…is a world without the
possibility of liberty.
Tom Holland has written a book: Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. At
some point, I will read this book and write something about it; I have heard
enough from him in interviews that the book seems very worthwhile.
This post is based on one of
these interviews, conducted by Glen Scrivener. Glen
Scrivener is an ordained minister and evangelist. My following notes
pick up at the 29-minute mark; however, the entire interview is worth listening
to.
GS: There are many humanists who say Christianity played a part in
Western liberal values, but even without Jesus Christ we would have got to
where we are.
TH: (chuckling) No. and it’s so odd because it tends to be
people who valorize science and Darwin and the theory of evolution… [prior to Christianity] there is nothing at all
about the emergence of the qualities or the values or the teaching of
Christianity at all.
I don’t recall if it was
earlier in this interview, or in another interview with Holland, but Holland
describes the Roman world into which Christianity was born. Anyone
not a male Roman citizen demanding any sort of rights would be sent to
death. Any male Roman citizen had the right to have sex with anyone
of any age in any orifice of his choosing. Things like this.
All of this was considered
right, and good. It was only in Christianity where the slaves were
given equal dignity in God’s eyes, where women had the same rights in marriage
and sex as men.
GS: You cannot get these from
other sources?
TH: If you want a sense of what
the world might have looked like without Christianity you can look at India,
where you have very rich philosophical tradition, a very rich tradition of
worshipping gods, you don’t have something that emerges and wipes that
out.
Certainly Christian-like values
did not emerge from India.
TH: I can absolutely imagine a
world where Christianity doesn’t emerge, where what the Jewish Scriptures
offers to Gentiles remains highly appealing, so there’s a kind of churn of
conversion. But because the difficulty of becoming a Jew is such, it
could never become universalist on the scale that Christianity does.
It didn’t before Christ; there
is no reason at all that it would have been different after Christ.
GS: Could we, though, have
generated some sort of human rights [absent Christianity]?
TH: I don’t see why you
would. Why would you? The idea that human rights
kind of hangs in the ether waiting to be discovered is as theological as
believing that the Lord Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and sits at the
hand of God the Father. It requires a leap of faith.
It is
interesting: we consider that natural rights “hang in the ether
waiting to be discovered,” and this is true enough. But I think it
is only true enough if one first accepts that man is made in God’s image and
that God, in Jesus, gave us the means by which to understand proper virtues.
TH: The difference is that
Christians recognize the divinity of Christ requires belief, whereas lots of
people just assume that human rights exist, but they do not. They
are a result of various legal developments in medieval
Christendom. It doesn’t just spontaneously emerge.
Prior to and outside of
Christianity, societies didn’t thrive by practicing what we today consider
proper (i.e. Christian) ethics. Societies thrived via violence and
brute force.
TH: The idea that humanists
propagate, that science “proves” [the value of liberal values] is
grotesque. Science is a mirror in which you see reflected what you
want to see. The Nazis used science to justify racial genocide,
liberals use it to justify “let’s hug the world.” But both of them
reflect the cultural prejudices of people who are looking in that mirror of
science.
Holland then describes his view
of the fall from Christianity, which he says happened as a result of the two
World Wars and people realizing the evils of the Holocaust. I will
only say, that the fall happened long before, and Nietzsche’s madman saw
this. Holland even references Nietzsche’s “Death of God,” so I do
not follow his thinking here at all. He continues:
TH: We no longer needed the
devil, because we had Hitler. We no longer needed hell because we
had Auschwitz. So, whenever people want to do what is right, what is
good, they look at the Nazis and do the opposite of what the Nazis did. The
worst insult you can give anyone is that they are a racist or a Nazi.
This kind of [modern liberal] thinking sucked everyone in – universities,
politicians, and churches. Therefore, the church no longer
determines what people think. Whereas humanism is a kind of a Christian
heresy, humanism has become so hegemonic that it has made the church kind of
humanist.
This is why church attendance in the west is shrinking – who needs the
church when all they do is regurgitate what is offered everywhere else?
GS: So, what would you like to see
Christians preach?
TH: I see no point in bishops,
preachers or evangelists just recycling the kind of stuff that you can get
(chuckling) from any kind of soft left-liberal, because everyone is doing
that. If I want that, I will get it from a liberal-democratic
counselor.
Holland then describes the incomprehensible truth of Christianity:
TH: If you are a Christian, you think that the entire fabric of the
cosmos was ruptured by this strange singularity where someone who is God and
man sets everything on its head. To say its supernatural is to
downplay it. If you believe that, then it should be possible to
dwell on all the other “weird” stuff that becomes part of the Christian
package.
Really, no one else is offering this. It sounds like a
pretty good product differentiation strategy.
TH: I don’t want to hear what
bishops think about Brexit; I know what they think about Brexit and it’s not
very interesting. If they’ve got views on original sin, I would be
very interested to hear that.
Original sin is a perfect
example: if you are a woke liberal, you think “how awful, how terrible;
Augustine was a terrible guy.” But watching the kind of shrillness
of people convinced of their own virtue, howling down “sinners,” you realize that
the concept of original sin keeps us all honest – we are all sinners.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn would write that the line separating good
and evil passes right through every human heart. Every single
one. Original sin; we are all depraved.
TH: Without original sin, you
get a horrible hierarchy of virtue. You get exactly what atheists
tend to criticize Christianity for. Christians always have a sense
of their own sin; it keeps them honest.
And this is what we see around
us today. The hierarchy of virtue is upside down. The
greater the evil and the more depraved, the higher up the ladder it goes.
Conclusion
Removing Christianity from community life, as
was accomplished in the Enlightenment, has led us to this
place. I am reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche, from Twilight of the Idols:
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian
morality out from under one's feet... Christianity is a system, a whole view of
things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith
in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands.
Do you remember what Holland said about the ethics in pre-Christian
Rome? There is nothing that keeps us from this.
Is liberty possible in such a world?