Light of the World

Christianity Inspired Liberal Society & Even Informs Its Antagonists

How do you measure the influence of Christianity on the world? By the transformation of Rome from state persecutor to state endorser? By Christianity's growth rate in terms of numbers or geographic reach? Certainly, these rank as indicators, but according to historian Tom Holland, the influence of Christianity runs far deeper than metrics such as these. In his most recent work, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books, 2019), he says the emergence of Christianity in the ancient world has been the single most transformative development in Western history, with effects so deeply embedded today, it's virtually impossible for us to extricate ourselves from them. And precisely because they are so deeply embedded, they are also largely hidden from our view.

Although he grew up in a churchgoing home, Holland says it wasn't church teachings or Christian scholarship that led him to that conclusion, but rather a deep dive into history. As a boy, he was more interested in "big things"—dinosaurs, empires, ancient kings and their gods—than in the children of Israel or Jesus and his disciples. And so, as he grew into adulthood, his childhood belief in God gradually faded from view, as if blotted out by the sun of fascination with the Romans and Greeks.

But in the process of writing studies of the classical world, which involved living intimately in the company of some of its largest figures, he found himself increasingly disenchanted with these "heroes." Yes, they soared large across the pages of history, but they were also terrifying and struck him as something increasingly alien. Profligate murderers and enslavers of millions, they lacked any modicum of human empathy. How could they so callously disregard basic human rights? Why was there no mercy or compassion? Where were their moral sensibilities?

Unsettled, Holland set out to trace the lineage of the liberal humanist values he had all his life taken for granted—only to find that they traced back, ultimately, to Christianity. Dominion is the result of that fifteen-year project. An extensive narrative, it opens in pre-Christian Athens, sweeps through early Christianity and the Middle Ages, then looks at the Reformation, the rise of science, the abolition of slavery, civil rights, the fall of Soviet Communism, and sexual politics right up to and including #MeToo, exploring, not the history of Christianity per se, but the currents of Christian influence that have provoked seismic cultural changes in the world.

Common Grace Endowments

Consider the ancestry of the following ideals, which the Western world and a growing portion of the East affirm as universal:

• Human Rights, Equality, and the Rule of Law: As Holland tells it, soon after the death of the overreaching eleventh-century pope Gregory VII, who claimed that he answered to no one, a law school was established in the Italian city of Bologna. The city became the prototype of something brand-new, the university town, and right away, a decades-long endeavor ensued to codify a comprehensive code of law. Attributed to a single monk named Gratian and completed around 1150, the Decretum incorporated ancient Roman law, the Scriptures, the writings of the Church Fathers, and centuries of canon law. Echoing the Stoics, much as Paul had done, Gratian framed his synthesis as natural law and set it forth as the key to fashioning a properly Christian legal system.

It opened with a quotation from St. Paul: "The entire law is summed up in a single command: 'Love your neighbor as yourself'" (Galatians 5:14). If all souls were equal in the eyes of God, Gratian reasoned, then in order for justice truly to be done, any legal code must begin with this assumption. This affirmation overturned age-old "commonsense" presumptions—that unequal classes of people naturally existed and that they rightly lived by different standards, including different standards of justice.

And so, with the Decretum, a thoroughly reordered social framework came into being. Resting on the foundational tenet that every individual was a child of God, who was himself just and who possessed the power to write his law on the human heart, its purpose was to provide for equal justice to all, regardless of rank, wealth, pedigree, or anything else.

Not only did this inaugurate the revolutionary idea of human equality, it also introduced a revolution in the relationship between rulers and the people under their rule. Ancient kings either claimed divine right or imposed their rule by conquest. Either way, the parochial power to rule was secured by strength. With the possible exception of the Torah, the law code introduced through Moses, the Decretum was the first legislation claiming universal authority over all people—secular, royal, or ecclesiastical. Moreover, it was the first "revolution" pointedly accomplished by law—enacted not by the overwhelming power of knights with lances, but by the humble, nonviolent virtue of reason flowing from the pens of learned men. In this way, the Decretum, anchored as it was in Old and New Testament principles, laid the groundwork for all the modern liberal democracies that would follow.

