Historian Tom Holland: Islam, Christianity & the West – TRIGGERnometry Podcast (Transcript)

So I was chair of the Society of Authors and they prepared a report on this, the gender imbalance, how it operated, and they dug into the stats and it was genuinely the case that the older men get, the less likely they are to read fiction. Which as a nonfiction writer was obviously good news for me.

Christianity as the Foundation of Western Civilization

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, look, it’s great to have you on. Your last book, “Dominion,” we talked about it last time, but it’s something we want to come back to a little bit in this conversation to talk about the history of Christianity, but also Islam. You’ve written about both, but starting with Christianity. I mean, the thesis of your book essentially is that Christianity is the soup we swim in in the Western world.

TOM HOLLAND: Yeah, it’s the water we’re goldfish and Christianity is essentially the water that we’re swimming in.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And talk to us. Because one of the things I think very few people now understand is how remarkable the mentality shift that came with Christianity was and how different Christian civilization is to the pre-Christian civilization in terms of its values, in terms of the things that it thought were important, in terms of the things that it believed about human beings and how they ought to act and what they ought to value and so on.

The Revolutionary Symbol of the Cross

TOM HOLLAND: I mean, it is radically different. But just to presage what I’m going to say about that by pointing out that obviously nothing comes from nothing. Christianity emerges from a particular matrix that you get in 1st century AD Mediterranean. There are all kinds of influences on it. The Jewish most obviously, but also Greek, Persian. And the fact that it is born into the Roman Empire. I think without the Roman Empire, it would not have happened.

And on the topic of the Roman Empire, I guess the clearest demonstration of the vibe shift, if you want to call it that, is to look at the classic emblem of Christianity, which is the cross. And the cross is for the Romans an expression of their right to torture to death anyone who opposes their rule. It is the fate that is visited particularly paradigmatically on slaves because it is the most agonizing, but also the most humiliating form of death imaginable.

You are stripped naked. So, you know, if you think of pictures of Christ on the cross, he usually has a loincloth. He wouldn’t have had a loincloth. It would all have been exposed. And you are nailed or hung by ropes or suspended in a wide variety of ways. There’s no set way of crucifying someone. And you are then a kind of public spectacle. You’re like a billboard advertising the power of the state that has put you there.

And you can’t ward the birds off as they flock around your eyes and peck them out. You’re constantly levering yourself up and down to try and keep your breath. Your suffering and your agony is on absolutely public display. And perhaps when you die, you’re left there like a slab of meat. So it is an excruciating, agonizing, horrific death.

The Radical Value Inversion

And what Christianity does is to turn that value system on its head and to say that the person who is crucified triumphs over the person who’s crucified him. And the scale of that value shift, I think, is illustrated by the way in which, in the early decades and centuries of Christianity, the fact that Jesus died on the cross is a cause of deep anxiety, or at least embarrassment to Christians who are talking about it.

So the earliest Christian writer that we have, the earliest evidence for Christianity written evidence, is Paul. And in his letters, he situates the death of Christ on the cross at the center of what he is preaching. But he is also embarrassed about it. And so he says that to the Jews or the Judeans, as I’d rather call them, it’s a stumbling block, his message. But to everybody else, to the Greeks and to the Romans, it’s just madness.

And the reason for that is that for the Romans, what Paul is preaching, the idea that a man can also be a God, I mean, that’s not news because Julius Caesar had become a God. Augustus is worshiped as a God. That’s not the madness of it. The madness is the idea that someone who had suffered this death that paradigmatically is visited on slaves is a God. That’s the lunacy of it.

And you sense that Paul is constantly trying to preempt objections to that position of madness. And it’s something that continues throughout Christian writings, throughout the second century, into the third century, and even when Constantine in the beginning of the 4th century converts to Christianity, and Christianity starts to emerge as something that is first of all permitted and then becomes the state ideology, there’s still a reluctance to illustrate Christ on the cross.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So there’s…

TOM HOLLAND: There’s an ivory casket in the British Museum which illustrates various scenes from the Passion. And you have Jesus on the cross there. He looks unbelievably buff. He’s got his loincloth on, and he looks like an athlete. He looks like someone who’s winning first prize in the Olympics.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Instagram influencer.

TOM HOLLAND: He looks, yeah, well, he looks like a footballer. You know, he’s toned. He’s muscular, he’s relaxed. He’s got this completely mellow expression on his face. He does not look like someone who’s worried about birds coming and pecking out his eyeballs.

And so even there, you still don’t have… The artist is reluctant to portray the reality of crucifixion. And it’s not for another 500 years, not until just before the first millennium, that you get the first representations of Christ dead on the cross.

The Medieval Obsession with Christ’s Suffering

And then over the course of the Middle Ages, so the High Middle Ages, the culture of Latin Christendom becomes increasingly obsessed with the sufferings of Christ. So it’s portrayed in art, but it’s also in the liturgy, it’s in prayers, it dominates the Christian imagination.

And I think that the long term consequence of that is that we, as a civilization, people growing up in a world that’s still powerfully informed by Christianity, we’ve been desensitized to what the cross represents. You know, we see it as an abstract expression of Christianity. We don’t stop to think that’s bad. You know, people have said, oh, it’s like having the electric chair as a symbol of something. But it is much, much worse to be crucified than to die in the electric chair.

The Sources of Christian Revolution

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Tom, come back with me to what you said earlier, which I thought fascinating because we talked about the moral inversion, the flipping of morality almost. And what we mean by this is effectively in the civilization in which Jesus was born and lived, the idea was that, you know, it was the strong conquer and win and the weak suffer what they must, or whatever that phrase is effectively. Right. It’s the ideology that Nietzsche then reinstated later in the 20th century, which was this idea that, you know, the strong must get what they want and the weak are going to suffer. And it’s good to be strong and it’s bad to be weak. And you say this was already there. It came from something that was already there in Roman society, in the Greek society, in the Jewish tradition, traditions that these people lived within. So how does that happen?

TOM HOLLAND: No, I’m not exactly saying that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Okay, correct.

TOM HOLLAND: I’m saying that there are, if you think of Christianity as a great sea, there are many rivers that flow into it. So there’s obviously the Jewish inheritance, the scriptural inheritance. And from Greece, there is the philosophical tradition. So the influence of Aristotle and Plato on Christianity as it evolves is absolutely immense. There’s a sense in which a lot of theology is just footnotes to Plato. Like philosophy is…

The influence of Persia. The Persians have this idea that the universe is moralized, that there are rival principles of dark and light, of lies and truth. And this seems to be a big influence on the formation of Hebrew scripture because people from Jerusalem are taken as prisoners to Babylon and then Babylon gets captured by the Persians and they’re allowed to go back and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. And Cyrus, the first great Persian king, is hailed in the Bible as a messiah, as a liberator. So that’s also a crucial part of it.

