We pulled out the highlights from The New Religion - Tom Holland | Maiden Mother Matriarch 81. Transcription and light editing by Anthropic's Claude, curation by Yiren Lu 😄

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Highlights

Tom Holland: So the sense that religion, and particularly Christianity, is something to be got rid of, I think is important, but I don't think it's the most important aspect of it, because I think the most important aspect of it is the valorization of those who historically have been persecuted.

Tom Holland: And I think that it emerges in its contemporary form as a result of two traumatic experiences in the 20th century, the first of which was the experience of fascism, particularly Nazism, because fascism was an overt assault, not just on institutional Christianity, as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution was, but on the very theological fundamentals, one of which is that those who are poor, who are weak, who are disadvantaged, owed a duty of care by the strong. And the Nazis obviously very radically repudiated that.

Tom Holland: And the second is the notion that all human beings are created in the image of God and therefore have an inherent dignity which derives from Genesis, but is given a particular spin by Paul when he says that there is no Jew or Greek in Christ. But, of course, that has been secularized to convey the sense that all human beings are created equal, that racism is a profound sin. And I think you can use that word again. The Nazis absolutely repudiated that. Of course, they thought Jews and Greeks were completely separate, and by extension, black and white were separate and distinct and embodied different races.

Tom Holland: And I think the measure of how traumatic this was for a civilization deeply shaped by this conviction is that in the wake of the Second World War and the destruction of Nazism, Hitler has basically been enshrined as the devil, the Nazis as devils, Auschwitz as hell, and the vision of Nazi Germany as hell. And that is what we now react against. We don't really need the Christian mythology anymore because we have the example of Nazi Europe to kind of offer us moral guidance. We don't need to do what Jesus did. We need to do the opposite of what Hitler did. And that has been hugely, hugely influential, I think, in shaping our moral horizons.

Tom Holland: The other traumatic experience has been the fact that in the wake of the American Civil War, racial equality was not established in the United States, and racism was institutionally hardwired into large swathes of the United States. And this provoked, I think, the last great manifestation of Christianity as a political reform movement that the West has seen, which was the civil rights movement.

Tom Holland: And the civil rights movement consciously drew on biblical stories to give its arguments and its campaigns resonance. So the Reverend Martin Luther King was always preaching about how God had redeemed the Israelites from slavery and brought them into a promised land. And he would talk of Jesus as being an extremist for love. And in doing that, he was appealing to the Christian fellow feeling of white Christians in America.

Tom Holland: And his arguments essentially were unanswerable. If you are a devout Christian, if you're a believing Christian, even if you're the most cursory Christian, the most shallow Christian, the arguments are so steeped in scripture and on the kind of traditional teachings of the church that they were unarguable. And that's why over the course of the sixties, the civil rights movement had the enormous successes that it did. It went with the grain of centuries and centuries of American Christian assumptions, and it had a huge impact on other marginalized groups, and it inspired other campaigners through the sixties into the seventies, into the eighties.

Louise Perry: But one of the strange features of the new religion is that there are ways in which it diverges very sharply from christian orthodoxy with a small o. Right. So the position on abortion, on euthanasia, on homosexuality, all of these are issues which surely scripture is fairly clear. I say this as someone who's not an expert.

Tom Holland: It depends what you choose to emphasize. So, of course, the idea that life is precious and that particularly the lives of those who are most vulnerable is precious. This has been something that's been crucial to the practice of Christianity since the very beginning. So one of the markers of a christian city, archaeologically, as opposed to a pre christian city, is that the pre christian cities in their sewerage, will have lots of the bones of small babies in it, babies that have literally been thrown out with the trash. And the coming of Christianity that finishes.

Tom Holland: And that reflects the way in which, say, in the fourth century, in the wake of Constantine's conversion, you have people who will tour the rubbish dumps outside cities looking for abandoned babies which would either be left to die or be captured by slavers, raised to be slaves or prostitutes or whatever. And that, of course, is an expression of a commitment to preserving the lives of those who are absolutely the most vulnerable. And obviously, the arguments against abortion are drawing on that tradition.

