Dominion: A Book Review

Two summers ago I went through what I have come to think of as a minor crisis of faith. It was nothing too earthshattering, but I was between ministries, with a bit more time on my hands than usual, and I happened to read a bunch of books in a row that each pointed out some of the unsightly stains on the garment of Church history. The first was a book called Walking the Bridgeless Canyon, which explored, among other things, the church’s response to LGBTQ people, a sobering story marked predominantly by misunderstanding, mistreatment, prejudice and pain. Then I read a book called Jesus and John Wayne, which examined the patriarchy, misogyny, militarism, and hunger for power endemic in American Evangelicalism. After that I read a book called, Yours, Mine, Ours, about the way European Christians used the Doctrine of Discover to justify exploiting and oppressing North America’s Indigenous People, convincing themselves that they were, in fact, doing God’s work by stealing land and violating treaties to “Christianize” the continent.

It was all pretty grim reading, and its cumulative effect was to leave me wrestling with a profoundly unsettled “What If?” What if, I wondered, in standing with the church, I was actually standing on the wrong side of history? Not that I hadn’t known before that there were some horrid moments in the annals of the Church’s story, but somehow, seeing them laid out so systematically, one after the other after the other, confronted me with the dark side of my tradition in a way I hadn’t really seen it before.

I am still wrestling with some of these issues, a year and a half later. Some I have come to terms with, and others have challenged me to find a different way of being Christian than the way that up till now had always come naturally to me. In another post, perhaps, there would be time to unpack the entire journey and explain how the Spirit led me through it.

For today, I’m sharing this only to give some background for a book I read over the holidays this year, and to explain, maybe, why I found it so fascinating. Like the books mentioned above, Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, is also a survey of the Church’s story. It traces the formation of Christendom, from the crucifixion of Jesus up to the present moment. Holland is not, as far as I can tell, a follower of Jesus Christ. He is, however, an erudite historian committed to objectivity, and while his version of the church’s story does not shy away from discussing any of the debacles I just mentioned, neither is it content to paint a simple two-dimensional portrait of Christianity as a power-hungry religion intent solely on oppressing, exploiting, and manipulating others for its own private ends.

If anything, Holland’s survey of church history leads him to the conclusion that the vast majority of the values and assumptions held dearest by the liberal, secular society of the West, actually trace back directly and inexorably to the Christian movement. The idea that there could be such a thing as a secular society, distinct and separate from “the religious,” is only one such assumption. The notion that there was such a thing as “religion,” and that it was a particular sphere of human thought and activity, distinguishable from one’s political, national, and ethnic identity is another. So is the modern assumption when it comes to sexual morality, that it’s not okay for one person to treat another person as a “thing” there solely for their sexual gratification. Likewise the belief that the powerless ought to be given special consideration in our society, or the idea that there is such a thing as “universal human rights” that give worth and dignity to all people. The list is pretty long, actually, of the ways Christianity has shaped our civilization, inculcating us with our most deeply held values, values that continue to exert an immense influence over us, long after society as a whole has forgotten the Christian root they sprang from.

Towards the end of this whirlwind tour of Church history, it occurred to me that if I find the Church’s exploitation of Canada’s indigenous people repugnant (and I do)—or if I am appalled at the way the Gospel has been used to mistreat women (which I am)—if the moral failings of the Church really do grate against my values, I mean, it’s primarily because my values have been so profoundly shaped by the last 2000 years of the Church’s influence on our world, that I take them for granted.

In one place Tom puts it like this: when we, as modern secular people, criticize the church for things like misogyny or exploitation, we seldom realize how deeply Christian the values are that we use to make that critique, how rarely those values have formed in civilizations that were not shaped fundamentally by Christianity, and how bizarre those values would seem to an ancient, who lived in a world before the Christian message began to exert its influence.

If the debacles of Christian history trouble us, he says, it’s primarily because we are more influenced by the Christian message than any of us realize.

I’ll let you read the book to see how convincingly he makes this case, by surveying the history of the Persian Empire, ancient Greece, the rise and fall of Rome, the Protestant Reformation, and any number of other historical epochs. For my part, though, Dominion has given me a much-needed counter-point to the hard tale of oppression and corruption I’d been wrestling with for the last year. It’s reminded me that the story of Christ’s Bride can’t be told in simply two dimensions, painted in black and white and framed as an either or. The Kingdom of God, for all its being a field planted with wheat and weeds together, still it remains a good and holy yeast, kneaded into the dough until it leavens the whole bunch. Dominion gives one a glimpse of just how thoroughly the leaven has caused the dough to rise.