Dominion

How could an obscure preacher in Judaea, condemned to suffer a slave’s death, create a moral vision that transformed the world? In an epic narrative spanning 2,000 years, Tom Holland traces the inexorable rise of Christianity. Dominion is not a conventional work of religious history, but the story of how a creed came to dominate the Western mind – beginning with the Romans, whose brutal social order it overthrew. On an exhilarating journey from antiquity to Christendom, it finds the imprint of the cross in surprising places: Dominion’s cast includes not just St Paul and Francis of Assisi but the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche and Napoleon. As Holland reaches the age of Martin Luther King and the Beatles, he argues that the modern West is ‘a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions’ – a list in which he includes gender equality, human rights, scientific inquiry and even atheism.