The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 52. Tom Holland: How religion shaped politics and the Western world

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

Is the West more Christian than it thinks? Why are so many British prime ministers from religious backgrounds? How does the evangelical support for Donald Trump and the culture wars in the US reflect a Christian civil war? For a Christmas Day special of Leading, Rory and Alastair are joined by historian Tom Holland, co-host of sister podcast 'The Rest Is History', to discuss the profound impact religion has had on shaping politics and the Western world. To hear more from Tom, just search 'The Rest Is History' wherever you get your podcasts. TRIP Plus:  Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes.  Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restis politics.com. Welcome to the rest of this politics leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Alistair Campbell. And nothing less than a Restis Politics leading Christmas Day special with Tom Holland. And it's a special day, partly because we've all got our Christmas jumpers on. I notice, Alice, tell us a little bit about your Christmas jumper, of people listening rather than watching. Abba. It's an Abba Christmas jumper. Worshiping false gods. And I can't quite

see off the frame. It's got a reindeer on it as well as lots of stars. It's got everything Christmas is. Oh, lovely. It's got elves. That's tremendous. Absolutely tremendous. And Tom is wearing a dinosaur Christmas jumper, which I think is very, very, very striking. One of the things I know about Tom Holland is that he's mildly obsessed with dinosaurs. Very good. Well, we're not here to talk about dinosaurs. We are here to talk about Christmas, which we do. We do. We don't. We don't need to remind listeners is, of course, the birth of Christ. To remind listeners, Chris. It's not just about Abba, it's also about Jesus. And we're going to be talking about religion in politics. We're going to be talking about Tom Holland's astonishing and

quite controversial idea that basically in the end, we are all almost Christians. The whole world is Christian without us really being aware of it. And Christmas Day seemed to be quite a good way of getting into that rather interesting controversial idea. And of course, I'm sure many of our listeners will know that Tom Holland is the co-presenter of another podcast, which frankly gave birth to this one, or helped to give birth to this one. That is the rest is history. So without further ado, here, Christmas Day Special with Tom Holland. I'm very grateful that you've invited me onto a podcast called Leading,

because I have to be upfront. I have never led anything in my life. So I do feel a bit of a fraud in that sense. Except for cricket. I mean, you're a big leading cricketer, as we know from your talk. I suppose that's true. I suppose that's true. I have led a cricket team, but that's about it. It's not exactly Hillary Clinton, is it? I suppose she didn't lead him much either, so. Oh, harsh, harsh, harsh. But just on, I'd argue that you led in debate on some of the most important and interesting aspects of the history of civilization, which is quite a big thing. Well, that's very kind.

That's a nice Christmas present. Yeah, I wouldn't knock yourself too much. And, you know, you led in the most successful global, global podcast, not the most successful domestic podcast, which would be the one that Rory had I present. So, Tom, I want to start with, so we met briefly the other night at, do you want to tell our listeners where we accidentally bumped into each other? Well, we met at Lambeth Palace, where the Archbishop of Canterbury. was hosting a small and intimate carol service, and I walked in expecting not to know anyone,

and then I saw you there. And I was very surprised because famously you said that you don't do God. So yeah. But then there were quite a lot of people there, I think, who don't do God, which is kind of interesting. I think there were. I think Justin Welby, who's a very, very fine man, and obviously until I got friendly with Rory, by a mile my favourite Old Etonian. But I think he sees himself as a bit of a missionary. I think he's on the conversion all the time and he sees as a challenge. But I want to ask you, so you were there. I was there, as you say, lots of people who believe and others who don't. So just first of all with you, do you believe? And I can remember when I interviewed Justin Welby for a magazine once. He said that the thing about belief is that you have to believe the basic story.

Jesus was born to a virgin mother. He is the son of God. The tenets in the Bible, they are true about his life. So do you believe that story? No, there's that thing where you look at this shape and you either see a rabbit or you see a duck. And it's very hard to keep them both in your head at the same time. And that's how I feel. There are times where I can believe it. So Christmas, I guess, would definitely be one. Easter would be another. And there are other times where I look at the stories. I think this is absolutely ridiculous. How could it possibly be true? I think of the infinitude of space. I think of the vastness of geological time. And I think it's,

absolutely, absolutely nonsense. So I kind of veer between the two. I guess I would like to believe, but there are most of the time I don't. But having said that, I have come to recognize myself as being profoundly Christian in my assumptions and everything that I take for granted. And I don't think that I'm alone in that. I think pretty much everybody who is brought up in the West, the same could be said of them. This is obviously our Christmas Day podcast. And be lovely, if you could just reflect a little bit on what the significance of Christmas Day is or the significance of Jesus's birth is for the world and for our listeners. Well, I think, I mean, in the broadest historical terms and why I say that I think that everybody in the West pretty much is steeped in Christian assumptions, perhaps one of the

profoundest illustrations of that is embodied by the Christmas story because in the Christian tradition, Christ is God. He is the king of the universe. He is, eternal and he comes to earth and he comes not as a conqueror, not as a Caesar, not as a earthly ruler, but as someone who is born in a stable. And that sense of the utter reversal of expectations that Jesus himself will go on to say the last will be first, the first will be last, that sense that power is to be found in powerlessness, that the true manifestation of God is displayed in humility is a radically, radically transformative notion. It's something that would have made no sense to the Romans at all. I mean, it made no sense to the Judeans, the Christ's own people. And yet that

idea that that it is better in a way that there is a greater moral value, say, in being powerless than in being powerful, is transformative. And that idea is obviously still completely with us now. It explains so much in our politics. It explains so much in our geopolitics. It explains the assumptions that govern the behavior of people in 2023 and who may not even realize where they're getting those assumptions from. So you're a historian, though. And so we were there. There's the Archbishop who I know really, really believes this story. And I was with my sister who also really, really believes this story.