And then what Rome provides, I think, is the notion of a universal order. So the ideology of Rome is that they have “imperium sine fine,” as Virgil called it, empire without limit. The remit of Rome is universal. And that is something that Christianity takes for granted, that there is a universal global order.

And Paul’s ability to write his letters to the Galatians or the Ephesians or the Corinthians or the Romans reflects that. The Mediterranean has become a Roman lake. Shipping lanes can be used without fear of pirates attacking you, and roads are being built and you can travel on them. It’s a globalized world. And so that also is part of the Christian context.

Paul’s Revolutionary Insight

The idea that someone who has suffered the death of a slave could in some way be the universal God who has created everything. That is the radical… You know, that’s what’s novel. That’s what’s radical.

Although having said that, I think when you look at Paul’s letters, so the tradition of Paul as portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul talks about it himself in his letters, is that he was a persecutor of the Church. He obviously thought the Christian notion that Jesus had risen from the dead and was in some way a part of God was powerfully offensive.

And then he has a vision of the risen Christ, he says. And I think in the aftermath of that experience, he goes away and he reads through the scriptures to try and make sense of what he has seen. And it’s like being given the key to a detective story where you go back and you realize that all kinds of things… you know, you’ve been thrown off the scent. You’ve missed what the actual solution to the puzzle is.

And I think that’s the key that Paul is bringing to Hebrew scriptures. And he’s realizing that all the promises that he had thought were contained in scripture, that a powerful warlord would come to redeem God’s people, that actually, that wasn’t what the key was. The key was that the Messiah would come, but he would come as a man of sorrows.

And so he is drawing on the inheritance of Hebrew scripture. It is there, but what Christianity does is to enshrine it at the molten heart of the gospel. “Evangelion,” good news that Paul is preaching.

The Character of Ancient Gods

FRANCIS FOSTER: I really like that we’ve talked about the difference between the Christian God and the gods that preceded it, because if you know anything about Roman gods or Greek gods from which they were based on, they come across as petty.

TOM HOLLAND: I think they come across as unbelievably charismatic.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Really.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Surely.

The Appeal of Ancient Gods vs. Christianity

TOM HOLLAND: Well, they, the peaceful charismatic pettiness. Perhaps you might. I, as a child, I went to church and went to Sunday school and I loved the Bible stories. I mean, I thought they were great. But I was always very much on the side of the great empires. So I was very much kind of team pharaoh as opposed to Moses and love the Assyrians, love the Babylonians, you know, very much pro Pontius Pilate as opposed to Jesus.

And one of the reasons for that was that I found the, I found their gods kind of more glamorous and exciting. So everything that the Hebrew prophets were condemning, you know, they condemn the gods of Egypt or Babylon as so much stock and stone that it’s, you know, they’re just great idols and things. I’d love an idol that was much more kind of glamorous than what we got in the church. And specifically, I loved the gods of Greece. I found them so much more charismatic.

But you’re right, I mean, they’re terrible, they’re awful. But in a way, a God like Athena seemed to me to correspond much more closely to how I felt the world was. You know, she’s very smart. She’s also very violent. She encourages all the arts of civilization. But she’s also unbelievably petty, as you say, you know, if you offend her, she will inflict appalling things on you. But she looks after her own. And I kind of always felt as a child that if Athena had been a viable faith alternative, I would absolutely have gone for her.

And I think the sense that the philosophers have, so going back to the 6th century and then through to Plato and Aristotle and to the particularly the Stoics, that they are reacting as you do, that Plato famously says we shouldn’t have poets in our ideal republic because the poets make you feel the charisma of poets of these gods and they are not worthy of being followed or worshiped. And that the true divine lies beyond these stories. And essentially it’s that understanding of the divine that Christian theologians then kind of adopt and bundle into the package.

So you could in that sense say that the Greek gods, in a kind of weird way, other maligned step parents of Christianity, that it’s the rejection of them. I mean, in an Oedipal way, very appropriate. The rejection of the philosophers, of that kind of quality of the Greek gods is there. And it’s interesting. I mean, obviously this is crucially a part of the context again into which Christianity is born.

Paul and the Greek Influence

So when Paul has his vision of Christ according to Acts, Christ says to him, “Paul, why are you kicking against the pricks? You know, why are you, why are you kicking against what I’m giving you?” And this is a phrase that comes from Euripides great play the Bacchae, which describes Dionysus appearing and there are people who reject him. And the fate that is visited on them is terrible.

Say Pentheus, the king of Thebes, who is Dionysus’ cousin. Refuses to recognize his cousin as a God. I mean, as he would if your cousin turns up, says he’s gone, not going to have anything to do. And he suffers a terrible fate. He, you know, his aunts go mad, roam the countryside tearing cattle to pieces and throwing bits of flesh all over the trees and things. Pentheus tries to arrest them. Dionysus drives him mad. He dresses up as a maenad, as a literally a raver, someone who goes to a rave. So he dresses up in whatever, you know, the maenads are wearing kind of animal skins.

He goes up to try and spy on his mother and his aunts and they see him and rip him to pieces as though that, you know, so he’s a wild animal. This is obviously not what Christ is doing to Paul, but there are clearly resemblances between a God, say like Dionysus and Christ that even Paul can recognize.

The Cruelty of Ancient Gods

FRANCIS FOSTER: It’s such a good point you made, because when I was reading your book and I was going over Greek and Roman history with the gods, the one word that stood out to me was cruelty.

TOM HOLLAND: It was.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yeah, they’re viciously cool.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Take the story of Prometheus gave fire to the human beings doomed to have. I think it was an eagle. Rip out his heart every day. His liver. His liver to be ripped out. But then you contrast that.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: He grows back every day and an eagle comes back and rips it out.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, yeah. You know, he liked the diet of awful anyway. But you had like, Jesus, who, when he was dying, said to God, whilst he was suffering the most horrendous of and brutal of fates on the cross, “forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.” That is a radical transformation, isn’t it? That’s a radical difference.

Nietzsche’s Understanding of Christianity

TOM HOLLAND: Yes, it’s very radical. And you mentioned Nietzsche. I mean, this is what nature fixes on. I mean, I said how we’ve become desensitized to the cross. I think it’s amazing that Nietzsche, who is the most brilliant of all atheist writers who have emerged in the west, he gets the cross. He gets what is radical and subversive about the cross to a degree that theologians haven’t really articulated for centuries and centuries.

There is something of Paul’s bewilderment and perplexity and shock contemplating the death of Christ on the cross about Nietzsche. And he finds it repellent because he thinks that what he famously calls Christianity a slave religion, that it’s a religion for the weak and the poor, and that its popularity is driven by the result, the not quite resentment, the kind of mingling of resentment and hostility that those who are weak feel for the strong.

