Novelist Tom Holland just wrote an article for The Spectator titled “Thank God for Western Values,” declaring the “debt of the West to Christianity is more deeply rooted than many might presume.” Everything he says is false.
The Back Story
Holland is another amateur playing at knowing what he’s talking about. He has no degrees in history, and no advanced degrees whatever. He has a bachelors in English and Latin poetry. He dabbled in getting a Ph.D. in Byron but gave up. No shame in that; but it still doesn’t qualify you to talk about ancient history, or even medieval. So keep that in mind. As to faith, he might be called a Christian atheist.
I’ve already refuted his entire thesis—because I’m psychic…or really, because his thesis has already been a pop myth for decades. The scientific values side of that myth I refuted in a whole chapter on it in The Christian Delusion; the democratic values side of the myth I refuted in another whole chapter on that in Christianity Is Not Great. I more thoroughly destroyed the science claim in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, based on my work at Columbia University. The democratic values claim I’ve summarized online in my (also psychically named) article That Christian Nation Nonsense (Gods Bless Our Pagan Nation). The philanthropic values claim I’ve summarized online in my article Christians Did Not Invent Charity and Philanthropy. The moral values claim I’ve addressed in my article Your Own Moral Reasoning: Some Things to Consider. And I’ve covered the question of scientific, educational, and economic values in:
- The Mythical Stillbirth of Science in Greece
- Imperial Roman Economics as an Example of an Overthrown Consensus
- The Ancient Romans Essentially Did Have Universities
- Ancient Industrial Machinery & Modern Christian Mythology
- Yes, the Dark Ages Really Were a Thing
Adding to all that, Neil Godfrey has collected an even more extensive bibliography refuting Holland. To that we can add ongoing examples of my own, from What About Orphans? to Four Representative Examples of Roman Attitudes Toward Infanticide, which dispel yet more bogus claims about pagan and Christian history.
Everything to follow is fully supported with citations of sources and scholarship in those articles and books.
The Front Story
Even Holland’s trivial implications are false, like saying “such is the lesson of Easter: that life can come from death,” if that is supposed to imply Christian Easter mythology is where this idea came from. Because, no. That idea did not come from Christianity. Even insofar as Easter itself is even Christian. After all, it actually incorporates a bunch of pagan holiday stuff now—there are no bunnies laying eggs in the Bible; and Eastre, the German goddess of fertility after which Easter even takes its name, is very definitely a pagan deity. But even its core myth about rebirth is not Christian. Life-coming-from-death myths had been popular all over the Western world for thousands of years before Christianity borrowed and adapted the idea into its own version of an already-popular dying-and-rising savior myth.
So we’re off to a bad start already at line one.
Holland’s following implication that Christian music (specifically, the lamest kind: church bells chiming) is “prettier” than Muslim’s singing (or even the Arabic language) is pretty much just imperialist pap. I don’t even agree. Perhaps because I’m not an imperialist dick; and church bells give people headaches, while Muslim singing is soothing by comparison. But that aside, there is no objectively, cosmically, “best” music or “most beautiful” language, and certainly not on that axis. So one cannot claim “Christianity” gave us the best music. Indeed, if we’re going to talk about the best music the West has given us, it sure as hell isn’t Christian music—which is pretty much a universal joke now. Even Classically; for every Handel’s Messiah, I give you a Ring of the Nibelung.
What we fundamentally appreciate in music is universal across all cultures, because it is biologically evolved. It is merely the many ways one can develop to evoke those evolved feelings that differ, in a totally happenstance way, through largely random cultural evolution—for which familiarity then becomes one of many triggers. Hence Muslims probably tend most to find church bells annoying and Arabic hymns beautiful. They are no more wrong than Dawkins saying the reverse.
So Holland gives us historical illiteracy, musical incompetence, and racism for his first two paragraphs. Outstanding.
Hence when Holland says “Free-thinkers who mock the very idea of a god as a sky fairy, an imaginary friend, still hold to taboos and morals that palpably derive from Christianity,” we should not be surprised to find he is just as full of blarp. Indeed, when he notes “the World Humanist Congress affirmed ‘the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others’,” it does not occur to him that none of those concepts exist in the Bible. There is no praise for autonomy, no concept of rights, and no valorizing of liberty. To the contrary, the Bible is very much against those things (Old Testament and New). Nor will you find any of these things in early Christian literature, for hundreds and hundreds of years.