And she, I know, feels that somebody like me who doesn't believe that I am kind of going to be a condemned at the end of my life. Now, you must be in that same category because you don't believe in the same way. You have these doubts. But I think you do believe, Alistair. Oh. Well, I think, for instance, that the political traditions of socialism would be unimaginable without this Christian heritage. You know, it's famously said that David Parti owes more to Methodism than to Marx, but Marx also would be unthinkable without this tradition. The idea that the rich and the wealthy and the powerful owe things to the poor. I mean, it's an incredibly powerful idea. And because we take it so for granted, we may be tempted to assume that this has always been universal, but it hasn't. And I would say

looking at the context of the world into which Christianity is born, that the fact that we have come to take these ideas for granted is due to the inheritance of Christianity. So if you were taking that for granted, then you know, you are believing it. These are contingent beliefs. There are lots of people who wouldn't necessarily believe them. We had a chat at the event at Lambeth Palace, and I said, you know, give me some stuff to read before we do this chat. And you said, well, have you read Dominion, your book? And I have...

Very modestly. No Christian humility there. Yeah, but it's not a bad starting point. And so I've only had a day or two, so I have kind of skim read it. But I feel this tension within it between you as a historian. So there's one point at which, I can't remember the detail, but you say that there's only one actual fact. related to Jesus' life and death that we know is true. But how can you say that?

And how can we then make such assumptions about all the other parts of his life that we are told are real? What I actually said was that there's one fact about Jesus' life that pretty much every historian, no matter how skeptical, would accept, which is that he was crucified by the Romans. I think pretty much everyone would accept that. There are plenty of historians who think that we can know more than that. But the truth is that it doesn't matter even whether Jesus existed or not.

What matters from my point of view when I say that we are all Christian is that billions of people have thought that this is true and that the consequence of that has been to radically reconfigure global history and continue to influence the way that people in the West think and take things for granted, even if they're not believing Christians, even if they've never read the Bible, even if they know literally nothing about Christianity, they're still influenced by it. And Tom, one of the things that's difficult to get our heads around is that our image, for example, of the Middle Ages, which is a very Christian age, is a feudalism of kings, of enormous inequality, of incredible sort of wealth and power and warfare. So it's tempting to

imagine it as a very hypocritical age that pretends to be Christian, but isn't behaving in a very Christian way. But you seem to argue in the book something a bit different that somehow despite of that, they were profoundly Christian. Oh, I mean, absolutely. And I think that actually what we think of as medieval civilization and perhaps we might be tempted because of the influence of the way that the Enlightenment has shaped most people's thinking. We're tempted to think of the Middle Ages as very hidebound, as very reactionary, as kind of unchanging. It's the opposite. And I would argue that medieval, high medieval society is Europe's first great revolutionary society. And there is, in the 11th century, which is the age that that sees the launching of the First Crusade and in due

course, the emergence of kind of radical new ideas about how society should be organized. This is Europe's first revolution. And pretty much everything that has followed, the reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution is simply a replaying of the convulsions that happened in that century. But what evidence is there that people really cared about the poor, about putting the last first in an age of kings with astonishing wealth and peasants suffering in misery? Well, so one thing, for instance, that emerges from this convulsive age is, I would argue what today we would call the notion of the secular. And this is a concept that derives from the very beginnings of Christianity. It's kind of implicit in

the Gospels. It's there in the teachings of the church fathers. And it's this idea that all of humanity, whether you are a king or whether you are a slave, is bound upon what the Romans called the cyclum, which is the flow of time, that we are born, we live, we die. And the only thing that can save all of humanity from that is the religio, the bond that joins earth to the unchanging order of heaven. And in the 11th century, this inspires what you can only call a revolutionary movement that is led by the Bishop of Rome, but comes to lay claim to the entire expanse of Christendom. And it says that the church should be completely sovereign, that no earthly king or emperor should have the right to pour the radiant robes of the church with his grubby fingers.

And the reason that the church wants to institute this is to offer a sovereign sense of justice to every Christian so that no matter how poor you are, no matter how humble you are, you have a right of appeal that transcends earthly power. And the implications of this over the course of the Middle Ages into the modern period is utterly profound because essentially it's dividing the world into two spheres, that of the cyclum and that of religio. And it's by, say, the 18th century, this has become what we would call the secular and religious. And it's bred entirely of theology and a kind of desire to give all Christians a sense of appeal that transcends earthly power. But presumably, Tom, if you were a Muslim, you would point to the fact that justice and rights are very fundamental to the notion of Islam. And there's very much a sense of an omar. I don't think rights are, though, because there are no human rights. Everything that comes in Islam comes directly from God.

So in Islam, there is a great body of law that has come directly from God. God is a legislator. That is not the case in Christianity. In Christianity, the law that God gives is written on the heart. And so Christians have to look into the heart, which is why we in the West take for granted the fact that law can have human origin, because it's coming from the sense of conscience that is in our hearts. But in the 12th century, in the wake of this kind of great transformation that sees the church try to split itself off from what will come to be. find as secular society. There is a need for the church to be able to have a sense of what laws should govern how things are done. And so in the 12th century, people look to the Gospels to get some sense of what laws should govern the way that the Christian people live. And they read in the gospels that the rich should give to the poor, that they should feed them if they're hungry,

that they should give them water if they're thirsty, they should give them clothes if they have no clothing. And from that, they deduce the fact that therefore the poor have rights to certain things, that they have rights to food, they have rights to drink, they have right to clothing, they have rights to shelter. And this is an idea that, of course, has fed through into an age that is not consciously Christian. But the idea that we have rights is absolutely bred of the labours of those monks in the 12th century. And that I think is what's so extraordinary about Christian history, is that again and again, it's kind of like depth charges are being laid under the fabric of Western civilization that continue to reverberate through the centuries right the way into the present, even for people who may not be aware where those depth charges were originally laid. I'm looking at the cover of Dominion now, the paperback, and there are some figures of history on there, Martin Luther King, Hitler, the suffragettes, the Beatles.