And Nietzsche thinks that the strong are healthy and that healthiness should be celebrated and that if strength involves strapping up someone who has annoyed you to a rock and sending an eagle to devour his liver every day. Well, brilliant. Bring it on. Let’s crack on.

Christianity’s Democratic Nature

FRANCIS FOSTER: But there’s another aspect of Christianity which is very powerful. Where Constantine and I went to Sicily and we did a guided tour of these Greek temples and Roman temples. And one of the things the guide said to us was this was a place. The temple was a place for the high priests. This was a place for the upper echelons of religious society, whereas the church is a place for everybody.

The Religious Ecosystem of Ancient Athens

TOM HOLLAND: Well, I’m not sure that’s entirely true. The temples and the shrines, say, in Greece or Rome, particularly. Let’s look at Athens, the democracy. In Athens, the temples are seen as and the rituals and the rights that are practiced to keep Athena and the other gods happy are fundamental to the health of the entire demos, the entire people. And unless you buy into that, you don’t understand what makes a city like democratic Athens tick.

So the power, the kratia of the demos, we translate it as people power, and we think of it as democracy. And but democracy in English is a kind of, it’s a false friend. It doesn’t mean what it meant for Athens, we tend to think democracy is founded on rights. People have a right to a vote. So therefore the fact that men in Athens had a vote and women didn’t is offensive to us. This is not how it operated in Athens because the role of men and women, all those who are sprung from the soil of Attica, are part of a continuum that reaches back into the past, forward into the future, and is in a kind of relationship with the gods.

So the soil, the people, the gods, this is a kind of ecosystem in which everyone flourishes and everyone has the role. And the role of men in this ecosystem is to keep the demos secure, the demos against external enemies, so to go out and fight against rival cities and also to draw up the laws that will enable the city to prosper in the kind of the dimension of the mortal. But just as important, or possibly even more important, is the role of keeping the gods on side.

And in that, women have a very important role. They provide, they weave the robes that every year is given to one of the two statues on the Acropolis. So every fourth year there’s an enormous one that goes to the statue of Athena in the Parthenon, and every year a slightly smaller one to the kind of the ancient wooden statue of the goddess. They feed the holy snakes on the Acropolis with cakes. They practice cults. So they, the great festival of Dionysus, they welcome Dionysus in. And women go to a temple in the marshes to Dionysus. And there one of them has sex with the king. And nobody really knows what this involves, but, I mean, it’s clearly something’s going on there.

The Mystery of Artemis

And the thing I love is that every young girl in Athens, when she becomes 10, goes to this temple of Artemis, who, like Athena, is a kind of terrifying goddess, virgin goddess, mistress of the beasts, she’s called. And girls go out there and we’re told in the they turn into bears. And scholars debate what does this mean? I mean, does it, is it a puberty ritual? You know, do they put on the robes of, you know, the skins of bears or what?

Nobody pauses to think, well, maybe they did turn into bears, but what if they did turn into bears? What if they did? They are then roaming with Artemis out in the wilds. They have experienced things that men have not experienced. And every man who marries a woman in Athens is marrying someone who’s run with Artemis, is run with the animals. And I think people believed that.

And it gives a shiver of the supernatural and the weird to the functioning of Athens in its golden age that we find very difficult to get a handle on because, of course, the instincts of historians are incredibly materialist. And even if they do believe in the supernatural, they don’t believe in the Greek gods. But you’ve got to try and believe in them. And when you do, you see that it’s part of the rhythm and the fabric of the functioning of the entire city.

And this is why in the long run, the philosophers are so threatening to that. Because if you’re turning around and saying that’s all rubbish, God is kind of perfection in some distant moral order or something, what role is there then for girls going off and turning into bears and running with Artemis?

Christianity’s Contradictions in Practice

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, look, I’m not historian, but I’m fairly comfortable with the idea of women turning into bears every now and again. That is a familiar experience. But I was going to come back to Christianity because one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is from my personal experience, I was surrounded by a lot of Orthodox Christians when I was growing up, my family Orthodox Christians. And one of the things I found quite incongruous was that there was a doctrine of what you’re supposed to do. And then I’d observe people who.

TOM HOLLAND: Orthodoxy.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: There was an orthodoxy that nobody actually did any of those things. They just talked about them. And one of the interesting things to me about Christianity is I imagine, you know, my Anglican friends, let’s say, who are kind of very peaceful and docile almost, you might say, and very kind and generous, etc. That is not the way that Christianity has been practiced through the centuries in some parts of the world.

So how, and how, you know, the message of Jesus turning the other cheek and all these other things, that is not also the way that Christianity has been practiced throughout the ages either. There’s been quite militant periods, there’s been periods of internal persecution of, you know, all sorts of recrimination between different branches, etc. How does all of that happen?

Christianity as a Matrix of Paradoxes

TOM HOLLAND: Christianity, I think, is best thought of as a kind of great pulsing matrix of paradoxes. Paradox structures everything about it. I mean, we’ve been talking about one – the guy on the cross who proves to be greater than the person who’s crucified him, the man who is also a God.

And I guess that this is the Christian understanding of the divine, that in a sense, paradox structures the inability of the human mind to contemplate the potency of the divine. And that being so, there are many, many different ways of structuring and understanding what it is to be a Christian.

A lot of these are generated by the fact that in the second century there’s a guy called Marcion who points out that the God of the New Testament seems quite different to the God of the Old Testament. He’s busy. King David holds the census and God goes ballistic and wipes all the children of Israel out with a plague. There’s a lot of smiting. And now suddenly Jesus is saying, “turn the other cheek” and “put up your sword” – and what’s going on here?

So Marcion’s theory was that the God of the Old Testament was a different God, essentially a kind of subordinate angel who had usurped the true God’s role and that Jesus had therefore been sent by the true God to put humanity back on the straight and narrow. He proposed that there should be a very finite number of Scriptures – the Gospel of Luke, Acts of the apostles, some of the letters of Paul, basically.

This is a key moment because I think you can already, by this point, talk about orthodox Christians, Christians who embody the mainstream of the central gravity in the church. They do not follow that. But because of this challenge, they have to decide what is what – what is the canon going to be, what are our scriptures going to be?

They choose the four gospels because these are the ones that are closest to the time. They’re the ones that are generally accepted as being the most authentic record – the various letters of Paul, the Book of Revelation and so on. They also decide to keep what they come to term the Old Testament and the sense that God had prefigured the coming of Christ in the Hebrew scriptures. By doing that sets up opportunities for Christians to emphasize things that perhaps aren’t being emphasized in the Passion narratives.