Dignitas and its related ideas, even in the sense of the common worth of persons, was already a widely known pagan concept. So Christianity can’t claim to have invented it. And valuing freedom, rights, and autonomy was all a pagan idea. Invented legally by Greek and Roman constitutionalists, and developed philosophically by Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics. The Enlightenment laureates who brought them back from the dead, to re-paganize Christianity with them, did so against opposition from Christian authorities. The “taboos” we inherited from Christianity are, rather, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, even racism and anti-semitism, and an unhealthy obsession with monogamy and a pathological phobia of human sexuality in general. In other words, garbage we need to get rid of, not praise or be thankful for.
I’m particularly horrified by Holland’s question, “What basis—other than mere sentimentality—was there to argue for” the conclusion that “atheism and a concern for human life go together?” He clearly has not read literally any of the literature arguing for this. Present or past. And quite frankly, anyone who hasn’t even read Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man is not qualified to comment on where our secular defense of humanist ideals comes from. Nor, evidently, has Holland read Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, or even Hobbes or Locke. What kind of scary fascist is this guy?
Indeed, it only gets worse when he displays not only a total ignorance of history, but a total ignorance of science and philosophy too, laughably asserting:
The primary dogma of humanism—‘that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others’—finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated.
In actual fact, the scientific background for moral reasoning and motivations being biologically innate to humans is vast; the scientific evidence that genocide is ever really productive, is nil. Indeed all actual scientific and historical evidence demonstrates that moral societies prosper while murderous ones founder. And secularists base beliefs on evidence. Most peculiarly unlike Christians. “Faith-based belief” being yet another garbage idea Christianity stuck us with that took thousands of years to finally get rid of—and even then many of us still haven’t broken free…Holland evidently among them.
It’s thus rather ominously funny that Holland cites “the great Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin” describing Christianity as “the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world.” Boyarin did not mean that as praise. It was censure. Boyarin’s point (in A Radical Jew) is that Christian cultural dominance has saddled us with intractable problems, particularly its ingrained sexism and hostility to liberty and diversity and modern social justice. He names especially anti-semitism, opposition to women’s rights, and Christianity’s long nightmarish defense of racist slavery (and one can thus add, the scars of inequality and injustice that that legacy still leaves across modern society today). Boyarin is right. This is not something to be proud of. It’s one of the greatest problems plaguing our society in most need of solution. A solution such as…getting the hell rid of it.
Holland also gets trivial historical facts wrong. Like…
- He claims “crucifixion” was “peculiarly suited to slaves.” False. It was standard for anyone who wasn’t of a protected class—such as being a Roman citizen, which most people then weren’t. Only about 14 million of the Roman Empire’s near 100 million population could claim it. Thus a great many of those crucified in Judea will not have been slaves. (In fact, all Jews executed by their own courts were crucified post mortem: see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 61-62; but I assume Holland does not know there were different kinds of crucifixion in antiquity.)
- He claims we have “four detailed accounts of the process by which a man might be sentenced to the cross.” No. We don’t. He means the Gospels. None of which are based on any witness testimony to the fact; but more importantly, all are just redactions of the same one story invented by Mark. So really, we have one account. Which is fictional. And which historians know does not conform very well to known facts of how such trials would proceed (see Haim Cohn’s The Trial and Death of Jesus and my own Proving History, pp. 154, 317 n. 68 and On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 140) and is based mostly on a creative rewrite of scripture (particularly the 22nd Psalm: see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 399, 408) and stories of trials that didn’t even involve crucifixion (such as the tale of Jesus ben Ananias: OHJ, pp. 428-31). Holland demonstrates his incompetence in historical reasoning when he confuses the fact that historians mostly agree Jesus was crucified, with the non-fact that they agree the details of the Gospel narrative are true. They don’t.
But enough with the embarrassing but trivial…
Wait, What Were We Supposed to Be Talking About?