And actually, one of the chapters I most enjoyed was the chapter where essentially you were saying that the Beatles, and in particular some of the specific songs, John Lennon, Imagine, All You Need is Love, that these were from a group of young men, atheists. I think Paul McCartney used to talk about religion as that goody-goody stuff, that actually you were saying they were all somehow connected to this basic story that may or may not be true. And just to develop on the point that Rory made, and yet this is an argument I have of my sister a lot, is that if I were a believing Christian, I believe that story so powerfully, so passionately, so fundamentally. And part of that is that I don't want to disrespect others, and yet a Muslim, a devout Muslim, believes their story just as devoutly, just as fundamentally, just as clearly, and that that is what has shaped the world that we live in. Absolutely. So I think that one of the temptations in our secular society is to imagine that the secular is neutral and that Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Sikhs and whoever can be bundled into the big tent and it will operate in a completely neutral way. But that's that seems to me a complete fallacy. I think that the ideas of the secular society in their fundamentals are Christian. And so therefore there is inherently a strain on Jews, on. Muslims if they live in a Western secular state to adapt themselves to the assumptions that derive ultimately from this deep Christian history. So I think that that is a tension that is often not

recognized by people in power who assume that as representatives of the secular state, they've somehow transcended the specificities of Western culture. They absolutely haven't. So, of course, Islam is a great global civilization. And Christendom that emerges to become the secular West, likewise. And I repeat, these are very culturally contingent, whether you believe it, whether you believe in Islam, whether you believe in Christianity, whether you believe in the values of a secular liberal state. These are not absolute, I think, from the kind of the historical point of view, they're contingent. They are bred of specific civilizational circumstances. Let's just focus then on today. So we're recording this just before Christmas. I think we can be

fairly sure that the catastrophe in Israel, Gaza, is going to be continuing come Christmas Day. Tell me what I, were I a devout Christian or were I a devout Muslim, how I should be feeling, looking at this happening while we're all sort of sitting around Christmas trees telling each other how marvellous the world is and giving each other love and presents? I mean, I don't think it's for me to tell anyone how they should feel. But what I would say is that in our beliefs in the things that we may feel very passionately, we are often influenced by deep trends within history that we may barely even be aware of. So I would say, I mean, that the concern with Israel and Palestine, Stein and the suffering of people there is deeply reflective of the role that what Christians

have always called the Holy Land continues to play. You don't have to be Christian to feel that that particular spot of land has a significance and a resonance that transcends that of other places. You know, there are terrible things happening elsewhere in the world. But are both sides currently engaging in unchristian conduct? Well, Christians have inflicted terrible violence and bloodshed over the course of their history, and they've done it specifically in the Holy Land. So one of the expressions of this great revolutionary period in Christian history in the 11th century, as we said, I mean, it culminates in the First Crusade, where Crusaders weighed through

blood in the streets of Jerusalem. And there's no question that I think that both for Jews and for Muslims likewise, the fact that this small plot of land has an outsized influence, both for Jews and for Muslims as well, means that attitudes towards the conflict there has a peculiar kind of heightened quality. And the fact that Jews, Christians, Muslims all feel that, but in different ways, I think only makes opportunities for resolving the war there even more complex. Tom, stepping aside from Christianity to you as a historian, what as a historian do you notice about the conflict that perhaps people who spend less times thinking and reading history might not immediately notice about what's happening in Israel, Gaza? Are the things from, I don't know, the Roman period or the early 20th century which help you to understand dimensions the conflict that maybe you think people haven't been emphasizing enough in the last couple of months?

Well, I'll be honest, I'm nervous to in any way pontificate on that conflict. because I think it is so complex and I think that the political and emotional complications of it are so profound that only those who are really very intimate with it and who are outside the conflict I think should talk about it. I claim no special insights. But what I would say is that I think that the way that it is playing out in Western capitals does reflect a kind of distinctively Christian sensibility, which if we're thinking about today is Christmas Day, the birth of Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem, which is now part of Palestine. That that explains the way in which both the Israelis and the Palestinians, when they are framing their appeals to Western support, are emphasizing the degree to which they are the oppressed, that if you like, they are David with the slingshot rather than Goliath in his armor. And neither of them are emphasizing their power.

What matters is to claim the status, if you like, of victim. Because there is a kind of power in the West in claiming that status. You know, we've seen that over recent years, that if you can claim that status as a victim, then you claim a kind of moral status as well. And I think that both the Israelis and the Palestinians, when they're making their appeals to Western opinion, are completely aware of that. So if we'll go back to John Lennon, imagine, and he's an atheist. and you're saying, but he's nonetheless influenced by Christianity.

What do you say to the argument that this current conflict is actually a direct product of faith, of religion, of us wanting to believe stories that we don't in our deep down, as historians, we don't actually know whether they're true? I think that's entirely plausible. I mean, it seems indisputable. that I remember sitting on the Mount of Olives and looking down at the Temple Mount where the Jewish temple stood the temple

that had been built by Solomon and then by Herod and was destroyed by the Romans and when Christianity then, when the Roman Empire then became Christian, Jews were banned from going up to the Temple Mount and then in due course the Muslims arrived and they built the dome of the rock supposedly on the site of where the Holy of Holies

had stood in the Jewish Temes. temple and thinking this is, you know, this is one of the great trigger points of the world. There is so much emotional investment in this tiny plot of rock. And it's an absolute kind, you know, you can imagine all kinds of terrible things happening here. And I was making a documentary and we spoke to an Israeli who was very keen to demolish the dome of the rock and rebuild the temple. And I was kind of thinking, wow, if that happens, I mean, who knows what could kick off. There's no objective. reason why that plot of land should have any more significance than, I don't know, a building site in Watford. But of course it does. It does. And there's no question that what people believe about the

