THE AUDACITY OF CHRISTIANITY

'To be a Christian is to believe that God became man, and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: the fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it - the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe - that serves to explain more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.524.

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTIONS

'Repeatedly, like a great earthquake, Christianity has sent reverberated across the world. First there was the primal revolution: the revolution preached by St Paul. There there came the aftershocks: the revolution in the eleventh century that set Latin Christendom upon its momentous course; the revolution commemorated as the Reformation; the revolution that killed God. All bore an identical stamp: the aspiration to enfold within their embrace every other possible way of seeing the world; the claim to a universalism that was culturally highly specific. That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution; these were never self-evident truths.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.523,

THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY

'I have written so much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.519.

#MeToo & CHRISTIANITY

'Implicit in #MeToo was the same call to sexual continence that has reverberated throughout the Church's history. Protestors who marched in the red cloaks of handmaids were summoning men to exercise control over their lusts just as the Puritans had done. Appetites that had been hailed by enthusiasts for sexual liberation as Dionysiac stood condemned once again as predatory and violent. The human body was not an object, not a commodity to be used by the rich and powerful as and when they pleased. Two thousands years of Christian sexual morality had resulted in men as well as women widely taking this for granted. Had it not, then #MeToo would have had no force.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.515.

BOTH SIDES IN THE CULTURE WARS ARE CHRISTIAN

'That the great battles in America's culture war were being fought between Christians and those who had emanicipated themselves from Christianity was a conceit that both sides had an interest in promoting. It was no less a myth for that. In reality, Evangelicals and progressives were both recognisably bred of the same matrix. If opponents of abortion were the heirs on Macrina, who had toured the rubbish tips of Cappadocia looking for abandoned infants to rescue then those who argued against them were likewise drawing on a deeply rooted Christian supposition: that every woman's body was her own, and to be respected as such by every man. Supporters of gay marriage were quite as influenced by the Church's enthusiasm for monogamous fidelity as those against it were by biblical condemnations of men who slept with men. To install transgender toilets might indeed seem an affront to the Lord God, who had created male and female; but to refuse kindness to the persecuted was to offend against the most fundamental teaching of Christ. In a country as saturated in Christian assumptions as the United Sates, there could be no escaping their influence - even for those who imagined that they had. America's culture wars were less a war against Christianity than a civil war between Christian factions.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.514.

HOW CHRISTIANITY ITSELF UNDERMINES CHRISTIAN ARROGANCE

'Repeatedly, whether crashing along the canals of Tenochtitlan, or settling the estuaries of Massachusetts, or trekking deep into the Transvaal, the confidence that had enabled Europeans to believe themselves superior to those they were displacing was derived from Christianity. Repeatedly, though, in the struggle to hold this arrogance to account, it was Christianity that had provided the colonised and the enslaved with their surest voice. The paradox was profound. No other conquerors, dismissing with contempt the gods of other peoples, had installed in their place an emblem of power so deeply ambivalent as to render problematic the very notion of power. No other conquerors, exporting an understanding of the divine peculiar to themselves, has so successfully persuaded people around the globe that it possessed a universal import.'

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.487.

SELF-EVIDENT TRUTHS?

'That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths. That most Americans believed they were owed less to philosophy that to the Bible: to the assurance given equally to Christianity and Jews, to Protestants and Catholics, to Calvinist and Quakers, that every human being was created in God's image. The truest and ultimate seedbed of the American republic - no matter what some of those who had composed its founding documents might have cared to think - was the book of Genesis.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion, p.384.

THE POWER OF STORY

'Opposed to the brutally coercive power of the Roman state, Christians brought a conviction as potent as it was subversive: that they were actors in a cosmic drama.' 

Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. p.92.