You might have noticed we’re over half way through his article and have yet to get to any actual argument that any actual idea we can be thankful for came from Christianity. Just a bunch of imperialist bigotry and ignorance. Finally we do get to something…
Holland eventually implies that Christianity gave us the idea of a god that “was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich.” That’s false. Humiliated, humbled, crippled, castrated, crucified, and defiled gods and heroes already abounded in paganism (I assemble many examples in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 51-74). Indeed, Jesus’s myth is so similar to that of the executed slave-hero Aesop and the humiliated and crucified Inanna as to raise some suspicions of plagiarism (OHJ, pp. 223-25: Aesop; pp. 45-47: Inanna). But more importantly, the entire notion of the unjustly disgraced and humiliated righteous (and often working-class) man being exalted by God was already a common Jewish trope by the time Christianity stole it (Ibid., pp. 142, 209, 430-31).
Holland then implies Christianity gave us the idea “that to be a victim might be a source of strength.” Also false. That idea was commonplace throughout Jewish scripture and wisdom literature, and also well-known in pagan philosophical thought, including the entire concept of the Stoic Sage.
Holland then implies Christianity gave us the idea that a “measure of a man’s compassion for the lowly and suffering” is “the measure of the loftiness of his soul.” Totally false. The idea that a person’s worth and virtue can be measured by his compassion and magnanimity toward the humble and suffering is already a mainstay in Aristotle and was a feature of every pagan philosophical school to succeed him. It’s even an idea eloquently described and praised by Seneca, who by all accounts was a stodgy conservative douche—even by the standards of his own day.
Holland then says, “If God is indeed dead, then his shadow, immense and dreadful, continues to flicker even as his corpse lies cold.” Yet he has yet to identify a single particle of that shadow. So far all he has given us is stuff pagans already invented and Christians only picked up and carried on…after murdering all the pagans. And even much of that, Christians abandoned in fact; it had to be rediscovered from pagan literature over a thousand years later, and argued over for centuries, before becoming anything like “popular” again. Ideals like rights, liberty, autonomy and democracy had to be forced, and awkwardly, to fit into the Christian system; they did not proceed naturally from it, but rather met a resistance from it that had to be overcome. And it took literal wars to finally get it there.
Holland then claims the idea “that the persecuted and disadvantaged have claims upon the privileged” is Christian. False. The notion that the elite have duties and obligations to the commons, that they owe them welfare and justice, was as universal in pagan antiquity as it is today. As was its flouting. The idea of “persecution” as a phenomenon of injustice originated long before Christians even existed. The idea that, as Holland says, “Condemnations of Christianity as patriarchal or repressive or hegemonic derive from a framework of values that is itself nothing if not Christian,” is full-on bogus. The notion of patriarchy as bad arose from Enlightenment opposition to Christianity’s consistent endorsement of patriarchy. It certainly did not arise from scripture. One thing Jesus never did, was damn the patriarchy…or even condemn slavery. Meanwhile, the notion of hegemonic oppression being evil was a mainstay of Greco-Roman political philosophy from as early as we have writing from them.
And…
That’s it.
Holland’s article ends.
WTF.
Conclusion
Holland gives no examples of anything Christianity uniquely brought to the West that was any good. Everything he even implies as such, was already Western before Christianity came along, was developed without it, or arose in opposition to it. He then ignores everything it brought that was bad. And then claims we ought therefore glorify Christ. Holy balls.
Dear Richard, I howled laughing. Thank you.
Firstly I have to admit I am a huge fan of Tom Holland’s history books. They are brilliantly lively and make me chuckle for all the right reasons – a lovely and literary turn of phrase.
But I have to admit that article was not one of his best. Reading it I got the impression it was meant as some sort of grandiose poetic paen (typical Spectator shite to be honest) rather than any real coherent argument.
In this case Tom did deserve to get served and bloody hell you served him real good- still got a huge smile plastered all over my face.
As you so rightly say Christianity like Islam, soaked up a thousand years of the previous cultures over a long period, gradually rebranding it as it’s own. As indeed every culture does.
The fact that it, and Islam, are in many respects pygmies standing on the shoulders of giants is something Tom Holland well knows. Hell, even I know it.
I don’t know what prompted this article, but it was definitely poetic truth. (As Robert Graves so guilefully put it in his The White Goddess. Another brilliant book – love it to death- but the history is shocking. Even Graves knew it, hence the care to differentiate poetic truth from actual fact.) And it really did not work well for Tom.
I’m am just a general reader, so what do I know, but The idea of Christ coming ofr the poor and weak I always believed was a Victorian rebranding. Look at teh Christ of the Byzantine Church- there is not much human compassion there. Plus if he really did support the poor and weak, then why is there no mention of his speaking out against slavery- one of the most hideous institutions there has ever been.
