What if one of Christianity’s strongest defenders wasn’t a Christian?
Historian Tom Holland spent years immersed in the ancient Greek and Roman world expecting to admire it. Instead, he found something deeply unsettling. The ancient world was breathtaking in its achievements; but also astonishingly brutal. Infanticide was common. Slavery was taken for granted. The weak existed for the benefit of the strong. Human dignity, as we understand it today, simply wasn’t a universal value.
That realization led Holland to an unexpected conclusion: many of the moral assumptions we now consider “obvious” are anything but ancient. They are the product of Christianity’s profound influence on Western civilization: equality, compassion, human rights, care for the poor, and the value of every human life is the hallmark of Christianity.
Tom Holland is one of Britain’s best-known historians of the ancient world and the author of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Although he has described himself as an agnostic, his historical research led him to conclude that Christianity transformed Western moral thought in ways many people no longer recognize.
Holland argues that ideas such as the inherent worth of every person, compassion for the weak, care for the poor, the dignity of women, opposition to infanticide, and the belief that power should serve rather than exploit are not self-evident truths inherited from Greece or Rome. They became deeply rooted in the West through the influence of Christianity.
That doesn’t mean Christians have always lived up to these ideals.
History records many failures.
But it does mean the ideals themselves became culturally influential because of the Christian worldview.
