The Book Club: Tom Holland on Christianity's enduring influence

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🗓️ 4 December 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

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Summary

In this week's Book Club, Sam's guest is the historian Tom Holland, author of the new book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. The book, though as Tom remarks, you might not know it from the cover, is essentially a history of Christianity -- and an account of the myriad ways, many of them invisible to us, that it has shaped and continues to shape Western culture. It's a book and an argument that takes us from Ancient Babylon to Harvey Weinstein's hotel room, draws in the Beatles and the Nazis, and orbits around two giant figures: St Paul and Nietzsche. Is there a single discernible, distinctive Christian way of thinking? Is secularism Christianity by other means? And are our modern-day culture wars between alt-righters and woke progressives a post-Christian phenomenon or, as Tom argues, essentially a civil war between two Christian sects?

The Book Club, what used to be known as Spectator Books, is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before you start listening to this podcast, a reminder that we have a special subscription offer.
0:04.8	You can get 12 issues of The Spectator for £12, as well as a £20,000 Amazon voucher.
0:10.3	Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher if you'd like to get this offer.
0:20.5	Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,
0:26.8	and this week I'm very pleased to be joined in the run-up to Christmas by the historian Tom Holland,
0:32.9	whose new book is called Dominion, The Making of the Western Mind, I think is the subtitle.
0:38.8	It is.
0:39.4	Yes.
0:40.1	And it's a book about the history of Christianity and its effect on the whole of Western culture.
0:47.5	So a modest project, Tom.
0:50.4	Yes, and the fact that it's called the making of the Western mind and the fact that there's barely a hint on the cover that it's actually about Christianity kind of points you to the way in which Christian influence, particularly in Britain perhaps, but generally across the West has become quite occluded. It's something that the kind of people who publish beautiful history books tend not to be entirely comfortable with.
1:13.9	But the thesis of the book essentially is that despite that, if the West is a goldfish bowl and we're the goldfish, then the waters that we swim in essentially a Christian, even though we may not appreciate it.
1:25.8	And in fact, shortly after I finished the book, a kind of
1:29.7	even better metaphor hit me, which was prompted by watching Chernobyl, the drama series that I'm
1:35.4	sure some of your listeners may have watched. And in that series, there was a scene where two of the
1:41.8	main characters are looking at the radioactivity leaking from the reactor
1:46.1	and you can literally see it because the air is being ionised but of course the impact of
1:51.5	Chernobyl is experienced in Kiev and Scandinavia and Cumbrian hill farms by people who don't
1:58.8	see the radioactivity but are nevertheless breathing it in and being changed by it and by that I don't see the radioactivity, but are nevertheless breathing it in
2:01.4	and being changed by it. And by that, I don't, I'm not going kind of Richard Dawkins.
2:05.7	I'm not saying that Christianity makes your hair drop out and kills you, but that it, it continues
2:10.9	in the air, remains in the air, you breathe it in and you don't even realize it. And it changes
	...

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