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 explaining the thesis: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

Holland's claim is sweeping. Christianity didn't just add some values to the West. It changed what "good" even meant. A lot of what we now treat as obvious moral truth, like the dignity of the weak or the idea that every person has worth, has Christian roots.

David Foster Wallace has a nice line about this kind of invisibility. In his 2005 commencement speech, he tells 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 for a bit, and then one turns to the other and says, "What the hell is water?" That's what Holland is pointing at. We don't notice our Christian inheritance because we live inside it.

To understand how Christianity inverted moral code, you have to understand what came before it. Roman morality celebrated strength, victory, and dominance. Mercy and weakness were defects. The crucifixion of a criminal was the most shameful death imaginable. It was reserved for slaves and traitors and designed to strip every shred of dignity from the condemned.

Christianity put the crucifixion at the center. A crucified God. It was a scandal! Holland opens with this provocation and traces its consequences across two thousand years. If God himself suffered and died in humiliation, then suffering and humiliation could no longer be signs of worthlessness. The victim became morally significant. The weak had a claim the strong were obligated to honor.

Holland illustrates this inversion through figures like Blandina, a slave girl martyred in second-century Lyon. In the Roman frame, she was nothing. In the Christian frame, she was an icon of victory.

Holland's deeper argument is that the Enlightenment didn't spring from a vacuum. The rights of man, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of moral concern to all humans regardless of station. The Reformation cracked open questions of individual conscience. The Scientific Revolution emerged from Christians who believed in an orderly cosmos created by a rational God.

As the West becomes less and less Christian every year, we have to ask ourselves what we're losing. We've inherited the conclusions but abandoned the premises. We believe in human dignity but not in the imago Dei that wrote it. We champion the victim but have no cross to explain why suffering has meaning. And how long can we run on fumes?

I still consider myself a Christian, although I don't attend church regularly. I grew up Christian. I can't pretend I'm outside this inheritance. All my moral intuitions are shaped by the cross. I received it. I didn't decide upon it myself.

We're living through an experiment: how long can a civilization sustain the fruits of Christianity without the faith that produced them?