dimensions of the supernatural has an absolutely visceral impact on the dimensions of the natural. Tom, I'm very keen, again, to get you thinking about 20th century history and contemporary politics. And in particular, maybe in relation to Israel, Palestine, how does understanding of colonialism or understanding of the Cold War or understanding of populism, if we take kind of three trends, the 20th, 21st century, help inform the way in which this thing is playing out at the moment? Do you see Empire, Cold War, populism in this conflict? I think that how you interpret what's going on in Israel and Palestine will very, very much. much be determined by the kind of story that you have in your head. So if you feel that the great story of the past 200 years, say, has been European imperialism, then you will see Israel as an expression of that. If you see the great curse of the modern world as being American hyperpower,

then again, you will interpret Israel in that sense. If your narrative is that Western civilization is under attack, that it's being subverted both from without and from within, then again, you will bring that perspective to the conflict. And so I think that in a sense is why I wouldn't presume to comment on it with any great kind of sense, because I feel that it's like a kind of Rorschach test for people in the West. You can tell exactly what they, you know, if you know what they think about Israel or Palestine, then you will know probably what they think about a whole host of other issues as well, their perspectives on the world. And I, I, I, suspect that if you are, you know, you are in Gaza or you are a mother mourning the death of her

child in Israel, you will feel that none of these stories are really adequate to explaining the depth of your grief and your horror at what is going on. I think you have to be in the eye of the storm actually at the moment while it's raging properly to have a sense of what it means. Okay, Tom, Rory, let's just take a quick break. Back in a minute. Hi, everybody. It's Dominic Samarok here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Restis Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Restis History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our

own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a Malays, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues, and people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history, we're looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking

about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. We'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1975, a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alastair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimest moments in Britain's economic history, the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you.

We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Tom, one of the phrases that I probably get reminded of virtually every day, not at least from theology students, who are doing thesis upon it, is when I said, we don't do God. And what I meant by that was that I don't think the British people want their politicians to be wearing their faith on their sleeves. I could be right or wrong about that, but that's kind of what I've always thought, even though I knew that Tony Blair was somebody of very, very deep religious faith, as have other prime ministers been in the past. What does it say about us that that is, I think, our basic

approach to religion and politics, whereas in America, you kind of have to go to church and you have to carry the Bible and you have to say, God bless America. And I feel that what we see in American politics at the moment, particularly with the kind of, I cannot for the life of me understand why evangelical Christians sort of are so powerfully for Trump, who seems to me deeply irreligious, deeply unchristian and a very, very, very bad human being, doing very bad things to the world. So first of all, I guess, what does it say about UK and America and our attitudes to religion and to politics, but also what does it say about the power of religion that the Americans feel they have to co-opt it in that way? I think that since the 60s, we've been going through a process of convulsion that is comparable to the Reformation in the 16th century. And I think that it is affecting different countries in different ways.

Because Christianity has been so saturating in British history, you know, people have been imbibing this stuff for a thousand years and more. It affects us in Britain in a distinctive way. Equally in the United States, it's a country that was founded by Puritans, by Quakers, by evangelicals. That history also has shaped the way that politics is experienced in the US. And this great convoluting. that happens in the 60s, where lessons and impulses and instincts that derive from Christianity have been kind of profoundly transfigured. I quote the Beatles right at the head of the book, and I write about them. They seem to me expressive of a trend that what happens in the 60s is that Christian teaching, theology, scripture is transmuted into a kind of vibe. All you need is love. That's all you need. You don't need to get it from churches or from reading the Bible or whatever, it's just part of your heart, it's in your soul, you know where it's taking you. But of course,

it doesn't, because everybody feels things differently. And so therefore, the kind of climate of opinion that has been generated by the centuries and centuries of Christian opinion in the United States and in Britain express themselves in kind of quite different ways. So my sister always says, well, you may think you don't do God, but God does you. Is that what you're saying? I'm not saying anything about whether God exists or not, but what I would say is that I think you do do God, because I think that your beliefs and your values and your assumptions, derive from the Christian understanding of God. I mean, whether God exists or not,

I mean, that's irrelevant. From the point of view of understanding why you think what you do, I think you are very, very profoundly shaped by that legacy. What about my old boss? Because Tony Blair is not a kind of, he doesn't project himself as a godly person. And yet I know from having worked alongside him very, very closely,

the fact that we always used to have to, if we were abroad, we had to find a church. The fact that he travels with the bar, Bible that he reads it. What's your sense in British politics and in American politics of presidents and prime ministers where you think actually their faith has been fundamental to their politics? I think considering how far Christianity, you know, institutional Christianity, the habit of going to the church and having a familiarity with the Bible has retreated since the 60s. I think it is amazing actually how many prime ministers have been profoundly influenced by a kind of Christian heritage.

So Mrs. Thatcher, obviously, James Callahan was before her. Theresa May. Gordon Brown, son of the manse. I mean, the degree to which he believes that I've never entirely certain, but clearly, I mean, he's absolutely the child of his father. And Theresa May, likewise, kind of very strongly influenced. I think that I'm sure. I know that the whole point coming on, the rest of his politics is to give Boris Johnson a kicking, but that's the point of it. I think he is the most profoundly unchristian prime minister we've had because I think he is properly a kind of neo pagan figure.