So notions like human rights or the existence of something called the secular, which is absolutely bred of Christian history and Christian theology, these have been rebranded as being something that is the common property of all cultures. And this is, you know, this has been a tremendous trick that the European and American civilizations in the 20th century pulled off. So the United Nations, the idea of human rights, which is fundamental to the United Nations charter, I mean, this is a purely Christian way of framing things, but it's passed off as being universal.

Now, I think that the West was able to pull this trick off because it was so hegemonic, it was so powerful culturally as well as economically and militarily. But as that fades, so it's becoming evident that notions like, say, the secular are not at all universal. I mean, they're very culturally contingent ideas. And you see this in India with Modi or in Turkey with Erdogan. Both India and Turkey were societies that thought becoming secular republics somehow emancipated themselves from religion. But it's evident that this isn't the case at all. And I think that to that extent, Modi and Erdogan are kind of purging themselves of one of perhaps the stickiest and most enduring legacy of the colonial period.

So notions like human rights or the existence of something called the secular, which is absolutely bred of Christian history and Christian theology, these have been rebranded as being something that is the common property of all cultures. And this is, you know, this has been a tremendous trick that the European and American civilizations in the 20th century pulled off. So the United Nations, the idea of human rights, which is fundamental to the United Nations charter, I mean, this is a purely Christian way of framing things, but it's passed off as being universal.

Now, I think that the West was able to pull this trick off because it was so hegemonic, it was so powerful culturally as well as economically and militarily. But as that fades, so it's becoming evident that notions like, say, the secular are not at all universal. I mean, they're very culturally contingent ideas. And you see this in India with Modi or in Turkey with Erdogan. Both India and Turkey were societies that thought becoming secular republics somehow emancipated themselves from religion. But it's evident that this isn't the case at all. And I think that to that extent, Modi and Erdogan are kind of purging themselves of one of perhaps the stickiest and most enduring legacy of the colonial period.

Tom Holland: Because to be a Muslim or a Jew or a Hindu in a western secular society requires you to conceptualize yourself as belonging to something called a religion and thereby essentially to be Christianized. So there's an Indian thinker, I can't remember his name, it's so long since I wrote Dominion. But he said essentially, that Christianity spreads itself around the world in two ways, by conversion and by secularization. And I think he's right.

So Jews in the 19th century were obliged to recognize that they were not a people, they were not the nation of Israel. They belonged to something called Judaism. And both reform and orthodox Judaism was essentially a process of self-Protestantization. And you could see the foundation of Israel as an attempt to kind of row back from that, to reestablish the Jews as a people, as a nation.

And likewise, Muslims who've come to the West, they have freedom of religion, but they're not free to be Muslims in the way that Muslims traditionally have been Muslim since the age of the caliphate, where Islam is not a religion, it's not something that is separate from something called the secular. Islam is an entire way of life. It saturates every aspect of existence that is not permissible in a Western society.

Full Transcript

Louise Perry: Hello and welcome to Main Mother Matriarch with me, Louise Perry. My guest today is Tom Holland, co-host of the Russell's History podcast, author of many, many books, including most relevant to today's discussion, Dominion on the intellectual history of Christianity in the West. We spoke today about the book that Tom is working on at the moment, which will be about what he wants to call the Second Reformation, which is what we're living through right now.

Louise Perry: His argument is that what looks like culture warring is in fact theological warring between different factions within Christianity, that this is an intra-Christian battle. And what looks like anti-Christian practices, say euthanasia or abortion or homosexuality, which have historically been outside of Christian orthodoxy, are in fact justified according to the new Christian orthodoxy.

Louise Perry: We spoke about the prospects for this new kind of Christianity in terms of its long-term survival, the role of Nazism, and of the American civil rights movement in triggering this ideological shift. And in the extended part of the episode, we spoke about what real de-Christianization actually looks like and why real de-Christianization is an incredibly frightening prospect for anyone raised within the Christian framework. That extended version of the episode is available at louiseperry.substack.com, where you can also find the back catalogue of extended episodes, the MMM chat community, and the bonus episodes that I do with my husband. Enjoy.

Louise Perry: Many of you will know that Christianity is a subject of fascination for me, and the role of Christianity in shaping the modern world is a theme I return to again and again on the podcast. My view is that we really can't understand the world or ourselves without getting to grips with it, which is why I'm very glad to point you towards a new online course called 321.

