Opinion
How Christianity Remade the World
Tom Holland joins Bari Weiss on Honestly (The Free Press)
Interview courtesy of The Free Press
| By Bari Weiss |
This Christmas, one of our greatest living historians explains how one ‘radical message’ came to define the entirety of the Western world.
Is our vacation from religion coming to an end?
Whether you believe in the story of the virgin birth and resurrection, or you believe that those miracles are myths, one thing is beyond dispute: The story of Jesus and the message of Christianity is among the stickiest ideas the world has ever seen.
Within four centuries of Jesus’s death, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. It had 30 million followers—which amounted to half the empire. Today, two millennia later, Christianity is still the largest religion in the world, with more than 2 billion adherents.
How did the radical message of Christianity catch on? How did it change the world? And how does it shape all our lives today?
These questions motivate the latest episode of Honestly. My guest is the incredible historian Tom Holland, one of the most gifted storytellers in the world. His podcast, The Rest Is History, is among the most popular out there. Each week, he and his co-host, Dominic Sandbrook, charm their way through history’s most interesting characters and sagas. I can’t recommend it more highly.
I also recommend Tom’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. In it, he argues that Christianity is the reason we have America, that it was the inspiration behind our revolution. He also argues that Christianity is the backbone of both “wokeness,” as an ideology, and liberalism, which so often sees itself as secular.
In today’s episode, Tom discusses all this and more, including a question that a lot of my colleagues have thought about this year: Is our vacation from religion coming to an end?
Click below to listen to the podcast, or scroll down for an edited transcript of our conversation. Merry Christmas and happy holidays!
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Tom Holland on How Christianity Remade the World
The Free Press Episode |
On the radical story of Jesus’s death:
Bari Weiss: Your book opens with the crucifixion. Your argument is that the turning point is not Jesus’s birth, but his death, at 33 years old, at the hands of the Roman authorities. Why is this the pivotal moment?
Tom Holland: It is very difficult to overemphasize how completely mad it was for everybody in the ancient world that someone who suffers crucifixion could in any way be the Messiah, let alone part of the one God. In the opinion of the Romans, crucifixion is the fate that should properly be visited on slaves. Not just because it is protracted and agonizing, but also because it is deeply humiliating.
When you die, you will hang there like a lump of meat. This is a demonstration, in the opinion of the Romans, that essentially their might is right. That if a slave rebels against his master, this is what happens.
I think what is radical about what Christians come to believe is not the fact that a man can become a god. Because for most people in the Mediterranean that is a given. What is radical is that the man Christians believe was divine was someone who had ended up suffering the worst fate imaginable—death by crucifixion—which, in the opinion of the Romans, was the fate visited on a slave.
The reason that Jesus suffers that fate is that he is part of a conquered people. He’s not even from Judea. He’s from Galilee. Galilee is not properly under the rule of the Romans. It’s franchised out to a client king. He is the lowest of the low. Even the Judeans look down on him.
The fact that such a person could conceivably be raised up by citizens of the Roman Empire as someone greater than Caesar himself, greater than Augustus, is a completely shocking maneuver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shocking to them all.
The radical message of the crucifixion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.
On the power relationship between the church and state:
BW: I’ve always been so interested in how Christianity goes from being the bane of the powerful to being the faith of the emperor. Constantine, the emperor who could have been a god, instead converts to the faith whose god died on a cross. How does that happen?
TH: Christianity spreads through most of the major cities of the empire. It’s not difficult to see what the appeal is. In a society without any hint of a welfare state, a state in which no value at all is put upon the weak or the poor or the sick, what the church offers is the first functioning welfare state.
If you are a widow or an orphan or in prison or hungry, the likelihood is that you will be able to find relief from the church. And that offers a kind of power because bishop literally means an overseer—the figure of a bishop who has charity to dispense. That’s quite something. You are in a position of authority that even your pagan neighbors might come to respect.
That’s the situation at the beginning of the fourth century, when Constantine is fighting a civil war. What Constantine wants is what Roman emperors for a century have wanted. Everyone in the empire knows that the prosperity of the empire is dependent on the favor of the gods. But there is a problem, which is that most cults are centered on particular temples, particular shrines, particular ways of offering up sacrifice or respect to a god.
Over the course of the third century, the Roman Empire goes through a terrible time—barbarian invasions, galloping inflation. So when Constantine comes to power, he is looking for a religion that can bind everyone within the empire. And this, basically, is what Christianity supplies him with.
What it also does is to suggest that there is a single celestial king in heaven. You can see it’s quite nice to imagine himself as the chosen one of God, because it suits his ego to have a single god for a single emperor.