I think that the influence of the classical world on him is much profounder than that of a kind of Christian teaching. And I think that that does a lot to explain what from a Christian perspective may seem his kind of distinctive amorality. I mean, obviously, Tom, nothing I want to do more than return to the fight on Boris Johnson. who I think would be someone, even the Romans, would be profoundly ashamed of. But I'm not going to get dragged too deeply into that. I'm going to go to another shameful figure of the modern age, which is Donald Trump, who again doesn't seem to me to be a figure awfully kind of imbued with Christian morality and values. Can you give us a sense of this weird paradox that here is this kind of amazing, swinging,

crass, misbehaving, lying, ludicrous orange figure who suddenly gets embraced by the evangelical movement in the United States? So I think that the culture wars in the United States, which have been raging since the 60s, are in a sense a Christian civil war. It's bred of the civil rights movement, which indisputably drew from Christian wellsprings. The leaders of the civil rights movement appealed to white Christians in overtly Christian terms. And by and large, white Christians accepted the justice of what they were saying. But the, The arguments of the civil rights movement then got picked up by people for whom traditional conservative Christians found it harder to accept, so gay rights, feminism, whatever,

and that these then kind of meant that impulses and campaigns that derived from Christian impulses were seen by lots of Christians as being deeply unchristian. And feminists and gay rights campaigners likewise felt that Christianity was the enemy. But in fact, these arguments, which has split America in two are drawing from the same wellspring. So I would say that there is no aspect of the culture wars that isn't in some way a Christian civil war. So to give the, you know, the classic one is, I guess, trans rights at the moment. This is the kind of the big, big issue. So there's no question that it's fundamental to Christian teaching that man and women are separate. God creates man and woman distinctively in Genesis. And so you might think, well,

how could trans rights possibly have anything to do with Christianity? But again, it's couched in this sense that trans people have been left behind by the campaign for gay rights, that they are the most persecuted people, they're the most persecuted minority, and that that persecution, that status of being the ultimate victims in society is what gives them their dignity. And that again, I think is unthinkable without deeply held Christian assumptions. So that's what I meant by saying that I think that what we're going through in the West at the moment is comparable to the reformation, because these are arguments ultimately about doctrines that derive from Christianity, And we know that the fact that these are passionately held is precisely what makes the arguments

about them so fortupative. And that I think is why evangelicals turn to someone like Trump, who is a completely un-Christian figure, a kind of a braggot, a bully, a kind of monstrous, grotesque. And yet, you know, he's their grotesque. They can feel that he's batting on their side. And he's been compared by supporters of Trump to King Cyrus, the Persian king, who allowed the people from Jerusalem to go back and rebuild the temple. Cyrus wasn't a Jew, but he played the role of the patron of the Jews. And I think that evangelicals feel that the challenge they face from progressives is so profound that they need help wherever they can get it and that Trump offers that help.

Yeah, and they talk about him sometimes as the Second Coming. I mean, they talk about him and almost sometimes they feed his sort of Messiah complex. It's interesting in Dominion, which you wrote some years ago now, but you have a chapter about woke, and I'm fascinated by this as well, because I didn't realize, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but it sort of springs directly from awakening, and that has a sense of a religious element and a revelatory element to that as well. So what's happened within the debate about politics and religion that woke has become this kind of catch-all term of abuse for anybody who's sort of vaguely wants to make poor people better off and help the oppressed and help the

week, what has happened? I think it's a convenient shorthand for something that is quite new, which is, I think, it's a kind of post-Christian or in cases anti-Christian, progressivism that draws on palpably Christian assumptions. And to repeat, it's this fundamental idea that the last shall be first, the first shall be last. It upends the traditional hierarchies. You know, as we said at the beginning, this is the essence of the Christian story, that the king of the world is born not on the Palatine Hill in the Imperial Capital of Rome, but in a stable. So that's a deeply unconstervative view of the world? It is. And I think that to be honest, to build a civilization that is founded on the tenets of

Christianity is akin to building San Francisco on the San Andreas fault. Every so often, you're going to get a great convulsion because people are going to say, well, what about the fact that the first should be last? And this explains. I think the repeated kind of seismic convulsions that have shaped and shaken European and then Western civilization over the course of the past thousand years. That first great revolution in the 11th century, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, whatever it is that we're living through at the moment. And I think Woke is a convenient shorthand for it. But, you know, it took 150 years for people to realize that they'd lived through something

called the Reformation. And maybe it will take us, you know, we don't know what we're living through at the moment, but it's something weird. Tom, I wonder whether secularism isn't more of a shift than you want to acknowledge, because obviously in your account, we end up in a sort of absurd world where every single thing that you can think of is Christian. It's very difficult to think of anything in the modern world that you don't say is somehow Christian. Somebody could be an atheist. There's lots. No, no, there's lots. So I would say Darwinism, for instance, is very subversive of Christian claims that there is an inherent dignity in being. being weak or disadvantage relative to the strong. I mean, Darwinism really doesn't, or at least,

you know, as it's been mediated through Western history in the 20th century, absolutely doesn't suggest that. And I would say that in the modern world, transhumanism, the idea that, you know, which is very popular in, particularly in Silicon Valley, the idea that technology offers humans a chance to transcend the limitations of homo sapiens is also very subversive of Christianity, because at the heart of Christianity is the idea that every human being is created in the image of God and that thereby has an inherent dignity. But if people can transcend that human status, then where does that leave that idea? Tom, I suppose I was sort of pushing on to something else, which is that the drop in faith, the drop in attendance in churches, has big social impacts. I mean, one of the ones that I'm most conscious of is what's happened, for example, in the global campaign,

against extreme poverty. A lot of the drive in the 80s and 90s to make poverty history, live aid concerts, all this stuff, came out at the World Council of Churches, as well as the trade union movement. And one of the most striking things now is in the absence of strong trade unions with their Christian roots and in the absence of a real sense of international Christian solidarity, it's very much more difficult to mobilize people to think about extreme poverty in Africa. In fact, there's a sense of increasing isolation and very difficult to raise, I mean, international development fundings going down around the world, people are giving less and less to charity. And it's just much less interesting to people that there are people

suffering in extreme poverty in Africa. And that seems to me to be directly related to the fact that people may be in your sense proto-Christian, but the mere fact that they're no longer attending these institutions of churches and that there's no longer that sense of solidarity, having a big impact financially on the extreme poor in Africa? I mean, I think that this is the big question that I don't really try to answer in Dominion, because I'm writing it as a historian, not as a futurist, is what happens? To what extent are we as a society continuing to live off the kind of, you know, the accumulated interest of Christianity?

