CNN ran an Easter feature on Tom Holland, the British pop historian who wrote Dominion and now tours the American evangelical circuit as their favorite secular validator. The headline promises a “brush with the supernatural.” The article delivers something more instructive: a case study in what happens when a thesis is tailored to its paying audience.
Holland went to Sinjar in 2016, where ISIS had massacred Yazidis by the hundreds. Men executed. Women sold into slavery. The stench of decomposing bodies so overpowering he doubled over on camera. His takeaway: a cross was still standing above the rubble. It moved him. Financially. The dead Yazidis didn’t get a second thought as he walked through them towards his personal savior plans.
Booze for the Alcoholics
Holland’s thesis in Dominion is that Western values like compassion, equality, and human rights are Christian inventions. Secular people hold Christian beliefs without knowing it. The argument has a problem and a function, and the function explains why nobody talks about the problem.
The problem is that the thesis is false. Buddhist ethics developed sophisticated frameworks for compassion and non-harm five centuries before Christ. Jewish law codified obligations to the poor, the stranger, and the vulnerable long before Paul wrote his first letter. Confucian reciprocity predates Christianity by the same margin. Islamic jurisprudence built an entire legal architecture around human dignity. Holland ignores ALL of it. A historian who omits most of human civilization from his thesis about most of human civilization is not doing history. He is doing something else.
The function is flattery. The Southern Baptist Seminary president calls Holland’s premise “fairly unassailable.” American evangelicals get a credentialed British intellectual telling them their religion invented morality. Holland gets the audience, the debate invitations, the YouTube clips, the Easter profiles. Booze for the alcoholics. Delivered in a posh accent with a PBS shine.
The same CNN writer who profiled Holland for Easter published a piece three months ago that documents Christianity’s central role in the KKK, slavery, and colonial genocide. The Holland thesis requires amnesia from the people telling it.
The Content Creator in the Foxhole
Holland’s own faith statements reveal how thin the performance is. “There are times where I can feel that I believe it. There are times when I don’t feel it at all.” His mother tells CNN “he never quite acknowledges it.” He says belief makes “the universe more interesting.” This is not faith. It is aesthetic consumption.
He cites R.S. Thomas as his spiritual touchstone. Any reader of Thomas knows what that means. Thomas was the poet of God’s absence, unanswered prayer, the empty church. His life’s work was the theology of divine silence. Holland cited him as a branding reference in a CNN puff piece. If Holland understood what Thomas was actually writing about, he would not have brought him up.
Holland himself invokes the foxhole cliché. Diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2021, he prayed at midnight mass on Christmas Eve. The cancer hadn’t spread. His brother connected him with a specialist. He now calls it a possible “Marian miracle” while conceding he can’t “100 percent say it’s a coincidence.” His brother’s phone call saved him. He credited the Virgin Mary.
Serious people have examined what happens to faith in actual foxholes. Rabbi Richard Rubenstein published After Auschwitz in 1966 and founded an entire field of theology on one premise: after the Holocaust, belief in a God who acts in history is intellectually indefensible. Elie Wiesel, who survived Auschwitz as a teenager, wrote The Trial of God with God as the defendant. The people who endured genocide concluded God was absent or dead. Holland walked through a genocide site and saw a camera angle.
The Honest Version
Christianity did reshape Western moral frameworks. That much is defensible, and Holland deserves credit for stating it plainly. Where the argument collapses is in calling it revelation rather than what the historical record shows it to be: power technology.
After 1945, British occupation forces deployed church networks across Germany to deprogram a generation raised on Nazi ideology. Christianity was the available operating system that could overwrite the previous one. The British didn’t evangelize the Hitler Youth because they believed. They did it because it worked. Christianity spread through colonization for the same reason. Empires used it because it was effective, and its effectiveness is what Holland is actually documenting.
An honest version of Holland’s thesis would say: Christianity became the dominant moral framework of the West because it was backed by cruel militant empires of history trying to obliterate other faiths, for profit. That is a serious historical argument. But it would empty his bleachers, so he wraps the same insight in a conversion narrative and sells it as mystery. The stench from Holland is almost too much to bear.
CNN calls this a story about faith. It’s a story about supply and demand. And if Holland actually believes what he now claims to believe, he should worry. He declared himself a Christian, then used the faith to sell snake oil to the faithful. By his own adopted theology, that’s the kind of thing they send you to hell for.