Louise Perry: It's an introduction to Christianity that's imaginative, thoughtful, engaging. It assumes absolutely no prior knowledge. It's presented by the wonderful Glenn Scrivener, who has been again on the MMM podcast previously, and I've also been a guest on his show. Glenn presents eight video-led sessions which are based around some beautiful animated stories that illustrate the Christian message. You can check it out for free at 321course.com/mmm. Just enter your email, choose a password, and you're in. There's no spam, there's no fees. Just visit 321course.com/mmm. And now onto the show.

Louise Perry: So, Tom, I think it was you I first heard suggesting that the 1960s are the equivalent of something like a Second Reformation. I think you were in conversation with Glenn Scrivener a little while ago when we first met, and I found it such a compelling idea because, well, not only because of the size of the ideological shift, but also because it reminds one of what it actually feels like to live through a period of immense change. And often it's quite hard to tell when you're living in it that that's what's happening. And I think for many people who've lived through this reformation, that's exactly how it feels. It doesn't obviously feel like an important historical event, except I think that people in the future will recognize that it was.

Tom Holland: So people who lived through the first reformation, the Protestant Reformation, it took them about a century and a half before they named it, before they realized that they'd lived through a discrete historical process that could be given a name. And it was Protestants who gave it that name. So Catholics didn't start calling it the Reformation till the late 19th century.

Tom Holland: So I think in that sense, it's very easy to be caught up on a massive slip tide and not really realize that you're heading out towards a new ocean. But at the same time, of course, in the 1520s, people were completely aware that extraordinary ideological and theological convulsions were taking place. And I think it's pretty evident to people today that the same thing is happening. It's just I think that we haven't yet given the process of ideological reformation that we're living through a name. But I'm sure that historians writing in a century or two centuries time will probably recognize that we are living through quite a profound moment of change.

Louise Perry: And this one is a lot less violent, at least so far.

Tom Holland: So that's a huge difference, yes.

Louise Perry: So, I mean, aside from that though, how do you... So my guess would be if the first Reformation was about the rejection of Catholicism, this is about the reformation of Christianity per se, right? Or do you think that there's something else going on?

Tom Holland: I'm not sure it is even. I think that would be to give Christianity too much, or institutional Christianity too much significance. I think it's kind of bred of the marrow of Christian assumptions.

Tom Holland: I think that one of those is absolutely the valorization of victimhood. The notion that Christianity radically discovers that the person who is being tortured can ultimately, in the long run, have a power over the person who is torturing him. And that has been a kind of slow burning process of ideological convulsion that has spanned 2000 years and has been seismic in its implications.

Tom Holland: And I think that part of that process has been, ironically, that the very success of Christian civilization, the fact that the cross has become the most internationally recognized symbol, probably, that humanity has ever devised, has made Christianity itself seem hegemonic. And that has made it an object of suspicion.

Tom Holland: So its very success, the fact that the cross has been an emblem for countless empires, for conquistadors and imperialists and colonialists, and it means that Europeans, believing Christianity has spread to all corners of the world, that now means that Christianity itself has to be viewed with suspicion. But the paradox, of course, is that it remains that that attitude remains a deeply Christian one.

Tom Holland: And so we are caught up in this kind of matrix, this kind of Mobius strip of ideological and theological presumptions that are all kind of in conflict with one another. And you keep trying to kind of follow them round and you just end up where you've begun.

Tom Holland: And I think that, in a way, what we're living through at the moment is an attempt to kind of cut that Mobius strip, that Gordian knot, if you want. You want to imagine the Gordian knot as a kind of Mobius strip, essentially, by just jettisoning the whole baggage of Christianity, the scriptures, the practice of institutional religion and so on, which, of course, is a process of reformation, of cleansing the altar, of clearing the altars, that radically goes beyond anything that the Protestants of the 16th century attempted, but I think is part of a continuum.

Tom Holland: It's an attempt to, on one level, topple idols and banish superstition again, in the way that the Protestant reformers have done. So the sense that religion, and particularly Christianity, is something to be got rid of, I think is important, but I don't think it's the most important aspect of it, because I think the most important aspect of it is the valorization of those who historically have been persecuted.

