To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable—indeed the inescapable—influence of Christianity. . . So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.
Tom Holland, Dominion
12 responses to “Quote of the Day”
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First of all, thank you for those wonderful posts. I downloaded this book and started reading it (beginning from the end). 🙂 Good writing style and interesting analysis.
Need more time to read it and think, so the below are the first impressions and partly emotional reactions.
While reading I remembered the first quote from your review (below) and then reread your posts and 2nd quote stood out too.
From your review of Hazony’s book The Virtue of Nationalism:
Hazony tries to find roots of the modern nation-state in the Hebrew Bible, which I find kind of embarrassing in its sheer ludicrousness.
Hazony talks as if we were all brains and emotions and had no stomachs, physical bodies, and varying material needs. I strongly believe that any discussion of the globalization has to start with the economy.
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“society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions”
This is why though I’m not a Christian believer (agnostic) I sometimes describe myself as a cultural Christian (more specifically cultural Protestant… more specifically probably cultural Methodist. Back when public school children were asked to list denomination on some forms my mother had told me ‘just put Methodist’ even though we…. never went to church.
Then a year or so ago in the viral video about Christian denominations…. Methodist seemed to be the one that most jibed with my general world view…..
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Absolutely. And the last chapter of the book is precisely about that.
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I understand that Christianity played a great role in the history of humankind, yet am bothered by the (implied?) assumption that w/o Christianity we would have no morality or civilisation, the way modern people understand those concepts, and no progress / scientific thought.
Did not science flourish in Muslim societies too , even if for a while?
What about Chinese or other Asian peoples?If Christianity took part in the development of humanism, human dignity and basic rights, valuing democracy, thirsting for knowledge or wanting the improve the human condition, does it mean Jews and Buddhists would still have slavery, that humanity would’ve never invented cars, let alone moon landing, w/o Christianity?
It’s hard to believe, even if I admit this reaction is partly emotional.
As for the 2nd quote, imo, after economic and technological development reach a certain level, they create new realities, making demands from which new ideologies spring. For instance, the need for nation states and its current disappearance.
Why not suppose that mankind was strongly inclined to arrive to humanism and increased tolerance, one way or another, during its development?
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It’s not impossible that we would have arrived at the same result in some different manner. But history is what it is. It makes sense to study what actually happened and not explore hypothetical and unverifiable scenarios.
It is always useful, I believe, to ponder the ways in which our mentality is different from our ancestors. People experienced themselves completely differently even 200 years ago than you and I experience ourselves. We’ll never fully understand just how big that difference was. But at least we need to be aware of it because what there is right now was very slowly and painfully gained. Squandering it will be easy but regaining extremely hard.
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And without widespread monotheism, modern science would not exist.
The first step is to understand and recognize what an absolute miracle monotheism even was. What an enormous leap of consciousness it took.
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It definitely gets more and more interesting as we progress towards how Christianity feeds the political movements of today. But it’s a long book, and I’m moving through it little by little because everybody hates very long posts.
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There’s also the topic of religious/political converts adopting fundamentalist positions. For example, our local libertarian who’s posts I have linked to, was raised NP Calvinist and supports the DA as an adult. The traditional party loyalists tend to be more moderate in their views.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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