Novelist Tom Holland just wrote an article for The Spectator titled “Thank God for Western Values,” declaring the “debt of the West to Christianity is more deeply rooted than many might presume.” Everything he says is false.

The Back Story

Holland is another amateur playing at knowing what he’s talking about. He has no degrees in history, and no advanced degrees whatever. He has a bachelors in English and Latin poetry. He dabbled in getting a Ph.D. in Byron but gave up. No shame in that; but it still doesn’t qualify you to talk about ancient history, or even medieval. So keep that in mind. As to faith, he might be called a Christian atheist.

I’ve already refuted his entire thesis—because I’m psychic…or really, because his thesis has already been a pop myth for decades. The scientific values side of that myth I refuted in a whole chapter on it in The Christian Delusion; the democratic values side of the myth I refuted in another whole chapter on that in Christianity Is Not Great. I more thoroughly destroyed the science claim in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, which was adapted from my Columbia University doctoral dissertation. The democratic values claim I’ve summarized online in my (also psychically named) article That Christian Nation Nonsense (Gods Bless Our Pagan Nation). Crucially, I add more on the point of values in Christians Did Not Invent Charity and Philanthropy. Adding to all that, Neil Godfrey has collected an even more extensive bibliography refuting Holland.

Everything to follow is fully supported with citations of sources and scholarship in those works.

The Front Story

Even Holland’s trivial implications are false, like saying “such is the lesson of Easter: that life can come from death,” if that is supposed to imply Christian Easter mythology is where this idea came from. Because, no. That idea did not come from Christianity. Even insofar as Easter itself is even Christian. After all, it actually incorporates a bunch of pagan holiday stuff now—there are no bunnies laying eggs in the Bible; and Eastre, the German goddess of fertility after which Easter even takes its name, is very definitely a pagan deity. But even its core myth about rebirth is not Christian. Life-coming-from-death myths had been popular all over the Western world for thousands of years before Christianity borrowed and adapted the idea into its own version of an already-popular dying-and-rising savior myth.

So we’re off to a bad start already at line one.

Holland’s following implication that Christian music (specifically, the lamest kind: church bells chiming) is “prettier” than Muslim’s singing (or even the Arabic language) is pretty much just imperialist pap. I don’t even agree. Perhaps because I’m not an imperialist dick. But that aside, there is no objectively, cosmically, “best” music or “most beautiful” language, and certainly not on that axis. So one cannot claim “Christianity” gave us the best music. Indeed, if we’re going to talk about the best music the West has given us, it sure as hell isn’t Christian music—which is pretty much a universal joke now. Even Classically, for every Handel’s Messiah, I give you a Ring of the Nibelungen.

What we fundamentally appreciate in music is universal across all cultures, because it is biologically evolved. It is merely the many ways one can develop to evoke those evolved feelings that differ, in a totally happenstance way, through largely random cultural evolution—for which familiarity then becomes one of many triggers. Hence Muslims probably tend most to find church bells annoying and Arabic hymns beautiful. They are no more wrong than Dawkins saying the reverse.

So Holland gives us historical illiteracy, musical incompetence, and racism for his first two paragraphs. Outstanding.

Hence when Holland says “Free-thinkers who mock the very idea of a god as a sky fairy, an imaginary friend, still hold to taboos and morals that palpably derive from Christianity,” we should not be surprised to find he is just as full of blarp. Indeed, when he notes “the World Humanist Congress affirmed ‘the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others’,” it does not occur to him that none of those concepts exist in the Bible. There is no praise for autonomy, no concept of rights, and no valorizing of liberty. To the contrary, the Bible is very much against those things (Old Testament and New). Nor will you find any of these things in early Christian literature, for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Dignitas and its related ideas, even in the sense of the common worth of persons, was already a widely known pagan concept. So Christianity can’t claim to have invented it. And valuing freedom, rights, and autonomy was all a pagan idea. Invented legally by Greek and Roman constitutionalists, and developed philosophically by Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics. The Enlightenment laureates who brought them back from the dead, to re-paganize Christianity with them, did so against opposition from Christian authorities. The “taboos” we inherited from Christianity are, rather, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, even racism and anti-semitism, and an unhealthy obsession with monogamy and a pathological phobia of human sexuality in general. In other words, garbage we need to get rid of; not praise or be thankful for.

I’m particularly horrified by Holland’s question, “What basis—other than mere sentimentality—was there to argue for” the conclusion that “atheism and a concern for human life go together?” He clearly has not read literally any of the literature arguing for this. Present or past. And quite frankly, anyone who hasn’t even read Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man is not qualified to comment on where our secular defense of humanist ideals comes from. Nor, evidently, has Holland read Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, or even Hobbes or Locke. What kind of scary fascist is this guy?

Indeed, it only gets worse when he displays not only a total ignorance of history, but a total ignorance of science and philosophy too, laughably asserting:

The primary dogma of humanism—‘that morality is an intrinsic part of human nature based on understanding and a concern for others’—finds no more corroboration in science than did the dogma of the Nazis that anyone not fit for life should be exterminated.

In actual fact, the scientific background for moral reasoning and motivations being biologically innate to humans is vast; the scientific evidence that genocide is ever really productive, is nil. Indeed all actual scientific and historical evidence demonstrates that moral societies prosper while murderous ones founder. And secularists base beliefs on evidence. Most peculiarly unlike Christians. “Faith-based belief” being yet another garbage idea Christianity stuck us with that took thousands of years to finally get rid of—and even then many of us still haven’t broken free…Holland evidently among them.