Tom Holland: And I think that it emerges in its contemporary form as a result of two traumatic experiences in the 20th century, the first of which was the experience of fascism, particularly Nazism, because fascism was an overt assault, not just on institutional Christianity, as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution was, but on the very theological fundamentals, one of which is that those who are poor, who are weak, who are disadvantaged, owed a duty of care by the strong. And the Nazis obviously very radically repudiated that.

Tom Holland: And the second is the notion that all human beings are created in the image of God and therefore have an inherent dignity which derives from Genesis, but is given a particular spin by Paul when he says that there is no Jew or Greek in Christ. But, of course, that has been secularized to convey the sense that all human beings are created equal, that racism is a profound sin. And I think you can use that word again. The Nazis absolutely repudiated that. Of course, they thought Jews and Greeks were completely separate, and by extension, black and white were separate and distinct and embodied different races.

Tom Holland: And I think the measure of how traumatic this was for a civilization deeply shaped by this conviction is that in the wake of the Second World War and the destruction of Nazism, Hitler has basically been enshrined as the devil, the Nazis as devils, Auschwitz as hell, and the vision of Nazi Germany as hell. And that is what we now react against. We don't really need the Christian mythology anymore because we have the example of Nazi Europe to kind of offer us moral guidance. We don't need to do what Jesus did. We need to do the opposite of what Hitler did. And that has been hugely, hugely influential, I think, in shaping our moral horizons.

Tom Holland: The other traumatic experience has been the fact that in the wake of the American Civil War, racial equality was not established in the United States, and racism was institutionally hardwired into large swathes of the United States. And this provoked, I think, the last great manifestation of Christianity as a political reform movement that the West has seen, which was the civil rights movement.

Tom Holland: And the civil rights movement consciously drew on biblical stories to give its arguments and its campaigns resonance. So the Reverend Martin Luther King was always preaching about how God had redeemed the Israelites from slavery and brought them into a promised land. And he would talk of Jesus as being an extremist for love. And in doing that, he was appealing to the Christian fellow feeling of white Christians in America.

Tom Holland: And his arguments essentially were unanswerable. If you are a devout Christian, if you're a believing Christian, even if you're the most cursory Christian, the most shallow Christian, the arguments are so steeped in scripture and on the kind of traditional teachings of the church that they were unarguable. And that's why over the course of the sixties, the civil rights movement had the enormous successes that it did. It went with the grain of centuries and centuries of American Christian assumptions, and it had a huge impact on other marginalized groups, and it inspired other campaigners through the sixties into the seventies, into the eighties.

Tom Holland: Feminism would be one, gay rights campaigners would be another. In more recent times, trans rights campaigners, all of them essentially drawing on the same kind of model of resistance, the same summons to people to share in their call for equality that Martin Luther King and the civil rights activists had done.

Tom Holland: But of course, for institutional Christianity, these were much more threatening because they did go against Christian doctrines as traditionally taught. And so that has resulted in a degree of polarization in America that has resulted in a kind of schism within American culture that, in turn, has rippled out across, particularly the English-speaking world, but across the West more generally, because America is so culturally dominant that its own internal culture wars have radiated out, and we're all kind of implicated in them.

Tom Holland: But I would argue, kind of making the case for the fact that this is a kind of iteration of reformations, that are processes of reformation and revolution that have happened before in Christian civilization, that there is no aspect of the culture wars as currently raging, that are not in some sense an expression of a civil war within Christianity, that these are theological arguments, that are deeply, deeply rooted in Christian assumptions.

Tom Holland: And that's why I think it's a repudiation. It's kind of a leaving behind of institutional Christianity, but it's a transmutation of its assumptions and its teachings and its doctrines and its stories kind of into a vibe. And that process happened in the sixties. And I think that the music, the culture, the counterculture was actually absolutely crucial.

Tom Holland: If you read books, histories of the sixties, the Beatles or Bob Dylan will be, you know, they'll maybe get a paragraph, but they'll be seen as peripheral. I don't think they're peripheral at all. I think they're absolutely fundamental because they... The music plays a crucial role in habituating vast, vast swathes of Western society to the idea that the vibe is actually where you want to be at. The answer is blowing in the wind.

Louise Perry: Hence the title of your next book.