The Evolution of Christian Behavior

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, what I’m getting at, Tom, is let me put it more bluntly. You’re very eloquent and historian. I’m just, what I’m saying is, in my understanding, why are Christians behaved in monstrous way throughout history?

For example, I guess what I’m saying is my experience of Christians today is that if somebody stood up and went, “you know what? These people are heretics and they must be eradicated,” most Christians would be like, “well, that’s a bit much.” Do you know what I mean?

TOM HOLLAND: Well, that’s been a long process of weathering and transformation. And the thing is that Christianity isn’t a – it’s a constantly – I mean, it’s best thought of, I think, as a kind of civilization. Things evolve and change, but different emphases are happening all the time.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: This is why I’m asking, because when you talk to Christians today, they will say, compare it to Islam, right? If you say, “well, Islam is not as drastic today as it was when it was first created,” probably true. And process of weathering is perfect explanation to my layman understanding. You’ll probably rip into this, right? But with Christianity, there was the message of compassion and empathy and turning the other cheek and all of that from the beginning. So what is it that’s being weathered over this 2,000 years?

The Paradox of Progressive Messages and Dark Consequences

TOM HOLLAND: Well, okay, so go back to the issue of paradox. Paul in his letters writing to the Galatians – so this is really, might even be among the earliest of letters. So right at the start of the Christian tradition, he writes to them and he says that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, there is no man or woman, there is no slave or free. So he’s dissolving the traditional boundaries that are separated – the two sexes, the different peoples of the world and the different social orders. It’s very progressive.

Well, he’s saying in Christ Jesus, I mean, he’s not the world, the world is fallen. These differences and what stems from these differences are part of the lot of the children of Adam and Eve. We’re all part of this fallen world. I mean, that’s the gist, but that in Christ they will be dissolved. This is the heaven that is promised.

Now, of course there is, it’s like an acorn from which a great oak will flourish. And I would say that the assumptions that govern a liberal society derive from that. The idea that men and women have an inherent equality, that differences between peoples are iniquitous to emphasize. I mean, we’ll come to slavery perhaps in due course, but the idea that there should be – I mean, you can see that there is no stable, free. It feeds in the long run into abolitionism. It feeds into French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution. I mean, these are very, very long term consequences.

I mean, another metaphor, I love mixing up with metaphors would be, that is a grumbling of the earth, a grinding of the tectonic plates and in due course Tokyo gets drowned by a tsunami. It’s that kind of – that’s what it is.

But right from the beginning, there is a problem with one of those in particular, which is Paul’s assertion that there is no Jew or Greek. He writes, what he means is Judean or Greek. He is a Judean, he’s from Judea. He is therefore a provincial like any other. There are all kinds of people – Judeans, Egyptians, whatever, and he’s comparing them to the Greeks. And he’s saying that the differences between Judeans and Greeks will dissolve in Christ, i.e. there will be a kind of universal brotherhood, sisterhood, whatever.

However, famously, not all Judeans are keen on having their sense of distinctiveness dissolved into a kind of universal mush. And so they do not in the main follow Paul’s exhortation to accept Christ as Lord. And that then means that there is a fracture point right from the beginning between people who will come to be defined as Christians and Jews. And that is obviously an incredibly dark shadow that has hung over the entire course of Christianity.

But you can see how what seems to us a progressive message has led to what we could also see as very dark consequences. And that is just one verse from one book of the New Testament, which in turn is part of – includes the Old Testament. There is a lot of material there that can provide sanction for a broad array of responses. And that can also set in train all kinds of trends that would have seemed unimaginable in the first century A.D.

Spanish Conquest and Religious Justification

FRANCIS FOSTER: So everyone can drink? So my mother’s Venezuelan. And it’s really fascinating to see the way that the Spanish conquistadors behaved in South America and the Portuguese empire behaved in South America. And they come from a Catholic tradition to the way that the British Empire behaved. Was that a large part of the way they behaved based on religion, or was there something else to it?

TOM HOLLAND: Well, the Spanish are the first to discover great powers in a world that no one had imagined before. And so when they conquered the Aztec Empire and then the Inca Empire, they – I mean, I don’t know if you played a game like Civilization.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I played Colonization.

TOM HOLLAND: Civilization, you know, Civilization. You could end up with tanks attacking archers.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Yes.

TOM HOLLAND: And that’s basically what you have, because the Aztecs is kind of Bronze Age civilization, I mean, beautiful, fascinating, extraordinary, but collapses before everything that the Spanish bring because they’re the beneficiaries of thousands of years of Eurasian crops and cattle and all kinds of things like that. And this innate – and obviously the Spanish interpret this as an expression of divine plan. They’re bringing Christ to people who had previously walked in darkness.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Sorry to interject very briefly. How much of it was that? Were they genuinely seeking to expand in the new world for religious reasons or was there a lot of pragmatism to it?

The Conquistadors and Christian Motivations

TOM HOLLAND: You know, obviously it varies. I mean, the conquistadors are unbelievably brutal in the main, and if they hadn’t been brutal, then they wouldn’t have done what they did. You know, they wouldn’t have conquered what they ended up conquering. The lust for gold becomes notorious. It is absolutely about wanting material goods.

But to imagine that the desire to win souls for Christ is simply cynical window dressing is a very anachronistic take. There are absolutely people who are going out there who feel that this is absolutely part of God’s plan. And there are friars of whom the most famous is a guy called Bartolomé de las Casas who condemns the oppression and the greed of the conquistadors as an offense against God.

And there is a great scholarly debate in Spain between those who are drawing on Greek philosophers, particularly Aristotle, to essentially argue that the strong do what they will, the weak must suck it up. The argument that there are those who are destined to be slaves and there are those who are destined to be masters. And they’re drawing on Greek philosophy for that.

And then there is Las Casas, who’s saying no, he’s drawing on the Gospels. He’s saying no, slavery is an evil. These are people who are as worthy of respect as anyone else who has been won for Christ, they must be won for Christ. And you can see there the beginnings of ideas that will feed ultimately into notions of international law.

Protestant vs. Catholic Approaches to Slavery

And that’s a Catholic perspective. The British obviously are Protestant and therefore they bring a slightly different perspective. One perspective is that the Spanish are evil. So what they call the Black Legend. The idea that the Spanish are uniquely appalling, which often they’re drawing on Las Casas and other Spanish writers like him to condemn the Spanish. I mean, it’s very much Protestant black propaganda, I think.

But the British have their own route to deciding that slavery is wrong. It’s as Christian as the Spanish one, but it’s distinctively Protestant. And what you have with the radical form of Protestantism that develops in England in the Civil War and then the Commonwealth and its aftermath is this notion that the Spirit descends on you and enables you to read Scripture in the way that it’s meant to be properly understood.