But it has to be said that it takes Constantine and his heirs a while to realize what they’ve taken on—that the church is a kind of independent entity. And over the course of subsequent Christian history, what the relationship of the church should be to the authority and power of the great is one that is repeatedly being hammered out.
The traditions and ideologies of the Orthodox world and of the Western world are, I think, a consequence of the attempt to try and work out exactly what the balance should be between what you might call church and state.
On Christianity’s many paradoxes:
BW: To join a community not based on the lineage of your family or where you are born, but based on a belief—that still feels so radical to me, even in 2024.
TH: To the Romans, it’s bewildering. They are very puzzled. Who do the Christians think they are? They don’t have a land. They don’t have a mother city. Because they claim a universal identity, to the Romans, it seems they have no identity at all. This is a tension that runs throughout Christianity.
The paradox is the great motor of the Christian story and of Christian history. The idea that a man can be a god, the idea that someone who is dead can come to life, the idea that someone who suffers the death of a slave can be greater than Caesar: These are all paradoxes. And over the course of the 2,000 years of Christianity’s history, it’s unsurprising that these ideas have, in turn, generated further paradoxes, of which I would say—and this is pointed out by people hostile to Christianity—that for a people who claim to have a universal identity, Christians are very fond of fighting one another and denying the name of Christian to one another.
Christianity is a faith that is founded on the conviction that a crucified criminal suffering the death of a slave triumphs over the greatest empire on the face of the planet. That conviction has led to it becoming the most hegemonic explanation for who humans are—what their purpose on the face of the earth is, and where they will go after death—that has ever existed. And that gives it an unbelievable degree of power, and has given kings and emperors and popes power.
That is the supreme paradox of Christian history, a faith that became powerful by virtue of enshrining as its symbol someone utterly powerless. It’s incredible.
On the influence of Christianity on revolutions and modern political movements like wokeness:
BW: One of the things that Dominion does so powerfully is it shows the ways in which things we take for granted were actually Christian ideas. Some are obvious: the ideas of charity or forgiveness or redemption. But you connect even the American Revolution, the French Revolution to Christianity. You talk about how the impulses behind wokeness are fundamentally Christian.
TH: Christianity is inherently subversive of the established order that it’s born into. The Reformation of the eleventh century is followed by the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and that Reformation in turn is followed by the Enlightenment, revolutions, and the great cultural, ethical, moral convulsions that we’re going through at the moment.
You can distinguish certain abiding themes. One of them is the idea that the last shall be first—it’s the humbling of the papacy itself in the sixteenth century. It’s the overthrow of kings and emperors and czars in the American, the French, the Russian Revolution. It’s the toppling of statues in contemporary America, the idea that there is almost an inherent virtue within victimhood. To be oppressed is a source of power. It’s a very radical idea that Christianity weaponizes and has weaponized again and again and again.
I would go so far as to say that there are very few aspects of the culture wars that are being fought in America at the moment that do not ultimately have their origins in Christian theology. Like the trans issue. On one level, you would say that the idea that a man can become a woman or woman become a man, is radically opposed to Christian teaching. God creates man and woman separately in Genesis, and there really is no kind of sanction for thinking anything else. But at the same time, the case for trans rights as pushed by those who campaign for them is invariably done in very Christian terms. Trans people are defined as the last. And that seems to impose a kind of instinctive assumption that the last should become the first.
Martin Luther King Jr. described himself as an extremist for Jesus. His language, his speeches, his activism was saturated in biblical imagery. And essentially what he was doing was reminding Americans that if there is no Greek or Jew in Christ, then obviously there is no black or white. And he was summoning white American Christians to a reminder of their shared inheritance.
But over the course of the 1960s, there were other people, other groups of people who historically were disadvantaged, who drew on that lesson—whether feminists or gay-rights campaigners. You have a splintering between those who remain doctrinally Christian and those who are drawing on that Christian inheritance, but feel that they are opposing Christian doctrine and therefore increasingly become hostile to Christianity itself. The fact is they are indebted to the Christian inheritance. But because they have cut themselves off from the Scripture, the theology, the liturgy, and the patterns of behavior that had always defined Christians, they are kind of drifting off in all kinds of radical new ways.
But I think that there is one major theological maneuver that happens over the course of the ’60s, which is that sense that the Latin Christian doctrine of original sin is something to be profoundly rejected. The notion that human beings are born good and that they’re kind of corrupted by capitalism or whatever is very, very powerful in the ’60s. And so it seems liberating and progressive to get rid of the idea that we’re all born as sinners.