Louise Perry: Okay, so I'm inclined to agree with you, but one of the features of this new, this transformed Christianity, this reformed Christianity. And by the way, I mean comparing this with reformation. Anyone who looks back at the 16th century and is mystified as to why our ancestors were so obsessed with whether or not transubstantiation was literally true, ought to think of the question of whether or not women literally have penises. Right? Also a symbolic question, but one filled with, yeah, is a trans woman? A woman is a theological question, I think, in that sense. And it's a definer of identity, a marker of ideological positioning.

Louise Perry: But one of the strange features of the new religion is that there are ways in which it diverges very sharply from christian orthodoxy with a small o. Right. So the position on abortion, on euthanasia, on homosexuality, all of these are issues which surely scripture is fairly clear. I say this as someone who's not an expert.

Tom Holland: It depends what you choose to emphasize. So, of course, the idea that life is precious and that particularly the lives of those who are most vulnerable is precious. This has been something that's been crucial to the practice of Christianity since the very beginning. So one of the markers of a christian city, archaeologically, as opposed to a pre christian city, is that the pre christian cities in their sewerage, will have lots of the bones of small babies in it, babies that have literally been thrown out with the trash. And the coming of Christianity that finishes.

Tom Holland: And that reflects the way in which, say, in the fourth century, in the wake of Constantine's conversion, you have people who will tour the rubbish dumps outside cities looking for abandoned babies which would either be left to die or be captured by slavers, raised to be slaves or prostitutes or whatever. And that, of course, is an expression of a commitment to preserving the lives of those who are absolutely the most vulnerable. And obviously, the arguments against abortion are drawing on that tradition.

Tom Holland: But at the same time, and you are much more schooled in feminist thought than I am, and I dread the charge of mansplaining, but it does seem to me that the idea that underpins the right to choose is rooted in the idea that all human beings should have bodily autonomy, which, again, is one of the very radical teachings of Christianity. There's a sense in which the whole abortion debate is an argument over which aspect of those biblical teachings do you choose to emphasize?

Tom Holland: The fact that they have been their kind of anchorage within scripture, that the anchor has been loosed, of course, makes the arguments, in a way, even more intense, because you can't draw on scripture to press your case. You have to draw on, I mean, my sense is that people are moving, as I say, with vibes, with impressions, with gut instincts, with appeals that, well, you must feel this, because if you don't, you're evil. And both sides make that case. They no longer draw it. It's no longer theologically rooted.

Tom Holland: But the wellsprings, it seems to me, are theological. And in that way, it's absolutely indicative of the current state that western culture occupies, where it's arguing over things, over morals, ethics, practices that clearly derive from a very distinctive culture. But that that culture, certainly by half of the people who are arguing it, you know, that's. That culture has been repudiated, but they still remain a part of it. And that's the kind of the strangeness of where we are at the moment. I can't really think of anything comparable to it in history.

Louise Perry: Yeah, you see the same thing, of course, in euthanasia debate, where no one, almost no one, few exceptions, but almost no one justifies euthanasia on the basis that some lives are worth less than others and are useless and burdensome. And it would be more glorious to die by suicide in a japanese or a roman way than it would be to be a burden on the state and on your family. Almost no one justifies euthanasia on that basis. They justify it on the basis of mercy. So it is using christian rhetoric and christian moral ideas to justify something that until now has not been considered permissible within Christianity.

Tom Holland: Right? And again, and the great shadow over this is the Nazis and its euthanasia program, because the Nazis did justify euthanasia in terms of some lives are more important than others. And so that is the shadow that hangs over us. And it's a demonstration of the way in which it is absolutely possible to think outside the christian box. I mean, it is possible to move beyond the frameworks of christian thinking.

Tom Holland: But by and large, as you say, people are not doing that. People are making the argument not with kind of conscious repudiation of those christian values, but with the assumption that somehow they're self evident, that they're obvious, that all decent, right thinking people would accept them. I mean, and that is clearly not the case because there are plenty of examples from the past of people assuming that some lives are worth more than others and that, you know, I mean, getting rid of small babies is, you know, infanticide is a kind of classic example of that. What's wrong with killing small babies?