• Education and the Rise of Science: Peter Abelard, a contemporary of Gratian, was, like him, a scholar devoted to knowledge. A lecturer in Paris, a city that outshone even Bologna as a center of scholarship, Abelard believed that God's order was rational and governed by rules and that mortals could rightly aspire to comprehend it. His method of inquiry held that, "by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiry we perceive the truth." He was convicted as a heretic by an overly authoritarian, anti-intellectual church, but when he died he was buried under the epitaph "the Aristotle of our age," and less than a century after his death, his method of inquiry was accepted and institutionalized by papal statute. Universities, explicitly independent from church authority, began cropping up across Christendom.

Contra the church that opposed him, Abelard saw no conflict between his career as a scholar and his commitment to the crucified Christ. To identify the laws that governed the universe was to honor the Lord God who had formulated them. These convictions came to lie at the heart of the new universities, and, centuries later, they gave rise to modern science.

The Colonization of Language

The term "science," as we currently understand it, though, did not come into use until the era of Darwin. This provides a good point on which to turn and consider another invisible effect of Christianity: its influence on our language, including the very categories by which we organize our thoughts, if not whole societies. Following are a few words that have entered our language through or by reference in some way to Christianity.

• Science and Religion: Until the mid-1800s, Holland writes, branches of knowledge ranging from grammar to music were considered "sciences," and theology had long reigned as their "queen." That changed when Thomas Henry Huxley, the pugnacious "Darwin's Bulldog," imperiously declared the natural and physical sciences to be "the only method by which truth could be ascertained." This diktat effectively redrew the boundaries of what counted as knowable knowledge, subsuming all other truth claims under the principle of "agnosticism," a term he coined, which sowed this new scientism into the way we think about truth and knowledge.

In so doing, Holland writes, Huxley pointedly defined science by reference to what he saw as its opposite (or enemy)—religion, which by his day represented knowledge claims based on divine revelation. But this was not always so, either. In ancient Rome, religiones merely referred to the rites and rituals that governed the city's calendar. That changed around the year 600, when Pope Gregory I, also called St. Gregory the Great, converted his palace into a monastery and lived as a monk in repentance, poverty, and chastity out of devotion to God. This way of living became known as a life of religio, and the term "religion" evolved from there.

• Secular: In Rome, a saeculum referred to the general span of a human life or generation. Games were periodically held to mark the passing of a saeculum. When St. Augustine, while writing City of God, needed a word to characterize the passing and ever-fluctuating things of mortals in contrast to the eternal, unchanging things of God, he chose the term secularia—the "secular things." And so, ever since Augustine, the twin dimensions of life on earth have been referred to as the sacred and the secular.

• Heterosexuality and Homosexuality. Gay and lesbian apologists point out that homosexuality has existed since ancient times. This is only partly true, and it provides a good illustration of the way the coining of terms shapes the way we think. Yes, same-sex eroticism is old, but the terms heterosexuality and homosexuality are historically recent, having been introduced in late nineteenth-century Germany by homoerotic men campaigning for the repeal of sodomy laws.

They put forth the concept of homosexualität, not so much as a term for any behavior, but as an ontological category of human being. Those who fell into this category were owed compassion by the rest of society—and such compassion should be demonstrated, it was said, by the decriminalization of their sexual behaviors. Do you see how contemporary LGBT apologists are interpreting ancient historical accounts according to modern categories? Yes, same-sex eroticism existed long ago, but the classification of human beings as heterosexual or homosexual did not.

The Homage Vice Pays to Virtue

Do you also see how biblical values were (and still are) being deployed, politically, to serve an agenda that lies outside the purview of their source? Holland makes the case that the ideals of Christianity have taken such deep root in the world that they inform the thinking of us all, whether or not we are aware of it. As you learn to identify this phenomenon, you will start noticing how non-Christians, from secularists to social engineers to sexual activists, bear witness to it.

Consider this 2007 comment from Richard Dawkins: "It is the case that since we are all twenty-first-century people, we all subscribe to a pretty widespread consensus of what's right and what's wrong." He listed slavery, child labor, and domestic violence as "things that people used to believe in and no longer do." Ironically, with this observation, he confirms the sum thesis of Dominion.

Seventeenth-century French moralist Francois De La Rochefoucauld astutely observed that "hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue." The statement highlights the subtle way in which the hypocrite, in the very act of presenting himself as virtuous, bears witness to his own inner knowledge about virtue and vice. Consider what great dominion God hath wrought, then, when Richard Dawkins, one of today's most vehement atheists, unwittingly bears witness to the eternal verities of the faith he abhors.