So the simple words on the page, you know, this is inadequate to properly understand it. You have to have the Spirit. You have to have been granted grace by the Spirit, by God. And when you do that, then you can see what it properly means.

The Industrial Revolution and Slavery

And this revolution in England is transported to the Caribbean and it’s transported to the American colonies. And so Quakers are the most obvious example, but Baptists and people like that, and this coincides with the development of plantation slavery in the Caribbean and in the American colonies.

Britain is starting to industrialize by this point. And industrialization is about utilizing resources in a way that is more intensive than has ever been done before. And what that means for slaves is obviously horrendous because you industrialize the process of transporting slaves, of exploiting them, of working them.

So you have the conjunction of that industrialization of slavery and this radical notion that you can only understand God’s purpose by reading the Scriptures with a sense of the Spirit. And it combines to inspire Quakers and evangelical Anglicans, a sense that slavery is wrong. Even though famously, notoriously, nowhere in the Bible does it say that slavery is wrong.

Slavery is taken for granted in the Bible because it’s seen as, you know, in the way the fact that hunger is, or poverty or homelessness or whatever. It’s just part of the human condition. But radical Protestants in the 18th century and then into the early 19th century are saying, “No, actually, it may not say this, but I feel the Spirit is telling me slavery is wrong” and it spreads like a wildfire.

The Birth of International Activism

And the Spirit is conceptualized by Christians as fire, Pentecostal fire. So it’s literally some Pentecostal fire blazing across the Atlantic in Britain, in the Caribbean, in the North American colonies, particularly in the Northern colonies. And it inspires the first great activist movement in Britain. You have people writing to their MPs, you have demonstrations going through the streets of London demanding the abolition of slavery.

And it becomes so unignorable for the government that in 1814 Napoleon has been defeated and sent off to Elba. This is congress in Vienna to redraw the map of Europe. And Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary has to go to Vienna and basically says, “Guys, I’m really sorry, but I’ve got all these people in London who are holding street demonstrations and things. We’ve got to sort this out. We’ve got to abolish the slave trade.”

The Development of International Law

And this carries on even through Waterloo and the second defeat of Napoleon. And the Protestant tradition that Castlereagh is representing obviously means nothing to the Catholic powers, to the French, to the Spanish, to the Portuguese. So they draw on those traditions that Las Casas had been articulating. So Catholic traditions. And it gets blended with the Protestant traditions.

And so also do the radical traditions of the Revolution, the French Revolution. The radicalism of that because the French Revolution had abolished slavery in the Caribbean and then Napoleon had brought it back in. So there are essentially it’s a pooling of these three traditions, all of which are bred of the marrow of Christian Europe. The Protestant, the Catholic and the Enlightenment tradition you want to call it that.

And this is what gives birth essentially to international, the concept of international law, the idea that there are principles that transcend religious doctrine so that a Protestant and a Catholic can equally accept the dictates of international law. And this is what enables British ships when they are patrolling the Atlantic, that gives them the legal right to stop Portuguese or Spanish slave ships and arrest those who are doing it and say put them on coast of Cuba and try them under international law.

Islam and International Law

And it also provides a rubric for what then happens in the 19th century when the British start to go on the attack against the Muslim slave trade. Because of course Muslims have very different sanctions for slavery. And so the process by which Muslim powers come to accept that slavery is an evil requires them to accept the primacy of international law, which is a massive deal for Muslims because they have a framework of law that derives supposedly from God.

So it’s much trickier for them than it is for Christians because Christians don’t have that notion of a God given corpus of laws that have come from God. But essentially that is the framework of international law that governs, you know, uphold the notions of human rights and so on to this day.

The Woke Movement as Religious Phenomenon

FRANCIS FOSTER: Tom, when you were talking about the fact that it was a religious movement that spread like wildfire that helped to eradicate, well, for the British Empire to stop using slaves and to eradicate slavery in the empire, it made me think, and I’m only going to touch it on it briefly with the way that the Woke movement talked about slavery and how we were the beneficiary of slavery, which to a certain extent we are. But the way they talked about it was in the form of original sin. Yes, we are born into this sin and we are never going to be washed clean and is an indelible stain on our reputation and fundamentally our souls as well.

TOM HOLLAND: Well, so I think what happens is that slavery comes to be seen as the great sin. I mean it’s clearly a monstrous, appalling crime. But we judge that by Christian standards we accept it as an appalling crime because we have bought into the assumptions of Las Casas or the Quakers or whatever.

If you look at the entirety of global history, it’s not in any way a moral given. Civilizations have always depended upon the exploitation of the masses and that could be chattel slavery of the kind that you have in Greece and Rome and then in the Atlantic in the 18th century. Or it could be founded on caste, the idea that certain people are born to be inferior. Or it could be upon the exploitation of proletariat which you get in 19th century industrial civilization.

You always, you know, there is no form of civilization that does not. Is not also a reflection of barbarism. Is the famous quotation I’m paraphrasing, I can’t remember it exactly. North Benjamin comment. So there’s always been exploitation. The idea that slavery is therefore not just an unfortunate corollary of the way of things, but a moral stain that has to be eradicated is very, very novel.

Christianity’s Contaminated Legacy

And because it happened in a uniquely horrible form in the Atlantic and because it was Christians who drove that to a degree, it contaminated, I think the Christian record in the eyes of people who were themselves absolutely saturated with Christian assumptions and it bled into anti imperialism moving into the 20th century.

Again, the idea that the powerful countries shouldn’t dominate weak countries. I mean most the history of the world is basically the record of empires. The idea that empires are problematic to use, you know, favorite phrases of the Woke is again a relatively recent one.

And it’s meant that Christianity, which is a universal religion, Christians believe that it’s for the good of the world that everyone becomes a Christian. There are more Christians practice, you know, more Christians than any other kind of practicing ideology in the world that has come to be seen by lots of people as itself evil. The evangelical impetus of Christianity is seen as, you know, going out and overthrowing the right of the Aztecs to do what they want, even if that is human sacrifice or whatever.

The 2020 Movement as Christian Practice

And so the consequence of that is that today we remain the heirs of these Christian impulses. The notion that slavery is an evil, but Christianity has been implicated in that. And so therefore the institutional character of Christianity is often rejected as part of the problem, a part of what has to be rejected, even though it is that institutional structure that has provided people with the ideological framework that enables them to judge it as evil.

And so I think what you saw in 2020 and its aftermath was a deeply Christian movement. I mean, something that the Quakers in the 18th century would have recognized. The line of dissent from the activism of Quakers in the 18th century is very, very clear. That’s what they’re doing.

But because they have jettisoned the Christian scripture, the Christian practice, the Christian self identification that had provided structure for the Quakers and the early activists, they essentially have to construct their own traditions. And so that’s why you had all the toppling of statues, which is a very Protestant thing to do, toppling idols, taking the knee, people offering themselves up as penitentials, white people.