It’s thus rather ominously funny that Holland cites “the great Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin” describing Christianity as “the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world.” Boyarin did not mean that as praise. It was censure. Boyarin’s point (in A Radical Jew) is that Christian cultural dominance has saddled us with intractable problems, particularly its ingrained sexism and hostility to liberty and diversity and modern social justice. He names especially anti-semitism, opposition to women’s rights, and Christianity’s long nightmarish defense of racist slavery (and one can thus add, the scars of inequality and injustice that that legacy still leaves across modern society today). Boyarin is right. This is not something to be proud of. It’s one of the greatest problems plaguing our society in most need of solution. A solution such as…getting the hell rid of it.

Holland also gets trivial historical facts wrong. Like…

He claims “crucifixion” was “peculiarly suited to slaves.” False. It was standard for anyone who wasn’t of a protected class—such as being a Roman citizen, which most people then weren’t. Only about 14 million of the Roman Empire’s near 100 million population could claim it. Thus a great many of those crucified in Judea will not have been slaves. (In fact, all Jews executed by their own courts were crucified post mortem: see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 61-62; but I assume Holland does not know there were different kinds of crucifixion in antiquity.)

He claims we have “four detailed accounts of the process by which a man might be sentenced to the cross.” No. We don’t. He means the Gospels. None of which are based on any witness testimony to the fact; but more importantly, all are just redactions of the same one story invented by Mark. So really, we have one account. Which is fictional. And which historians know does not conform very well to known facts of how such trials would proceed (see Haim Cohn’s The Trial and Death of Jesus and my own Proving History, pp. 154, 317 n. 68 and On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 140) and is based mostly on a creative rewrite of scripture (particularly the 22nd Psalm: see On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 399, 408) and stories of trials that didn’t even involve crucifixion (such as the tale of Jesus ben Ananias: OHJ, pp. 428-31). Holland demonstrates his incompetence in historical reasoning when he confuses the fact that historians mostly agree Jesus was crucified, with the non-fact that they agree the details of the Gospel narrative are true. They don’t.

But enough with the embarrassing but trivial…

Wait, What Were We Supposed to Be Talking About?

You might have noticed we’re over half way through his article and have yet to get to any actual argument that any actual idea we can be thankful for came from Christianity. Just a bunch of imperialist bigotry and ignorance. Finally we do get to something…

Holland eventually implies that Christianity gave us the idea of a god that “was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich.” That’s false. Humiliated, humbled, crippled, castrated, crucified, and defiled gods and heroes already abounded in paganism (I assemble many examples in Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 51-74). Indeed, Jesus’s myth is so similar to that of the executed slave-hero Aesop and the humiliated and crucified Inanna as to raise some suspicions of plagiarism (OHJ, pp. 223-25: Aesop; pp. 45-47: Inanna). But more importantly, the entire notion of the unjustly disgraced and humiliated righteous (and often working-class) man being exalted by God was already a common Jewish trope by the time Christianity stole it (Ibid., pp. 142, 209, 430-31).

Holland then implies Christianity gave us the idea “that to be a victim might be a source of strength.” Also false. That idea was commonplace throughout Jewish scripture and wisdom literature, and also well-known in pagan philosophical thought, including the entire concept of the Stoic Sage.

Holland then implies Christianity gave us the idea that a “measure of a man’s compassion for the lowly and suffering” is “the measure of the loftiness of his soul.” Totally false. The idea that a person’s worth and virtue can be measured by his compassion and magnanimity toward the humble and suffering is already a mainstay in Aristotle and was a feature of every pagan philosophical school to succeed him. It’s even an idea eloquently described and praised by Seneca, who by all accounts was a stodgy conservative douche—even by the standards of his own day.

Holland then says, “If God is indeed dead, then his shadow, immense and dreadful, continues to flicker even as his corpse lies cold.” Yet he has yet to identify a single particle of that shadow. So far all he has given us is stuff pagans already invented and Christians only picked up and carried on…after murdering all the pagans. And even much of that, Christians abandoned in fact; it had to be rediscovered from pagan literature over a thousand years later, and argued over for centuries, before becoming anything like “popular” again. Ideals like rights, liberty, autonomy and democracy had to be forced, and awkwardly, to fit into the Christian system; they did not proceed naturally from it, but rather met a resistance from it that had to be overcome. And it took literal wars to finally get it there.

Holland then claims the idea “that the persecuted and disadvantaged have claims upon the privileged” is Christian. False. The notion that the elite have duties and obligations to the commons, that they owe them welfare and justice, was as universal in pagan antiquity as it is today. As was its flouting. The idea of “persecution” as a phenomenon of injustice originated long before Christians even existed. The idea that, as Holland says, “Condemnations of Christianity as patriarchal or repressive or hegemonic derive from a framework of values that is itself nothing if not Christian,” is full-on bogus. The notion of patriarchy as bad arose from Enlightenment opposition to Christianity’s consistent endorsement of patriarchy. It certainly did not arise from scripture. One thing Jesus never did, was damn the patriarchy…or even condemn slavery. Meanwhile, the notion of hegemonic oppression being evil was a mainstay of Greco-Roman political philosophy from as early as we have writing from them.

And…

That’s it.

Holland’s article ends.

WTF.

Conclusion

Holland gives no examples of anything Christianity uniquely brought to the West that was any good. Everything he even implies as such, was already Western before Christianity came along, was developed without it, or arose in opposition to it. He then ignores everything it brought that was bad. And then claims we ought therefore glorify Christ. Holy balls.