Louise Perry: The thing that I wonder about is that I'm minded to describe this new moral system as a christian heresy rather than as a new kind of Christianity. I suppose one can debate exactly the line between heresy and orthodoxy.

Tom Holland: But, I mean, I think these are semantics. Obviously. If you're a Christian, a believing Christian, then you will have views on what is a heretical form of Christianity. If you feel that there is an orthodoxy that is rooted in divine revelation and therefore in absolute truth, then distortions of that can absolutely be cast as heresy.

Tom Holland: But I think if you think of Christianity as a cultural expression like any other cultural expression, all variations on it, I mean, whether it's to be defined as a heresy or a distortion, I mean, that implies that there is a kind of absolute form of it. I'm not sure I'm making that argument at all. And I think that there is something, what is distinctive about christian civilization is that it kind of Christianity seems to contain within itself its own solvents.

Tom Holland: I think that there are trends within it that as they have worked themselves out over the course of the centuries and the millennia, have kind of led to, to atheism, to a repudiation of the truth claims of Christianity itself, but for deeply christian reasons. And this is what makes it so paradoxical as a culture. It's what makes it so powerful and so destabilizing, is that as an ideological system it's been unbelievably disruptive, unstable.

Tom Holland: Christianity today is often cast as kind of conservative, but I don't think it's, I mean, I don't think its impact over the course of 2000 years has been remote. I mean, the opposite of conservative. I think it's been the most revolutionary, the most kind of unsettling way of understanding the world that has ever been devised. And the kind of ultimate irony of that is that it's ended up abolishing itself.

Louise Perry: And I suspect that the new, the new kind of Christianity, whether we call it a heresy or a new orthodoxy, contains more solvents than most.

Tom Holland: Absolutely. But this is what's so interesting is we don't know what to call it yet. You know, people didn't know what. Yeah, people were in the, in the 1520s weren't calling themselves Protestants. The words did not exist that enabled people to have the conversation about what was going on. So whatever it is that we're living, is it a form of Christianity? Is it a, is it a heresy, is it a reformation? I mean, we just lack the accepted, agreed vocabulary to describe it as yet.

Louise Perry: See, my suspicion though, and maybe we differ a little bit on this, is that this new form is more unstable than most, even though as you say, Christianity is a destabilizing force inherently it contains more solvent than most and is more prone. I mean, thinking of something like euthanasia or abortion is more prone, I think, to just end up eventually, maybe sooner rather than later, jettisoning the christian rhetoric and just returning to something that looks much more pagan. Right. The extent to which it remains christian because it is completely tethered from scripture, because it's tethered from.

Tom Holland: But I still institution, again, I don't know what you mean by pagan.

Louise Perry: So for instance, that it might return in euthanasia or indeed an abortion instead of justifying these practices, which are age old practices, pre-Christian practices, by appeals to mercy and victimhood and Christian moral ideas, that rhetoric might fall away and we might just return to, well, some lives are burdensome and useless, which would be the older way of thinking about it.

Tom Holland: It might do, and that is what the Nazis did. So fascism was backward looking, and the Nazis in particular were. I mean, they had an almost kind of Nietzschean degree of contempt for Christianity as a poisoning of the human spirit at its most vital. And the desire of the Nazis to wipe away the legacy of Christianity and return the Aryans to the healthy condition that they believed had prevailed in the golden age of Greece or Rome was absolutely a huge animating impulse for Hitler and for the leading Nazis, for Nazi ideologues.

At the same time, they were also looking to the future. Mussolini was obviously hugely influenced by the futurists. Fascists adored planes, tanks, speed metal, everything that they could devise. And I think that what was distinctive about fascism was this fusion of the ancient and the futuristic, of the pre-Christian and the post-Christian.

And I suppose that it's perfectly possible that we will may end up with something like that. But I don't think we are at the moment. I think that the hostility to any hint of fascism remains so strong that to that extent, we are inoculated against the repudiation of these Christian values. I mean, it may be that it will fade, but I don't see any sign of it as yet.

I don't see ideologues saying that the old or the disadvantaged should be got rid of because they are weak. It's because they are sick, or it's because the mother, you know, has control over her own body and shouldn't be bullied by finger wagging, bigoted men. It's always framed in those terms, which I think remains foregrounding the kind of the Christian principles rather than the, say, the Nazi principles. So I don't think that we're approaching that yet.