These are very, very Christian forms of practice. It’s just that they have been divorced from the institutional framework that gave them birth. And so how and where they’re developing is unclear. And I think that they are clearly mutating very fast because once you unmoor ideas and stories and traditions from the context that gave them birth, they can mutate very, very quickly.

Understanding Islam in the Western Context

KONSTANTIN KISIN: It’s very interesting you mentioned that because we had a super viral, very popular interview we did with a journalist called Richard Miniter in which we talked about some of the ideas from Albion Seed, the idea of how the United States became what it became. And one of the things he explained to us, I think this may have been off camera, was how many of originate from the very areas of America where the Quakers would have once settled. Very interesting.

But moving on, Tom, One of the other great religions that I think we are incredibly uneducated about, and I speak for myself above anyone else here in the Western world particularly is Islam. And it’s becoming a bigger conversation politically and societally because of immigration policy, because the number of Muslim followers of Islam in the Western world is growing. And I’d love to know more about how that religion came into being. What are its core values? What are its principles? You mentioned some of them already, but can you expand on that?

The Concept of the Secular

TOM HOLLAND: Could I just, before I do that, just put Islam in the context of the Christian story, of course, as manifested in the present West, Because I think that’s important to understand why there are tensions between Islam and Western secular liberalism and why there is such a reluctance to acknowledge this on the part of enthusiasts for secular liberalism.

Because essentially what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept of the secular. And this goes right the way back to ultimately. I mean, you can trace it to the story of Jesus being asked whether taxes should be paid to Caesar. You know, he’s famously asked for a coin and there’s the picture of Caesar and he says, “Whose head is this?” And he says, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. Render unto God what is God’s.” And so that sense that there is.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’re talking about the separation of what the Americans call church and state.

The Secular-Religious Divide in Western Thought

TOM HOLLAND: And we call it here church and state. The notion of church and state, there isn’t synagogue and state, there isn’t mosque and state, it’s church and state. And in the west, that’s because this notion of there being two rival orders gets enshrined by the towering theological genius in the Latin church, Augustine, great in North Africa in the late 4th, early 5th century A.D. and this is against the backdrop of the collapse of Roman power.

Rome has been sacked. And there are Romans who say this is because we have rejected the old order, the old customs that enabled us to keep the gods on site. So, you know, going back to that stuff I was saying about Athens, these rituals, these festivals are like kind of insurance payments to keep the gods happy. And now we’ve abandoned these.

And the Romans call these religiones. So a sacrifice or a festival in honor of a God is a religio. It’s a bond that joins you to a God and is a kind of guarantee that this God will then look after the city and these religiones have been abandoned.

Augustine says, no, not a bit of it. And the reason for that is that everything in the fallen world is bound upon what he calls the cyculum, which is basically the span of human life. But it means the notion that everything is doomed to pass away. All things must pass, as George Harrison would put it. And he says that this is true of empires as well as of individuals. Rome is not permanent. Rome has no special significance. It will pass away. It is bound upon the cyculum.

If you want eternity, you must bind yourself to the pure eternity of heaven. That’s what the real religio is. And it’s only the church that can give you this religio. So there you have the, as the Roman Empire falls, this notion of there being an order of the cyculum, the order of religio.

And over the course of medieval history, this becomes institutionalized and going into the kind of the Reformation and into modernity, it mutates to become this idea that there is this space called the secular which is kind of neutral. It’s separated from what has come to be called religion. And this is a mad idea. No other culture has ever had this idea.

So when you read about ancient Greek religion, they had no concept of religion, and they certainly had no concept of religion as being something that is separate from everything else. It’s the relationship of people to the gods is like the gin in a tonic. You can’t separate out the gin and the tonic. What Christianity does is to say, yeah, you can have gin and here’s the tonic and you can separate them out. That’s the madness of the way that we conceptualize the world in the West.

Islam’s Totalizing Nature

And Islam, that has no concept that you can separate this out. And so this means, therefore, that what we have in the west is an idea that you have freedom of religion. And Jews in the 19th century had freedom of religion in the wake of the French Revolution. They are told, you can practice your religion as you want. Jews didn’t have religion. They were a people.

But they’re being told, if you want to become the citizens of the French Republic, that’s brilliant. But you can no longer define yourself as a citizen of Israel. You are now a French citizen who practices what comes to be called Judaism as a religion. And so Jews in the 19th and in the 20th century have to adapt their traditions to fit this very specific modern Western secular template.

And Western secular democracies require Muslims to do the same to conceptualize what they belong to as being a religion. But classically that’s not how Muslims understood it. Islam is a totalizing way of leading your life. There are rules that govern every aspect of your existence. God is manifested in everything that you do.

The idea that there are kind of safe spaces where everyone can meet up and kind of join in a secular space is something completely alien. And I don’t think that most enthusiasts for liberal secularism understand this. They tend to think that the notion of the secular is something that is common to everybody, that it’s kind of like, everyone has a sense of what a tree is, everyone has a sense of what a dog is, everyone has a sense of what the secular is. They don’t.

And so Muslims are being forced in when they come to the west, are being forced into this kind of Procrustean bed of the secular nation of what a religion is.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: The only reason I keep trying to interject is I’m trying always to convert what you’re saying into simpler, more easier to understand language. And I guess what you’re saying is the central tension there is, theologically speaking, Islam doesn’t allow the separation of politics and Islam. If you are a Muslim. Well, classically, that’s why I said theologically speaking. There are of course individual people who are able to do so. But within the way that the…

TOM HOLLAND: Religion is.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: If you follow that faith, then that faith controls everything. It controls the way you participate in society, the way you live your life and the way you might vote in a society, your wealth, your loyalty will be to that above other things. Is that fair summation?

The Challenge of Islamic Adaptation

TOM HOLLAND: As classically understood, Muhammad is the seal of the prophets. He has brought God’s last message. And the Quran is a record of humanity’s disobedience to prophets. Prophets arrive, they reveal God’s wishes, they then ignore it, or they corrupt God’s message or whatever. And so more prophets have to come. Muhammad is the last prophet.

He and what he teaches mankind is mankind’s last hope. If Islam goes, then mankind is doomed. Everyone will go to hell. So it’s absolutely existential stakes. And the proof that Islam is true, again classically, is that Islam is triumphant for most of its existence. I mean, it pulverizes the Sassanian Empire, it dismembers the Roman Empire, conquers vast swathes of the Christian world, the kind of ancient Christian heartlands of Mediterranean Christianity.

