful force in the Western world, Holland traverses widely over time and space to narrate the rise of Christianity ... Holland shows that Western culture in the 21st century—whether it claims to embrace Christianity or not—is thoroughly imbued by the language, thought and theology of a religious tradition that shuttles between universalism and exclusivism. Holland’s writing energetically conducts us through some often-dull history and ponderous concepts to demonstrate just how insidious Christian beliefs are in modern culture.

Leaping forward centuries and then decades at a time, Holland delivers penetrating, often jolting discussions on great controversies of Western civilization in which war, politics, and culture have formed a background to changes in values ... An insightful argument that Christian ethics, even when ignored, are the norm worldwide.

Holland traces Christendom’s philosophical, ethical, political, and even linguistic legacies in the West. Sophocles and Aristotle appear, as do Solomon and Moses ... later Holland weaves in Voltaire, Darwin, and even de Sade. He does not lose sight of political events—Charlemagne reigns, Columbus sails, the West fights WWI, and Hitler rises to power. He also wrestles with the theological disputes, inconsistencies, and recurring questions within Christianity, and the faith’s intertwined but often hostile relationship with Judaism and Jews. Entertaining is too light a term and instructive is too heavy a term for a rich work that is enjoyably both.