How We’re Swimming in a “Christian Fishpond” in the West

-- Historian Tom Holland on the Christian Roots of the West --

I’ve been studying the theme of ancestry (particularly spiritual ancestry) for a while now and reflecting on what our ancestry here in the West consists in. My conclusion at this point is reflected in the title above: The Christian heritage is such a fundamental part of our cultural and spiritual ancestry that—to put it metaphorically—whether we like it or not, we are swimming in—what was once—an originally Christian fishpond! Hence, if we really want to understand well this place where we are, we’ll have to understand Christianity to a certain extent. I’ll have to unpack more what I mean by that but, at this point, I think it’s better to refer first of all to people who have thought longer and harder about this topic than I.

 

     Thus, in this blogpost, I’ll introduce parts of an online lecture of British historian Tom Holland. Holland wrote a book titled Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind.

 

Holland, Tom. Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. London: Little-Brown, 2019. (references will be to this originally British hardcover edition)

 

The North American edition’s sub-title is more explicitly Christian and religious:

Holland, Tom. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. New York: Basic Books, 2019.

 

There he makes the argument that the history of the so-called West has been so crucially and irrevocably influenced by Christianity that, although the West has become generally doubtful of religion
nowadays in this secular age, its basic “instincts –for good and ill—remain thoroughly Christian” (p. xxix). That is what I mean when I say above that anyone who has been or is influenced by “western” ideas can be compared to fish swimming in an originally Christian fishpond. Thus, if we want to understand our western culture and civilization or, to use the metaphor again, the fishpond-habitat in which we swim, we’ll have to face its Christian heritage and ancestry. Holland bluntly puts it this way: “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions” (p. xxv).

 

     To take Holland’s last quoted point further, this means that although many parts of the West now are societies characterized by great diversity in terms of culture and ethnicity, being and living in the West still means to be swimming in a fishpond that is full of Christian influence even though many are not aware of it.

 

     The text of Holland’s lecture follows below. The parts in blue are my own annotations. Sub-headings are not part of the original lecture. Special thanks to my research assistant Danielle Rivest-Durand for helping me with this project.