I picked up Tom Holland's Dominion expecting a book about the Enlightenment. The North American subtitle, The Making of the Western Mind, points you that way. The UK subtitle is closer to the thesis: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

Holland's claim is sweeping. Christianity didn't just add values to the West. It changed what "good" meant. Human dignity, care for the weak, the moral weight of suffering. These aren't universal truths we discovered. They're Christian inventions we inherited.

David Foster Wallace told a story about two young fish who meet an older fish. The older fish nods and says, "How's the water?" The two young fish swim on, and one turns to the other: "What the hell is water?" That's what Holland is pointing at. We don't notice our Christian inheritance because we're swimming in it. Even our rejection of Christianity tends to be Christian in shape. When secular humanists champion human rights, they're drawing on a well they didn't dig.

To see the inversion, you have to see what came before. Roman morality celebrated strength and dominance. Mercy was a defect, not a virtue. The strong deserved their victory; the weak deserved their fate. Crucifixion was the most shameful death possible, reserved for slaves and traitors, designed to erase every shred of dignity from the condemned. A crucified man was less than nothing. He was a warning.

Christianity put this death at its center. A crucified God. Holland opens with the scandal and traces its consequences across two thousand years. If God himself suffered humiliation, then suffering could no longer mark worthlessness. The victim became morally significant. The weak gained a claim the strong were bound to honor. This was not an extension of Roman ethics. It was a demolition.

Holland illustrates the shift through Blandina, a slave girl martyred in Lyon around 177 AD. The Romans threw her to wild beasts in the amphitheater. She was tortured, gored, and finally killed. In the old frame, she was garbage. In the Christian frame, she became an icon of victory. Her story spread across the empire. Crowds had gathered to watch her degradation, but the Christians who recorded her death saw triumph. The logic of who mattered had flipped completely.

The book moves through two thousand years of this logic working itself out. Gregory the Great sending missionaries to England in 597. The Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century, which tried to purify the Church and ended up inventing the distinction between sacred and secular. The Crusades, where Christian knights slaughtered Muslims in Jerusalem while singing hymns. The Reformation, which cracked open questions of individual conscience and shattered the Church's monopoly on salvation. Luther nailing his theses to the door in 1517. Calvin building a theocracy in Geneva.

Holland is honest about the violence. Christians burned heretics, launched inquisitions, blessed slavery. But he argues the tools used to condemn these horrors were themselves Christian. When abolitionists in the 1800s argued that slavery was evil, they weren't appealing to Roman precedent. They were appealing to the Gospels. When the UN drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the fingerprints of Paul were all over it. The rights of man, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of moral concern beyond tribe and nation. The genealogy runs straight back to a tent-maker from Tarsus.

The book's deeper argument is that the Enlightenment ran on Christian rails. Locke's theory of natural rights borrowed from medieval theology. The Scientific Revolution grew from thinkers who assumed an orderly cosmos made by a rational God. Newton, Boyle, and Kepler saw their work as reading God's book of nature. Even the secular humanism that claims to have transcended Christianity is, Holland argues, Christianity in disguise. It keeps the ethics and drops the metaphysics.

Reading this, I kept thinking about what comes next. The West has kept the conclusions but dropped the premises. We believe in human dignity without the imago Dei that underwrote it. We champion victims but have no cross to explain why suffering matters. We speak of human rights as self-evident, but self-evidence is a theological claim dressed in secular clothing.

I grew up Christian. I still consider myself one, though I don't attend church regularly. I can't pretend I'm outside this inheritance. All my moral intuitions are shaped by the cross. I received them. I didn't choose them. Reading Holland made me realize how contingent my sense of right and wrong actually is. It feels universal, but it has an address and a birthday.

The question I'm left with is simple. How long can a civilization keep the fruits after it's cut down the tree? Maybe the ethics will persist through cultural inertia. Maybe new foundations will emerge. Or maybe we're coasting on moral capital that's slowly depleting.