The problem with that is that if you get rid of the doctrine of original sin, then what you bake in is that it’s within our own capabilities to be good, to be a good person, and therefore you might persuade yourself that you are free of sin. By abolishing the concept of original sin, it encourages progressives to sit, in a more self-confident way, in moral judgment of those they oppose, than they might otherwise have done.
On why Tom returned to Christianity:
BW: You became secular as a teen and then you returned to Christianity. What brought you back to it?
TH: I exist in the kind of shadowlands between belief and agnosticism. And what brought me back from being an atheist apostate was that I found it boring ultimately. I found the process of reading the great Christian thinkers, reflecting on the patterns of Christian history, and recognizing that this is where I came from—they kind of gelled with me in a way that nothing else would.
There are times where I might be out in the wilderness and I have a sense of the closeness of animals and water and the sky. And I can imagine what it must have been like to exist in the Neolithic era. But I can’t go back to that, obviously. But I can go back to Christianity, because that’s the faith in which I was raised. And I think because of that, I am more open, perhaps, to its beauties as well as to its cruelties.
I feel that in trying to make sense of it, I’m trying to make sense of myself and the kind of conflicted nature that I sense exists within me and within the society that I live in. Ultimately, it makes my life more interesting to be a part of that, to share in that and to contemplate the possibility that it might be true.
BW: What does Christmas mean to you?
TH: The times of the year where I feel most Christian and I feel that I can believe most easily are Christmas and Easter, because these are the two great festivals of the Church. I respond to the inherent beauty and drama of the story. To live in England in December is to live in darkness a lot of the time, and so the idea of light in the darkness is very vivid for me.
From the Macdonald Laurier Institute
By Raheel Raza
Fear of being labelled a racist prevented UK officials from stopping the mass abuse of women by “grooming gangs.” Could the same happen in Canada?
If you asked Canadians what they know about the United Kingdom’s “grooming gangs” the majority would be clueless. So far, the issue has been an exclusively UK based scandal, with limited media coverage.
These so-called “grooming gangs” sexually exploited hundreds of vulnerable young women and girls across the UK for many years before their activities came to public attention in the early 2010s. In essence, because the perpetrators are largely groups of British-Pakistani men, the media, law enforcement, and officials failed in their duty to address or publicize the scandal for fear of being accused of racism. This is a truly tragic result of identity politics on a massive scale.
The victims were mostly female and white (although some Asian girls were also targeted). Many victims were underage, some were homeless or living in state children’s homes. Local social services officials knew many of the girls but stood by as the gangs exploited them – sometimes for years.
Media reports suggested that local law enforcement also knew some of the perpetrators but waited unreasonably long before making arrests and laying charges. Scores of men in different towns have since been arrested, tried and imprisoned for their actions. But hundreds roam free, even today.
Among the worst cases were gangs operating in the northern towns of Rotherham and Rochdale, but many others have been exposed around the country over the last decade-and-a-half: Oldham, Oxford, Telford, Peterborough, and others. Ministers and members of the opposition have acknowledged that similar gangs may still be operating.
The story came to international attention recently, due to intervention by Elon Musk, who tweeted in clear terms about the UK’s problems with racial integration. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now grappling with the re-emergence of this long-running scandal.
GB News UK produced one of the most comprehensive and detailed exposes through an investigative documentary featuring exclusive interviews with survivors, whistleblowers, and activists. The documentary explains why the police and authorities have allowed such a significant cover up to persist for so long. There is evidence of a massive cover up by people who had infiltrated into social services, councils and law enforcement.
UK Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips refused a request from Oldham City Council to launch a national inquiry into the issue and instead told the council it should mount a local one itself. But thankfully, UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has announced plans for a nationwide review and five government-backed local inquiries.
British academic Alexis Jay, a professor of social work and a child protection expert, concluded a multi-year public inquiry detailing how an organized gang abused girls as young as 11, trafficking them across the country and even picking them up from children’s care homes in taxis without any effort to hide what they were doing.
Jay found that “1,400 children had been sexually exploited, raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked across other towns, abducted, beaten, and threatened with guns. Children had even been doused in petrol. Girls as young as 11 had been raped. Those reports a decade ago identified a failure to confront Pakistani heritage gangs and a ‘widespread perception’ that they should ‘downplay the ethnic dimensions’ for fear of being seen to be racist.”
Some UK Labour politicians previously said that fear of being labelled racist has created a taboo around saying there is a specific ethnicity of men, of Pakistani heritage, participating in sexual exploitation.
Among them is Sarah Champion, who represents of the areas where grooming gangs operated. She has campaigned consistently on the issue, and recently called for another national inquiry into grooming gangs, putting more pressure on Prime Minister Starmer.
