Tom Holland’s Dominion is truly is an epic work, telling the story of how Christianity came to create the modern, western soul.
One of Holland’s central points is that Christianity was a sexual revolution, placing restraints on men’s sexual appetites whereas previously a powerful man might have taken any slave girl he liked while engaging in worshipping a bunch of rapists.
Now, as Paul had commanded, every human body was sacred.
Christianity had brought “revolution to the erotic” in a quite spectacular way.
Divorce was prohibited, and to leave a wife was to “render her an adulteress”, as Christ had said. Even more radically, couples could no longer be forced into marriage and priests were instructed to join couples even without the permission or knowledge of their parents. “The Church, by pledging itself to this conviction, and putting it into law, was treading on the toes of patriarchs.”
Dominion traces the influence of Christianity up to the present-day Great Awokening, a political movement with a hugely religious strain to it.
The social justice theory of intersectionality is just the latest sub-strand of western thinking that owes its origins to Christianity, a hierarchy of victimhood that could be best summed up as “The last were to be first, and the first were to be last”.
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