And I also think, of course, that pagan paganism, the idea of the pagan, I mean, again, you still haven't entirely cut the Christian moorings there, because paganism is, again, an entirely Christian category. No one in the pre-Christian world would have called themselves a pagan. It's a Christian word. So again, we lack, if it is becoming something that is post-Christian in that sense, we still lack the way to think ourselves outside the Christian frameworks.

Louise Perry: One other way in which this we call it the new Christianity, in which the new Christianity might have a sort of self destruct button, might have its finger hovering over the self destruct button is through its response to other religions. So, for instance, to Islam, the fact that the new Christianity sees open borders essentially as a moral imperative and very much lacks confidence in historical western institutions, and particularly in Christian institutions, probably leaves it, well, I would argue, leaves it very open to being overtaken by other religions that are much more confident.

Tom Holland: I mean, the first thing to say is that the idea of the category of religions as something that exists separate from something called the secular, the idea that Islam is a religion, the idea that Judaism is, or Hinduism, again, these are Christian categories. And one of the ways in which Christianity has mutated and kind of enabled itself to survive in a world where people don't believe in God is by disguising the fact that Christian assumptions are actually Christian, they've been rebranded as universal.

So notions like human rights or the existence of something called the secular, which is absolutely bred of Christian history and Christian theology, these have been rebranded as being something that is the common property of all cultures. And this is, you know, this has been a tremendous trick that the European and American civilizations in the 20th century pulled off. So the United Nations, the idea of human rights, which is fundamental to the United Nations charter, I mean, this is a purely Christian way of framing things, but it's passed off as being universal.

Now, I think that the West was able to pull this trick off because it was so hegemonic, it was so powerful culturally as well as economically and militarily. But as that fades, so it's becoming evident that notions like, say, the secular are not at all universal. I mean, they're very culturally contingent ideas. And you see this in India with Modi or in Turkey with Erdogan. Both India and Turkey were societies that thought becoming secular republics somehow emancipated themselves from religion. But it's evident that this isn't the case at all. And I think that to that extent, Modi and Erdogan are kind of purging themselves of one of perhaps the stickiest and most enduring legacy of the colonial period.

Louise Perry: I mean, I'm not sure that answers my question, although I take the point. I mean, this. It is so difficult to psychologically break out of the Christian framework that we've all inherited, and it does. And yes, I accept the point that to some extent, we have constructed these alternative religions within a Christian framework. But is it not the case that the new Christianity is less. Less capable of withstanding alternative rivals? I mean, it just seems so clear to me that.

Tom Holland: Because to be a Muslim or a Jew or a Hindu in a western secular society requires you to conceptualize yourself as belonging to something called a religion and thereby essentially to be Christianized. So there's an Indian thinker, I can't remember his name, it's so long since I wrote Dominion. But he said essentially, that Christianity spreads itself around the world in two ways, by conversion and by secularization. And I think he's right.

So Jews in the 19th century were obliged to recognize that they were not a people, they were not the nation of Israel. They belonged to something called Judaism. And both reform and orthodox Judaism was essentially a process of self-Protestantization. And you could see the foundation of Israel as an attempt to kind of row back from that, to reestablish the Jews as a people, as a nation.

And likewise, Muslims who've come to the West, they have freedom of religion, but they're not free to be Muslims in the way that Muslims traditionally have been Muslim since the age of the caliphate, where Islam is not a religion, it's not something that is separate from something called the secular. Islam is an entire way of life. It saturates every aspect of existence that is not permissible in a Western society.

And those Muslims, on the kind of what we call the radical extreme, I mean, they, they're trying to recreate something that has gone. They can't possibly impose that. And the very attempt to do it, they get called fundamentalist. I mean, that is a Protestant categorization. And again, you, you know, the, something like the Islamic State was an attempt to kind of rage against that. And so you did have Muslims say, you know, from across the West going there, burning their passport, saying, we want to belong to an Islamic state, we want to belong to a caliphate. But it was a kind of nightmarish zombie horror. That is not the future. The future for Muslims and Jews and Hindus is to be secularized and is to be Christianized.