And when we've burned through that, what will happen? So if the roots are withering, then will the flower continue to bloom? And I guess I would see three possibilities lying ahead. And the first is that the claims of humanists and kind of devout secularists, if I can put it like that, are true that we don't need Christianity to provide rocket fuel for the kind of, for instance, the idea that the wealthy have a duty to care for those who are poorer than them. That we just accept this as being a kind of almost a scientific objective truth and that therefore we don't need the mumbo-jumbo. of Christian teaching to sustain it. Another darker possibility is that people will kind of increasingly adopt a pre-Christian perspective, which is to celebrate wealth and power and glory and to think, well, why should we bother with the weak? Why should we bother with the poor? And we've we've had

some experience of what that means. I think one of the reasons actually why institutional Christianity has faded so profoundly since the war is that in a sense the Nazis and Hitler, People who absolutely celebrated the power of the strong and the mighty have replaced the old Christian mythology with a new demonology. So we don't need the devil anymore. We have Hitler. And whereas before the Nazi period, people would say, what would Jesus do and try and do it? Now people are much likely to say, what would Hitler do and try and do the opposite. But if that fades, then maybe a celebration of strength for its own sake will come in and people will say, well, why should we bother with the poor in Africa, for instance? And another possibility is that

people will think, well, actually, maybe we need Christian teaching to sustain this. And maybe there'll be a kind of recrudescence of that. But I don't know which of those options, maybe a mix of all three. But Tom, just flowing from that, so I call me sad, but I watched a lot of the Rwanda debate in Parliament recently. And there was one contribution that really, really hit me quite hard. It was an MP from Don Valley. I think his name's Fletcher. And he was essentially totally in favour of you know, stick them on a plane, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and said this utter nonsense about how if you go into an A&E in Doncaster, nobody speaks English. I mean, I know that hospital very, very well because before my brother died, he was in there for many, many weeks, and the guy's

talking absolute nonsense, and I know that to be the case. They've got 4% non-white in the area. Anyway, so that was annoying enough. But then when it came to the immigration minister, winding up the debate, he singled out this MP for saying, I know he comes under a lot of attack because he's so open about his religious faith. And I thought, my God, so this guy isn't just spouting nonsense being vile about the poor and the oppressed, coming up with simple populist solutions and lies about the state of the world. He parades, I presume he will be spending Christmas Day with his maker, with his faith. And I just think, I don't know what I thought at the end of it, but I felt revolted by it.

Well, there are many ways to be Christian, and there are many opportunities for hypocrisy in Christianity. I mean, hypocrisy has been the shadow of Christian charity right the way from the beginning. And I'm not saying, you know, there's one way to be Christian. And on the issue of, say, of refugees in Dominion, I write about two very different responses to the Great Migration Crisis of 2016. There was Angela Merkel's. She's the daughter of a minister raised with the sense of the parable of the Good Samaritan. And I would say that in the assumption of progressives and liberals that

refugees should be welcomed, that would be unthinkable, I think, without the residual cultural impact of the parable of the Good Samaritan. But equally, there is Victor Orban in Hungary, and Hungarians experience conquest and occupation by the Muslim Ottomans, who of course feel that Christianity needs to be defended, and so he put up the fences. And those are both Christian responses that you can trace back through centuries and centuries, and they're both equally Christians. Tom, you and I have just done a BBC thing on Caesar, and I was very interested. I just take you back for a second before the birth of Christ to reflect on political leadership. I was fascinated by it, because it seemed to me at times that you were really enjoying the figure

of Caesar, enjoying his glory, enjoying his success, enjoying his triumph. Whereas Rory saw him as a Poundland Johnson. And I know who Rory saw himself as. Exactly. I was deeply, deeply troubled. I wonder whether you could reflect a little bit on the role of character or what, you know, maybe people following Aristotle would have called virtue in politics. And whether you believe in that at all or whether as a historian you've become so cynical

and structural in your views that you no longer do feel that that's something that's relevant in political life. Well, I think that different societies and different cultures and different periods have valued different things in political leaders. So I would say that Julius Caesar, for instance, he is the embodiment of greatness. And there is something about greatness that thrills and inspires people. It still does. Even in our contemporary world, Caesar is a figure of immense charisma. And one of the things that set me on the road to writing, minion and to realizing how Christian, in my assumptions I was, was thinking about how people in Rome responded to Caesar's commentaries on his conquests of Gaul, in which it was said that he slaughtered

a million ghouls and he took another million as slaves. And there is nothing apologetic about Caesar's presentation of his conquest of Gaul. It's all about the glory. And people in Rome loved it. They adored it. That is something that obviously is expressive of a very profound difference between us and them. I was writing, I was writing about Julius Caesar in Rubicon, my first work of history, as the Iraq war was going on. And in that, American generals were coming on the TV every evening to boast about how few people they'd killed, whereas in Rome, people would carry placards boasting about how many people they'd killed. That's quite a profound difference. And your sense of who is a good leader when you have such different

societies is obviously going to be very different. Tom, maybe there's a lot of, This relates to the point you made right at the top that you couldn't understand why we'd asked you to come on leading. But the one thing that Rory and I always do with our interviewees on leading is to go right back to their beginning. So what is it in your life and childhood that made you a historian? What is it in your life and childhood that develop the relationship that you have with Christianity? I was one of those boys who was obsessed by dinosaurs. In fact, I am sat here wearing Merry Rexmus. I've got a picture of Tyrannosaur with a Santa hat on.

