Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World by Tom Holland

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
By Tom Holland
Basic Books, 2019 

“But what precisely had been the sin of Sodom?” asks Tom Holland at one point is his big and richly satisfying new history of Christianity, Dominion: 

The key to understanding that lay not in Genesis, but in Paul’s letters. Writing to the Christians of Rome, the apostle had identified as the surest and most terrifying measure of humanity’s alienation from God’s love the sexual depravity of gentile society. One aspect of it more than any other had disgusted him ... Paul, by condemning the master who casually spent himself inside a slaveboy no less than the man who offered himself up to oral or anal penetration, had imposed on the patterns of Roman sexuality a thoroughly alien paradigm: one derived, in large part, from his upbringing as a Jew. 

Thus, Holland concludes, the fanatical obsession of one man gave birth to an entirely new way of thinking about human behavior; just as their had been no real idea of paganism before Christianity needed to define itself against it, so too there had been no real concept of sodomy before it was needed as a cudgel. In 15th century Florence, Holland writes, “the greatest preacher of his day was invited to mark the approach of Easter by giving three consecutive sermons on sodomy - a commission which he accepted with alacrity.” 

This juxtaposition, a growing Christianity continuously developing by defining itself by the things it hates, runs throughout Holland’s long and fascinating (and frequently quippy) book. Dominion is superior even to Holland’s much-loved earlier book Rubicon and every bit as crowded with vividly-drawn personalities. The canvas of the story is immensely bigger in this case and more volatile, which inevitably gives rise to an uneven narrative, often fruitfully so. Holland traces the insatiable growth and development of Christianity through all its major stages and locations and never does a slipshod job. But there are moments and contrasts that glimmer with extra energy, or seem to. The thorny relationship of Christianity and Hitler, for instance, is rivetingly portrayed, including with the use of a perhaps-unexpected dramatic foil: 

Conquest had enabled the tendrils of Hitler’s hatred to reach far beyond the limits of Germany. Even before the war they had snaked and slithered their way into Tolkien’s book-lined study. In 1938, a German editor wishing to publish him had written to ask if he were of Jewish origin. ‘I regret,” Tolkien had replied, ‘that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.’ 

Dominion is the latest example in a line that includes Paul Johnson’s The History of Christianity and A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch, and it’s both shorter and more icily readable than either of those whoppers. This is an admittedly defeating subject - as Holland’s US subtitle points out, Christianity has remade the entire world - but it also admits of an infinite variety of approaches. Holland’s approach is a vivid lantern-show of men and moments. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Historical Novel Society, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Washington Post, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.