Champion wrote an op-ed for a tabloid newspaper in which she stated: “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. There. I said it. Does that make me a racist? Or am I just prepared to call out this horrifying problem for what it is?”
Champion’s statement caused such an outrage – the Labour Party responded by shunning her – that she had to retract it from her article.
In 2023, then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman made several comments about the ethnicity of abusers in high-profile gangs. She said, “the perpetrators are groups of men, almost all British Pakistani.” She told the BBC the gangs “overwhelmingly” consisted of British Pakistani males.
Reports first surfaced about the groomer gangs more than a decade earlier. In September 2012, journalist Andrew Norfolk, chief investigative reporter for The Times, published an article based on a police report about the extent of the issue. It revealed that networks of mainly British Pakistani men were abusing children in Rotherham “on an unprecedented scale.”
Law authorities failed to prosecute suspects despite police and child protection agencies in Rotherham having had knowledge of these crimes for decades, the newspaper said.
To show that they were engaged, governments and agencies commissioned various reports, but no action was taken. In these reports, the criminals were referred to as “men of Asian heritage”!
Meanwhile Naz Shah, a Labour MP, retweeted, “Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of diversity.” She later deleted her retweet and unliked the post.
In 2018, I was invited to the UK to give testimony in the House of Lords about the Sharia debate in Ontario. At the time, there was a rising number of Sharia Councils operating in the UK that were depriving many Muslim women of their rights.
During that visit I met a white woman named Toni Bugle. Bugle is founder of MARIAS – Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia. Bugle had been a victim of gang rape and abuse as a child (not by grooming gangs) so she paid close attention to the stories of victims of grooming gangs.
Bugle asked me if I would attend a conference that she set up at the UK Parliament where some of the grooming gang victims would tell their stories. She told me she needed a Muslim woman’s voice because when she tried to expose the stories, she was called a racist, bigot, and Islamophobe.
At Bugle’s conference (which had no media presence) I met some of the rape victims, including Caitlin, Samantha, and Torron. They were scared and insecure and spoke in soft voices, looking around constantly. Some of them showed visible signs of trauma and had bruises on their arms and faces. But they were brave enough to share their stories, which were absolutely horrendous. The shock gave me sleepless nights.
Bugle had also organized a rally outside the British Parliament with the victims and I was happy to join her to amplify the victims’ concerns about the authorities’ failure to stop the abuse.
Bugle told me “I realized that there was a massive issue with Muslim men of predominantly Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnicity targeting predominantly young white working-class girls.” Bugle decided to reach out to the victims to help them and started to hear their stories. She continues to do that to this day:
“I always have my phone near me,” Bugle says, “These young girls can and do call me at anytime… I make myself available. If I had to give a number for how many girls I’ve helped, I would take a guess that via just the phone maybe fifty or sixty and more direct involvement approximately ten or fifteen young women. I have also helped many Muslim women who were facing the trauma of forced marriage and sharia councils – two of which I introduced at the conference.”
Hearing this, I was shocked as to why Muslim organizations in UK (especially women’s groups) did not condemn what was happening to their non-Muslim sisters or take any action? Imagine if this was the reverse and happened to Muslim women? All hell would have broken loose!
Bugle said that she had also been contacted by young girls for support. The first girl who reached out, Caitlin Spencer, eventually wrote a book titled, Please, let me go: the horrific true story of a girl’s life in the hands of sex traffickers.
From the age of 14, traffickers controlled Caitlin, raped her, and repeatedly sold and passed her on to new gangs across the UK. Her abusers were blatant in their attacks, often collecting her from school or home, to be taken to flats they owned, family homes, or hotels booked for the day.
Please, Let Me Go is Caitlin’s shocking story of abuse and survival. She writes, “I was trapped. I’d been raped so many times, abused by hundreds, if not thousands. They could have left every door open, and it would have made no difference. And I always came back – they always brought me back.”
Bugle says, “given that Caitlin still sees her abusers driving their taxis with impunity and that other victims similarly see perpetrators living freely and intimidating them, what will our government do to bring those perpetrators to justice?”
Bugle continues, “I have met girls who have been raped, defecated on, urinated on, had children from their abusers and often those children were taken away from these girls by social services. You can imagine the damage that did was devastating for the whole family.”
Another girl Bugle helped is Sarah, a 15 year old white girl. A journalist for the Daily Mail did a story on Sarah: a grooming gang coerced her to marry a gang member who effectively forced her into sex slavery after abducting her in a Tesco parking lot in an English suburb. Sarah’s captivity lasted for 12 years.