To go with your Abba. I've got Abba. You're a poor, your monstrous Abba t-shirt. And to be honest, it was the kind of the fact that they were big and fierce and glamorous and terrifying and safely extinct, I think, that made me fascinated by them. And I then moved seamlessly onto the Romans. So everything that I was saying about Julius Caesar, I found it very, very thrilling and exciting and glamorous.

And it seemed to me that the past was in a way more exciting, more thrilling than the present. And I remember being in a multi-story car park in Salisbury when my mother was out shopping and I was in the back seat and looking at the kind of the faded grey concrete and kind of wishing that I was in an ancient Rome or something. think it would have been so much more exciting. And it may be that because I grew up, I grew up in Wiltshire outside Salisbury. It's got, you know, you've got Stonehenge, you've got the cathedral, you've got castles all around. You've got the very famous spire that the FSB love. The spire. Maybe it just kind of subliminally gave me a sense that the past in a way was

was more exciting. But also, you were from a mixed marriage, weren't you, in that your dad was an atheist and your mum was a believer? Is that right? I'm never entirely sure what my father was, because he never talks about it. He's just not interested in it. So maybe that's even more kind of anti-Christian than to be an atheist. I mean, I think atheism in a way, if you're a militant atheist, it's a kind of extreme form of Protestantism in this country. I mean, you believe it. He doesn't really believe anything. For my mother, yeah, has been very, very important, and she's always been a kind of great moral role model for me. And so I've never been kind of ideologically opposed to Christianity because I think of my mother.

and I think of my godmother, who were both great influences on me, and I admire them so much that I've always kind of admired Christians. Tom, as my final question, obviously for me, being a conservative is partly about a respect for what we've inherited from our predecessors, respect for tradition, for history, respect for the constitution we've inherited and defending those things. And obviously, that's part of what we're playing out in this BBC documentary in my love of Cato and his attempt to defend the old Roman Constitution and the Old Red Republic against Caesar. I'm interested in the way in which, oddly, as a historian, you don't seem to feel a particular instinctive veneration for tradition and history

politically in the way that I do. And I wonder whether it's your last thought you'd reflect on why that might be the case. Oh, I say I have a very strong small C conservative. I don't like old things being broken, which is one of the reasons, for instance, why I've been so opposed to the government's plans to drive a road tunnel through the landscape that surrounds Stonehenge. I mean, it really offends me. But what I also think is that we live in a society where our traditions inherently breed upheaval. So the paradox, I think, of living in a Christian society is that our traditions inherently foster the desire to kind of recalibrate and in some cases eradicate those traditions. And that's the paradox that the French revolutionaries, you know,

when they're trying to overthrow the monarchy and the church, are doing it for reasons that are deeply Christian, that are deeply rooted in the traditions of France. And I think you see that, you know, in the United States at the moment, that's part of what's going on, that people who are opposed to the traditions of the United States are doing it for very, very American reasons. Which is why I think that the relationship, say in this country, where, you know, it's such an old country, that the relationship between conservative instincts and radical instincts are more complex than they're often represented as being, because radicalism in Britain is itself quite a conservative tradition. Now, my very final question, Tom, you know, I hate to lower the tone, but it's kind of my

constitutional duty on this podcast. We're going into an election year. Labor v. Tory, what would Jesus vote? Jesus, I think probably would, because he is obviously, been dead for 2,000 years, would have no idea what was going on at all. The whole scenario would be so alien to him. What a copper. But what I would say is, I think that what is deeply subversive about Christian teaching and about the teaching of Jesus, as he's portrayed in the Gospels, is that he proclaims the kingdom of God. And the kingdom of God is set apart from earthly rule and earthly kingdoms. And when he's brought before, you know, when he's arrested before his crucifixion, he's brought before the Sanadrin, the Judean religious leaders,

the people who administer the temple, and he rejects them because he sees them as interfusing the dimension of the divine with the dimension of the earthly. And then he's brought before Pontius Pilate, the representative of Roman power. And likewise, the Romans also interfuse, you know, the worship of the gods with a sense of Caesar's earthly power, and he rejects that as well. And that is what is unsettling about Christian teaching for people in his lifetime, is the idea that he says that there is a truth that transcends politics. So that is a kind of cop-out, but it's a very Christian cop-out, and I'm sure you would expect nothing less from me. The producer has just put a message in, so does he vote Lib Dem?

Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's the answer. No, no, no, no. We're not giving Jesus to Lid-Dems. absolute pleasure talking to you. I'm sure our listeners will thoroughly enjoy that as they get over their festive, whatever. The only sad thing is that we haven't had a Christmas carol out of either you or Alistair. I can play carols on the backpipes. You don't think you could sing a little line of a carol for us just as the final end of our Christmas special? Go on, Tom. Go on. Do you know, I'm not going to because as someone on a rival podcast, well, a sister podcast, I am singing there and people who want to hear me sing can look forward to the series that we're doing

on the Nazis in power where I sing Adelweiss as the introduction to our episode on the Anshlas. Yeah. So it's not a hymn, but in a way it's a Christmas song, isn't it? Great song. Great song. So anyone who wants to hear me sing, do tune into the rest of history in the new year and you can hear me sing Adelfeis. And I can also, to emphasize the point that Tom does a lot. of his own research, he was sitting at the Archbishop's Carroll Service with one of the

thickest books on the third rife I have ever seen. It was the most inappropriate book to have brought to Lampard Palace. It made Lawrence Reese's tomes look like sort of Booker's Eads. It was huge. Well, thank you guys. And thank you for your reflections. I think there's a lot of really important, interesting thoughts about Christianity there and a good, if somewhat serious way. of marking Christmas Day. And maybe we can do the same on Islam. I'm interested in us maybe doing a special episode around Eid this coming year. Thank you all very, very much indeed. All the best. Happy Christmas, everyone. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye. So, Anasah, what did you think of Tom Holland?

