Will I love Dominion?

Scottish missionary Mary Slessor wrote in 1909: "How little those who lightly throw it aside realize what they owe the Gospel." I had heard of Tom Holland's book Dominion from many intellectuals and finally read it this year. Having been raised Christian in Québec's post-catholic culture, I am used to most of my fellow men taking the transformations Christianity has brought for granted and affirming that throwing the baby away with the bath water was the right decision. As many in the West are noting that their secular cut flower societies are withering away, this examination of Christianity's role in… show more.

One of the blurbs on this book’s cover calls it “a masterpiece of scholarship and storytelling,” and this is what I think too. How can a work of such terrific learning and filled with such moral passion be so immensely readable and often so very funny?

Holland has an unfailing eye for fascinating historical details and for enthralling historical characters and historical debate. The book is provocative in its critique of modern Western secularism, in the fun it makes of “woke,” and its insistence on the foundational power of the biblical story that God created humans – all humans –… show more.

Why do we think like we do? I love this book because I had no idea of the extent to which, like it or not, the Western mind has been shaped by Christianity.

Free will, charity, social security, the international dating system, morals, gay rights, paganism, monotheism, faith; attitudes to wealth, privilege, marriage, sin, forgiveness, justice, and the law; wherever you look, there lies the influence of Christianity.

We may well be doubtful now of religion’s claims, but, gorblimey (English cockney corruption of ‘God blind me’), if Christianity isn’t there in the very DNA of the rational West. The need… show more.