I asked Bugle why they didn’t go to court or the police. She says “sadly they went to the police, who pretty much promised they would deal with what happened – but also made it very clear it would be ‘their word against the men’… The girls were made to feel they were not believed and it led to the girls just giving up… every time they went to the police and nothing was done the girls would often find themselves beaten by the very men they reported.”
Bugle says she saw this same trend, of girls and their families not believed by local authorities, occur over and over. The total failure of social services, law enforcement, teachers, and council officers exacerbated the trauma faced by these victims.
In the past eight years, I’ve observed the changing face of Canada, and the picture is eerily similar to the changes I’ve observed in UK. Every time I returned from a trip to the UK, I worried that with a rise in wokeism, political correctness, and DEI policies, a similar situation of abuse could arise in Canada, and that Canadian leaders would likewise remain silent.
The rise in radical Islamist extremism across Europe and the UK is also happening in Canada, while our politicians and institutions refuse to acknowledge this reality. Radical Islamist extremism is directly connected to the behaviour and attitudes of Islamists. They justify their weaponizing of sexual slavery, disrespect, and dishonouring of non-Muslim women as being in sync with their warped interpretation of the faith. The sexual abuse unleashed by Hamas terrorists against innocent Israeli women is a further indication of the ideological mindset of Islamist radicals. For example, ISIS raped and abused Yazidi women – the irony being that some of the Yazidi women given asylum in the West have seen their captors on the streets.
We now see protestors in Canada rallying in favour of a radical Islamist terror organizations with impunity, a weak judicial system where criminals roam the streets on bail days after committing a crime, an influx of mass immigration with a lack of integration, assimilation, and respect for Canadian values, and a hyper focus on identity politics across our political institutions. A worrying thought: All the ingredients that allowed the “grooming gangs” to operate in the UK are now present in Canada. Canada should learn from the UK’s experience before it is too late.
Raheel Raza is President of The Council for Muslims Against Antisemitism and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
National
War against the US? Chrystia Freeland says Canada, allies need to build ‘New World Order’ to combat Trump
From LifeSiteNews
During last night’s Liberal leadership debate, candidate Chrystia Freeland called for ‘democratic’ countries to ‘build a New World Order’ to combat Trump and his threat of making Canada the 51st U.S. state.
Former finance minister and deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland has called on “democratic” countries to “build a New World Order” to combat U.S. President Donald Trump.
During the February 25 English-language Liberal Party leadership debate, Freeland, who is running for party leadership to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, declared that Canada and its allies must “build a New World Order” to protect against U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to turn the nation into the 51st U.S. state.
“We need to recognize President Trump has said dozens of times he wants us to be the 51st state,” Freeland stated around the 36 minute mark of last night’s debate. “I don’t think any of us wants to be the leader who was asleep at the wheel and didn’t get Canada defended, did not work with our democratic allies to protect our borders.”
“They want to work with us it’s time for us to step up at home to urgently reach out to them and build a New World Order where democracy and Canadian sovereignty is protected,” she declared.
Media outlets have long described talk of a “New World Order” as a conspiracy theory, but globalist organizations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations (UN) continue to give credence to the concept, by publicly calling for and working towards a worldwide “Great Reset” or other similarly named agendas.
To that end, former WEF chairman Klaus Schwab has insisted for decades that “stakeholder capitalism” is the optimal form of global governance in a “reset” world, allowing the biggest corporations to partner with political leaders in deciding key policy agendas, and relegating the governments’ voice to “one among many, without always being the final arbiter.”
Freeland is not the only politician to admit that plans to establish the New World Order are underway. As LifeSiteNews reported in 2021, during the height of the COVID “pandemic,” a senior Australian health officer said that authorities will consider what contact tracing looks like “in the New World Order.” The term has also been used by former U.S. President Joe Biden, former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and others.
Freeland’s comments caused a stir on social media, with many accusing the mainstream political sphere of hypocrisy for labelling the term “New World Order” a “conspiracy theory” while actively advocating for it.
“Liberals: ‘A New World Order is a conspiracy theory. Stop spreading misinformation,’” one user posted on X. “Also Liberals: ‘We need a new world order to protect ourselves from Donald Trump.’”
Liberal Party ties to the WEF and ‘New World Order’ ideology
During the last few years, during which time Freeland served as deputy prime minister and finance minister, the Liberal Party has routinely come under fire for its ties to globalist organizations like the World Economic Forum.
In fact, Freeland’s own ties to the WEF seem extensive, with her receiving a personal commendation from former WEF leader Klaus Schwab.
Others have also pointed out that right around the time she announced her bid for Liberal leader, the WEF’s profile on Freeland disappeared from the group’s website.
Another Liberal leadership candidate, Mark Carney, also has ties to the WEF, as does outgoing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
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