And it’s really only with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt at the very end of the 18th century that Muslim powers are suddenly brought up against the fact that the despised Christian powers are incredibly powerful. And over the course of the 19th into the 20th century, most Muslim powers come under either direct or the indirect hegemony of Christian Western powers. And so that’s a massive shock. And it requires a recalibration of what Islam is.

I mean, the attitude to slavery would be a classic example. The reason that the Sultan in Constantinople is willing to contemplate banning the slave trade, even though it had been legitimized by the fact that Muhammad had slaves and that the early caliphs were all in favor of slavery. They thought it was brilliant and that it’s mandated in Islamic scriptures. The only reason he’s willing to do that was that he needed the help of the British and the French in the Crimean War against the Russians.

And so he essentially employed his top scholars to try and work out a way in which Islamic law could be squared with this radical new notion. And this has been part of the great trauma for Muslims in the modern world is how do you adapt it. And essentially what Muslims did was to kind of Protestantize themselves. So they slightly adopted the sense that it’s in the heart.

You know, it may say this in the Quran, go out and crucify people who are offenders against God, but what that actually means is that you should try and be kind to them. That’s the kind of…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So this is the people who say jihad is the internal jihad, is it?

TOM HOLLAND: Yeah, which it kind, I mean that is a part of it, but it’s not the entirety of it. It absolutely is not part of it, but yes, absolutely. And so you have the, you look at your heart and therefore you can adjust and adapt the legacy of Islamic scripture for the modern world. Get on the right side of history. All these kind of very Protestant ideas or the counter reaction to that is again, a very Protestant one, which is to go fundamentalist because in 20th century Protestantism you have Protestants who were faced with Darwin and all this kind of stuff and they say we’ve got to go back and interpret the Scriptures literally, which neither Christians or Muslims had ever really done.

They have very sophisticated, complicated, almost poetic understanding of the Scriptures. But fundamentalist Protestants were saying, well, what does the Bible say? It’s inerrant. That’s what we’re going to do. And so Muslims also have adopted that policy and the consequence, a kind of very brutal understanding of Islam because there’s quite a lot in the Quran and in the hadiths and in the life of Muhammad that if interpreted in a kind of brutally literal way, sanctions quite a lot of bloodshed. And so that’s part of the problem.

The Unique Challenge of Islamic Reform

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, quite. And this is so informative, Tom. I’m so glad we’re talking about this because I’m really keen to understand this from a deep perspective. And one of the things that I wanted to ask you about in this context is how is it, is there a unique challenge for Islam to, you call it Protestantize itself, which is to start to develop an interpretation that’s more compatible with modern reality for a number of reasons. One of them being the Quran is the literal word of God and the last word of God. This is a kind of the problem. You can’t have a reformation if this is. This is it, right? Like you can’t challenge any of that.

TOM HOLLAND: I think Islam is uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset and people don’t want to admit that in a way because there’s a default assumption that secular civilization can swallow anything up. There’s a kind of arrogance there. The secular civilization of the west is such a broad tent that everyone can be brought into it.

But Islam is at least as sophisticated a civilization as the civilization of the Christian west and a very ancient one. And for most of its existence has been much more powerful than the Christian world. And therefore the idea that it should accommodate itself to what liberal secularists think it should do isn’t a given.

So Muslims in, say in a country like Britain have freedom of religion, but there are lots of Muslims who do not see Islam as a religion because they see religion as a Christian category. Islam is much more than a religion. It’s something that saturates every aspect of existence and therefore they don’t necessarily want that. They want to live in a world where, as has tradition been the case, Islam is everywhere. But that is obviously something that the liberal state is not prepared to offer. So there are limits to what secularism and liberalism can and will offer.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: So what’s the obvious question is, and I mean, it’s probably an unfair question to ask a historian, but we, where is this going?

The Future of Islam in Western Society

TOM HOLLAND: I don’t know. I’m not a prophet, unlike Mohammed. My guess is that Islam, rather in the way that Judaism has done, will accommodate itself to the host society. I mean, that’s traditionally what happens, but that there will always be kickback because of what makes Islam distinctive. And also obviously, the more Muslims there are, the more weight their voices will have. And so the more under pressure, the secular assumptions of the west will come. And I don’t quite know where that leads.

FRANCIS FOSTER: I mean, the worry for a lot of people is it’s not necessarily Islam. It’s that kind of very hard extremist edge of Islam that we see in this country. Will that remain? Will it ever be weathered? I mean, these are impossible questions to ask, because I think that’s a worry for a lot of people. And if there’s no reformation possible, then is this just a continuation?

TOM HOLLAND: Yeah, I think it is. Well, I mean, I think Islam to a degree has had a reformation because the Reformation is all about going back to Scripture and getting rid of the kind of accretion of what’s seen as superstition. And Islam has repeatedly been doing that. It’s a constant kind of summons to reform Islam.

And so certainly, the ideologues of the Islamic State would say that they were reformers. That’s why they, for instance, completely dismiss any notion of international law. It’s why they dismiss notions of human rights. It’s why they think that slavery shouldn’t just be allowed, but should be positively encouraged because it’s in the Quran. And therefore, if you want to be true to God’s message, you should have slavery. I mean, that’s a very radical minority position. But it is an example of the direction of travel that a certain understanding of the Islamic inheritance can lead people in. And it’s, of course, a worry.

The Christian Lens of Western Thought

FRANCIS FOSTER: But I find this conversation very valuable actually, because what you are explaining is that even people who go, “I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe in Jesus Christ, I reject all of that.” But you were still a product of Christianity.

TOM HOLLAND: Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And as a result of that, you look at the world, whether you accept it or not, through Christian eyes.

TOM HOLLAND: Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And I don’t think that people quite understand what that means, particularly when we look at religions like Islam or we look at other cultures and we’re like, “we’re all the same.”

TOM HOLLAND: Yeah, well, so that is the foundational principle of whatever our new religion is. This kind of gelded mutated “be kind, isn’t Paddington wonderful” kind of post Christianity that remains the dominant ideology. And I would say that the paradigmatic pulpit that this religion has is “Thought for the Day” on Radio 4’s Today program where you will have Catholic priests and Anglican bishops and rabbis and Islamic scholars and Sikhs and Hindus all preaching exactly the same message. One will give it a little bit of garnishing from the Gospels, one from the Quran, one from the Bhagavad Gita or whatever, but basically it’s the same core message.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: And what is that message? Be kind. Diversity.

TOM HOLLAND: Yes. We’re all basically the same. There are many routes to God. There are many paths up the mountain.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Isn’t that all true?

TOM HOLLAND: No, I don’t think it’s true. I think that what the study of history reveals, and it’s why it’s so fascinating, is the infinite number of ways there are to be human and the infinite number of ways there are to order a society. And that at any given time, the majority of people who live in a particular place at a particular time will assume that their way of doing things is obviously the standard way of doing it. Why wouldn’t you do it?