Plus I lived in Turkey for 6 years and I actually think the call to prayer is lovely as church bells ringing- in a purely secular way. I was upset by Notre Dame as I was by La Fenice burning down and Isis fucking Palmyra. Religions come and go, but architecture should endure. It is in our trust to care for it for future generations – should there be any.
So once again thanks for turning this Good Friday into a Great Friday – thoroughly enjoyed it.
Best regards,
Paul.
Richard – straight to the point as always.
Well done.
Appreciate Your work, you are doing something very important for many people around the world that appreciates truth, science and want to build better world free of middle age superstition for generations to come on this planet.
Regards from Poland! ? keep the great work ?
Radek (first atheist in the family ☝️?)
How is it you are referring to Aristotle whose writings come 600-700years later but you reject the Gospels. Are you qualified or just another darling of Muslims.
That statement doesn’t make any sense. Aristotle wrote 400 years before the Gospels, not “600-700” years. And the Gospels are just bad philosophy. Aristotle was already obsolete even by the time the Gospels were written (philosophy had undergone quite a few advances in the interim), and yet even his obsolete philosophy is vastly superior to that found in the Gospels. And is indeed one of the foundations of modern political and moral philosophy today, which in practice is already entirely as secular as it was in Aristotle’s day. His moral philosophy in fact was one of the best written in ages.
What any of this has to do with Muslims beats me. They didn’t do any good moral or political philosophy worth mentioning. Just like the Christians didn’t until the Enlightenment…and even then only did because a few mavericks started reading lost pagan (and thus secular) moral and political philosophy and resurrected it. Muslims never got around to doing that.
Hey Richard, Your analysis of the Flavian Testimonium is spot on. Now, the best evidence Christians have is Tacitus. Do you think the original copies of Tacitus, which uses “Chrestus” instead of “Christos,” hint that he actually did write it? Would a lying scribe be savvy enough to use a term that was eventually dropped?
I’ve already published a case under peer review arguing the associated line is an interpolation. It’s republished in Hitler Homer Bible Christ and summarized in Ch. 8.10 of On the Historicity of Jesus.
I beat up on Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine for similar nonsense back in December. It seems a common defensive posture for the justification of faith traditions that should be challenged whenever possible.
If you have a link to what you wrote, please do include it here.
See if this works:
https://www.exunoplura.com/2018/12/19/poetics-and-humanism-for-the-solstice/
Excellent. Thanks.
Just added link back to this post…
TBF Christians were responsible for putting an end to infanticide that used to be carried out by the pagans. On a side note, do you have any reading recommendations on the moral and cultural norms in the Roman empire pre and post Constantine for a better picture?
There is no one-stop-shop for that that I know of. You have to pick a specific moral issue and research the latest peer reviewed literature on it, item by item.
Though one must always observe key caveats:
There has always been (even still today) a difference between what Christians preach and what they do. There has never been evidence of a significant reduction in abortion or prostitution, for example, despite Christian opposition to both even in Christian majority nations. And Christians have always been every bit as prone to war, vengeance, and capital punishment as any people despite the Gospels explicitly banning them. And so on.
As to attempts to regulate public morality, most of what Christians did was suppress human freedom (e.g. banning homosexuality and free love and other free enterprises and consensual behaviors; banning freedom of religion and speech and in fact neglecting or opposing nearly all human rights; enslaving peasants with Orwellian laws; and the like).
Even their prohibition on infanticide, though on paper a rare example of an improvement, was really just an extension of their outlawing of abortion. In reality, under the pagans most abandoned babies were raised as slaves, not actually killed; and under Christendom, the number killed may have been no different as ever. People just did it in private. The net result was the same number of babies shuffled into slavery as ever was. For example, all free peasants became de facto slaves under Constantine, a law Christians maintained until the Age of Revolutions; thus by forcing peasants to bear children, Christendom was simply supplying its new slave industry. Not exactly a net plus.
Similarly, Christians banned blood sport. Then simply replaced it with public torture and execution. Also hardly a net plus. Gladiators at least had a chance to earn their freedom; or could volunteer to fight for profit. Heretics and outlaws were simply murdered, before drooling audiences delighting at the spectacle.
But for examples to explore: there is this recent book of sexual mores; this one on family policy; this article on infanticide; etc.