Now, of course, it's absolutely true that that inevitably diminishes the. What was always something very striking about, particularly Latin Christendom, where essentially that, you know, Jews were the only religious minority. We do now live in multi-faith states. And of course, that will dilute the cultural primacy of Christianity. But I think the conceptual primacy of Christianity remains unshaken. To be in a Western country and to be a Jew or a Muslim is to belong to religion, not to belong to a people.

Louise Perry: Except, of course, that there are not Jews so much, but Muslims in Europe who would very much like to assert Muslim principles in government, who would like to see Sharia law. I mean, yes, we would call these people fundamentalists or whatever within the secular Christian framework. But given their druthers, there would be this idea of Islam being confined safely to the marginalized religion category would be a thing of the past. And I just wonder if the new Christians are sufficiently motivated to protect a Christianity that they abhor, at least rhetorically, in the face of that kind of challenge.

Tom Holland: I mean, there's always been a massive tension at the heart of Christianity, one of which, you know, and it's important to point out that Christianity, there are many, many different ways of understanding Christianity, and it has bred paradoxical responses. And the response to those who are not Christian is obviously one of them. It's there right from the beginning.

So I've already quoted Paul's famous line that there's no Jew or Greek in Christ, but what if, what of those Jews who don't want to have their distinctiveness dissolved into some kind of universal identity? So right from the beginning, that was a problem. And the question of how Christians should treat Jews is obviously, you know, has been a kind of dark problem for Christians for 2000 years, with often devastating consequences for Jewish people within Christendom.

And the same, of course, was true for how Christians should conceptualize and understand Muslims. Are they enemies to be fought against, or are they people to be treated as the good Samaritan treated the Jew found on the road leading up to Jerusalem? And you see in the responses to the mass migration of Muslims into Europe, both responses, you see, say, Viktor Orban, for instance, who put up the barbed wire fence against immigrants coming in, in whatever it was, 2015. Was it 2016? I can't remember. I mean, he did that overtly in the name of defending a Christian Hungary and Christian Europe. And Angela Merkel, likewise, who said, yeah, let them all in. Brilliant. I mean, she's the daughter of a Lutheran pastor who is completely steeped in the values of the parable of the good Samaritan.

So both responses coexist as they have always done, because Christianity is only one way of understanding the world. And so therefore, it inevitably has to negotiate with people who do come from different traditions. But what I would say is that in many ways, I mean, it sounds, again, you know, paradoxical Christianity, or at least the legacy of Christianity, the legacy of whatever we want to call it, Western progressivism or Western secularism or liberalism or whatever. I mean, it's had such a conditioning effect on cultures around the world. It's not just in the West, but globally. Islam has been Christianized, and I would say Protestantized Hinduism as a category. I mean, that is a Christian category.

And what you see in India and what you see in Turkey at the moment is an attempt to kind of row back against that. I don't see any weakening of that power, that ideological power within Europe, within.

Louise Perry: America, to put my Dominic Sandbrook hat on for a moment, and to talk about material factors in this history, right? So, I mean, you've spoken about the sort of one two punch of the fascism and civil rights movement in terms of undermining the old, the old order. There are also, of course, enormous material changes that happen during that period.

And I mean, for instance, on something like attitudes towards homosexuality, you could look, there are nice maps available on the Internet which show different legal regimes on the question of homosexuality across the world, color coded. And you will notice when you look at it, that Christian and post-Christian countries are generally the most liberal. So you could conclude from that that it's because. It's because Christian ideas are being used to justify a liberalized approach.

But you also notice that northeast Asian countries tend to be liberal, too, despite having basically no Christian influence. Which makes me suspect that maybe it's actually affluence that pushes people towards the second reformation, right? Maybe there's something distinctive, maybe there's a parallel process, which isn't just ideological, but is also material, and it's something to do with people becoming richer, safer, more comfortable, more peaceful, that encourages this change in attitudes towards Christianity, in which case that continued process of us becoming ever richer and safer and more comfortable is not guaranteed, and is also not guaranteed in other parts of the world, which, as you say, might be liable to become more and more Protestant, even if their historical religious tradition is not a Christian one. What do you think about the possible connection between affluence and religiosity?

Tom Holland: I'm not convinced by that at all.

Louise Perry: Thank you so much.