And that’s as true of Athenians in 5th century Athens as it is of us today in 21st century Britain. We just assume that the way we see the world is the way that the world is, but it clearly isn’t. And you just have to look at the world through the eyes of Protestants in the 18th century or Muslims in the 14th century or Aztecs in the 15th century to realize how relative one’s own cultural assumptions are.

The Question of Society’s Core

FRANCIS FOSTER: I mean, it’s a very powerful point. I guess the next logical question is we’ve got this new religion, whatever this is, as you’ve said yourself. But to me, it doesn’t seem more a religion. It seems kind of a mishmash of ideologies with no rule.

TOM HOLLAND: That is what religion is.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: But there is no God.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But there is no God. And what I was trying to say is there doesn’t seem to be a core.

TOM HOLLAND: Yes, it’s floating.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And I guess my question is, unpleasant as it may seem, is can society last without this core to it?

TOM HOLLAND: We will find out.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: I mean, I would say that’s an optimistic answer.

Three Possible Futures

TOM HOLLAND: I mean, I would say that there are many paths that our society will take because it’s fracturing in all kinds of ways. There are many different perspectives. And those aren’t just political, they’re cultural in all kinds of ways.

But I would say that for Britain, this ancient Christian country, one path is that this kind of post Christian Paddingtonism, if you want to call it that, it’s like the head of the rocket. It’s gone through the atmosphere, everything else underneath it has been jettisoned and now it’s got the power to blast through the solar system. And all that stuff that’s been jettisoned is all the nonsense about the Bible and Jesus and the church baggage. We don’t need it, it’s just baggage. It’s gone, it’s detritus.

We have now blasted out and we’re going forward. And the secular principles, the liberal principles are sufficiently self-evidently right and good that it will sustain the future evolution and development of our society for decades and centuries to come. Therefore it’s culturally determined. I mean it clearly derives from Christianity, but you don’t need Christianity anymore to provide the rocket fuel. It’s going on its own way.

Another option which the history of the 20th century suggests is that the default assumption among humans is that strength and might is right. Power does have a glamour. And this is what Nietzsche predicted. He said when Christianity goes, there will be this great convulsion and terrifying powers will emerge. And of course he was right because they emerged in the form of fascism.

And fascism and Nazism cast such a shadow over us that we’ve lived in their shadow. In a way, one of the reasons I think for the decline of institutional Christianity is that Hitler has taken the place of the devil and that a modern liberal now, rather than ask “what would Jesus do?” as his Victorian forebear would have done, says “what would Hitler do?” and does the opposite. And that’s kept us on our liberal straight and narrow.

But that is clearly fading as the experience of fascism becomes, in Europe, no longer lived experience. So the bogeyman power of Hitler will fade. And people who are no longer bounded by Christian inhibitions or assumptions, I can imagine them turning around and saying, “well, what’s wrong with that? Why shouldn’t I do what I like? I’m very rich, I’m very powerful, why shouldn’t I do exactly what I like?” And it’s not obvious what the answer to that is if you don’t have the Christian answers.

And I suppose a third possibility is that people will return to the source and say, “well actually maybe I am Christian. Maybe I should take this a bit more seriously than I have been.” And there are tentative signs that that might be happening.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: What’s fascinating is I would argue there are signs of all three of those things happening.

TOM HOLLAND: Of course. And that’s what I’m saying is that all of these things might be happening. And of course we will also have the growth of Islam. So that also provides a fourth option. And quite how all these different traditions will cope with each other, I mean, it’s going to be interesting.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But does it also…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: He seems very excited about this for reasons that are beyond me.

TOM HOLLAND: I think we are living through one of the…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: You’re going to get some fascists, you’re going to get the rise of Islam, you’re going to get these woke idiots running around ruining everything. And what was the other one? The resurgence of Christianity? I think that’s the one I’m rooting for.

A Great Historical Choke Point

TOM HOLLAND: I think we are living through a great choke point in the history of this country and of this continent more generally and Western civilization. And in British terms of British history, we’ve had periods where the culture of, say just looking specifically at England, has radically changed. So the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution. I think that we are on the verge of going through something similar now. And I don’t know where it’s going to go.

People in 1790, looking at Birmingham or Manchester would have had no idea where that was going. But everything changed and maybe we’re on the verge of going through something similar now.

FRANCIS FOSTER: Well, at least you said it with a smile on your face. But I was going to say just one thing. Doesn’t this talk about an arrogance of our culture where…

TOM HOLLAND: But all cultures are arrogant.

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Right.

TOM HOLLAND: They are.

FRANCIS FOSTER: But aren’t we especially arrogant to think we can divorce society…

KONSTANTIN KISIN: That’s your arrogance showing. “Am I not really special about thinking I’m special?”

FRANCIS FOSTER: Yeah, I am special. My mother said so. But I was going to say, aren’t we the only society that has ever thought we can divorce culture and religion?

TOM HOLLAND: Yes.

FRANCIS FOSTER: And is that not arrogant?

TOM HOLLAND: Yeah, it is arrogant. But the arrogance, people would say that’s justified because of the fact that we have the most advanced civilization that industrialized and therefore basically we’ve got the answer. And I think obviously that now rubs up against all kinds of anxieties about Western exceptionalism.

But I think the idea that our secular liberal society is uniquely advanced… I mean, to be progressive is itself a very Western thing. And if you’re progressive, you’re progressing ahead of everybody else. I mean, a sense of arrogance is baked into that word, I would argue.

Closing Questions

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Well, it’s going to be a very interesting time. Tom, thank you so much. It’s always such a pleasure speaking with you. We’re going to ask you a bunch of questions from our supporters which they’ve submitted. But before we do, what’s the one thing that we’re not talking about that we really should be?

TOM HOLLAND: Have you talked about the cultural and social significance of sport?

KONSTANTIN KISIN: We have not, no.

The Power of Shared Experience

TOM HOLLAND: I think that because we’ve just had this incredible climax to a cricket series, and I went on the Today program this morning to talk about it and was reminded I went to the Oval yesterday where it was played, and sense of tension was unbearable. And I’d been through this quarter final in the Champions League where Villa, who we were talking about earlier, had played against PSG. And that also had been so excruciating.

And I realized that these are the two moments where I have lived most fully this year. And that is, I am just one person among millions, perhaps billions, who share in experiences like that. And it is obviously part of an enormous, vast, global, industrialized construct. I mean, it’s enormous.

And the way that this has evolved, the fact that we take it for granted, it suddenly struck me. This is very odd. This is something I’ve always taken for granted that actually is very, very strange and unusual. So maybe something on that.

Modern Apocalyptic Movements

KONSTANTIN KISIN: Excellent.

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