This is almost entirely false
Demonstrate one thing in it as false.
Holland now has a whole book on this called Dominion. Maybe you could review it sometime.
Does it say anything I didn’t already just refute?
Hey Richard carrier I’m a fan just been thinking you really need to go on THE BIG CONVERSATION again it’s now done on camera you would probably tear them a new one
Sure. I do Brierley’s radio show from time to time. You can always write him to request that he ask me on that too, though I assume I’d need to be in England for it. Which won’t happen anytime soon.
Richard Carrier versus Tom Holland on “The Big Conversation” topic: On ancient Greco-Roman history in relation to Christianity and Science.
Tom Holland would be fully exposed. ????
Agreed ?
I think you must see the contribution of ibn rushd,ibn khaldun and ibn ghazzali contribution on philosophy,rather discrediting them
You will have to be more specific. What contributions are you talking about? To what? What has any of this to do with this article?
You can read here,wiki-fakhr din al-razi,and,wiki-averoess,wiki-imam ghazali
You provided no links or citations. So I have no idea what you mean by “here.”
I actually gave some links about muslim philosophers in Wikipedia you can read there,wiki-fakhr din al razi,wiki-ibn ghazzali,wiki-ibn rushd pliz see
Stop ignoring me. Listen to what I tell you.
I said:
“You will have to be more specific. What contributions are you talking about? To what? What has any of this to do with this article?”
Don’t waste my time by giving me names and no sources. Don’t waste my time by not explaining why those names matter here, what they matter to, why I should even be interested in them, or what relevance anything they did has to anything in this thread, or what I am supposed to comment on regarding it.
Where I am neglecting you,I have given you Wikipedia sites about muslim philosopher,therein you can see their works that’s it,wiki-ibn ghazzali,wiki-ibn rushd,wiki-,fakhr din al razi
You still have not explained their relevance to anything here.
I now understand you are making your own assumption and are not interested to see my links.ok fine here is a useful link for your answer,nev.gov.in-the Islamic scholars who founded modern philosophy.now I m leaving this discussion bye.
Dude. I am making NO assumptions. That’s the problem here. You have never told me anything WHATEVER about these guys. Thus I have no idea what relevance they have to LITERALLY ANYTHING WE ARE DISCUSSING HERE. I have repeatedly asked you to tell me what that relevance is. You have repeatedly refused. What the fuck is up with you? Why can you not answer that question?
No,I had gave you links you are the one who don’t even gave a look to it,wiki-fakhr din al razi,wiki-ibn rushd,wiki- averroes.also here is a brief explanation of their contribution,nev.gov.in-the Islamic scholars who founded modern philosophy.they revived Greek philosophy during dark ages,and even created their own methodology in the realm of philosophy.you directly rejected them.i urge to read them.for now I m leaving discussion bye.
There are no hyperlinks in any of your comments. And you never once explained their relevance here. Weirdly, even now, as you complain that you are, you still aren’t. You are just talking about generic history of philosophy. What relevance does that have to this article? What did any of those guys write that has any relevance to the points I made in this article? What elements of that are you claiming derived from Greek philosophy? Explain.
I am tired and I am also failed to explain to you anything.ok I will try to give you links that will show the works of muslim philosopher,and their influence in modern world,muslimheritage-the contribution of muslim in philosophy,nev.gov.in-islamic scholars who created modern philosophy.also here is there biography,wiki-ibn rushd,wiki-avicenna,wiki-fakhr din al razi.now I m leaving.
But why is any of that relevant HERE? What relates to this article and what it discusses specifically?
“There were Muslim philosophers” is not relevant here. We already know that. What we need to know is what you think they said that connects to this article about what Holland is saying. What is relevant?
Holland is now out with a thesis that humanism is also Christian:
https://unherd.com/2022/11/humanism-is-a-heresy/
That’s using a different sense of the word. So if he means modern secular humanism is Christian, that’s an equivocation fallacy. Renaissance humanism was a shift in aesthetics, not ethics. It took the Enlightenment rejection of Christianity to establish ethical humanism, the forerunner of modern secular humanism. See the American Humanist summary. Compare with Holland and you’ll see he isn’t really talking about the same thing (at least in respect to anything that happened before the rejection phase in the 18th century that led to the rise of 19th century rationalism).
Wikipedia also has a decent historical brief, making clear the distinction between the different uses of the word here.