I really enjoyed that. I once defined myself as a pro-faith atheist, although it's interesting that Tom clearly thinks that I'm not an atheist and that I'm a sort of deep, devout Christian. but I've always been very interested in faith. And what I, I'm ashamed to say, I hadn't read Dominion until he advised the other night that I should. And so I've been skim reading, fast reading. I'm going to read it properly over. It's quite a big book.

It's a very, very big book, but it's really, really interesting. This is the great thing about something like, about Tom Holland. Because, I mean, to have all that stuff in his head, I know that when he does the rest of history, he and Dominic Sanbrok, they have papers. I know that. But there's so much stuff in his head. And I think to have, when you read this book, I'm just in awe of the reading that he must have done, the original research he must have done. And he does say some very, very, very interesting things. I think that, you know, there's the chapter that we talked about in relation to John Lennon, it really, really makes you think differently about Beatles. So one of the things that I wish I'd been able to do more with him is to discuss Islam. Because, you know, he grew up in a Christian context. And I partly grew up.

in the Muslim world. I spent part of my childhood in Malaysia and I then obviously spent life living in Indonesia and Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. And I find it difficult to say that everything that we think about, you know, human rights or dignity or compassion is purely Christian. I feel that Islam is so shot through profoundly with a sense of human dignity, a profound sense of equality, a profound sense of equality, a profound sense of of justice. Now, you know, we probably, if we'd had longer, he could get into trying to explain why that's different and that's not quite the same and why that doesn't quite add up to human rights. But certainly, I feel that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights drew on a lot of different religious traditions. And I definitely often felt, you know,

with Afghan friends that they had an incredibly strong sense of justice. And that it, so anyway, we didn't have time to get into that. But I'm a little bit worried the idea that, everything good, everything progressive, it's Christian. I guess the point that he made when you put that to him was that God, Islam is, as it were, everything is God made, whereas the rules and norms and conventions that he says are deeply Christian have been manmade, as it were, following the lesson and the teachings of Christ and Christianity. And of course, don't forget, we didn't have time to get into this, but one of the other things that Tom, he makes very interesting documentaries, And he made a documentary about Islam some years ago, which ended up in him receiving death threats galore, and it became incredibly controversial.

I do think it's very, I do think, I mean, it's one of the things that he does, which takes a lot of courage. And I think he deserves credit for is speaking about a huge range of issues. But there is a problem with representation. I mean, I've spent a lot of, as I say, my life living in the Muslim world. I'd still be very, very cautious about speaking on behalf. of Muslims or defining what Islam is. But I guess that's what he has to do. I mean, he's trying to explain complicated ideas from around the world. I guess he'd say he doesn't need to be a Roman to talk about Julius Caesar and he doesn't be Muslim talk about Islam. But I do still feel that we

sometimes, all of us, even Tom, may be blind to dimensions of other people's religions, partly because religion isn't just a set of things that you can read in a book. This was one of the ways that I slightly disagree with your former boss, Tony Blair, when he'd say, you know, Islam is this kind of religion and I've read the Quran three times. I thought you can't really work out what Christianity is just by reading the Bible or Islam by reading the Quran that it's also about history and society and community and how you grow up and the way that you instinctively treat each other. And that's I think we're often missing with the sun. I do think that in relation to the way that politics and religion and faith intersect is probably, well, I don't think

there's any probably about it. It is very, very different in the Islamic world. If you look at some of the current leaders in the Islamic world, they couldn't possibly lead and be effective and popular unless they were absolutely committed to their faith. Erdogan in Turkey essentially has built what some would argue is a sort of proto-dictatorship around it. Likewise, you look at Imran Khan. I mean, I don't know what Imran Khan in his heart. I don't know. I don't see inside his heart. But I think he would definitely be in that category because he's a kind of internationalist figure who knows the West very well. Yeah. I also think there's something we, you know, maybe need to explore more in the podcast, which is the point that you kept making about how often these politicians

in a secular society present themselves as religious, because the truth is that Britain has fewer and fewer people going to church. I mean, our church is largely empty. And, you know, there is a few of changes. I mean, obviously there will be some clergy. and listening to this who will say, oh, no, it's not quite true. You know, there's some bits of the evangelical movement that are growing. But broadly speaking, we're becoming a more and more secular study. And actually, it's even true in the United States. I mean, many more people go to church in the US, but the trend is on its way down.

And yet the politicians are still very much presenting themselves often as Christians. Although, actually, interestingly, I mean, I think Rishi Sunak doesn't claim to be a Christian. And I think one of the things that was interesting and potentially awkward about the coronation was that he as a Hindu was then reading, I guess, a lesson from the Bible in Westminster Abbey. I noticed when he gave evidence at the COVID inquiry, he swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and I don't know that the truth, but in relation to a different God. Right. And that's really interesting, because I can remember when I was a journalist, one of the stories

that we used to cover was when Chris Patton was being identified as a possible Conservative Party leader. It was just a given world, this is going to be impossible because he's a Catholic. Right, right, right. And that was very recently. That was sort of 1997. Yeah, yeah. And now Suna it comes along is the prime minister's Hindu and nobody about said I led. Yeah, that's an incredible change, isn't it? In sort of 25 years. Yeah. No, no. I think that's amazing. I wonder what it is. Is it that psychologically the public, the fact that so many people present themselves as religious, do the public sort of psychologically feel reassured if somebody talks about having a faith that they somehow think that that's going to result in better? political leadership, even if they don't believe themselves? I mean, what's going on here? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, Tony Blair, as I said in the chat with Tom's, you know, deep faith. I think if he'd had his own way, he probably would have converted to Catholicism before he did, but he knew that it would be such a big deal within the political construct of the United Kingdom with the church and state allied in the way that they are that he waited.

But it is interesting, isn't it? You've now got, so whether it's, Sunak here, Humsey Yusuf in First Minister in Scotland, it's just not a deal anymore. No. Very interesting. I think it's a very, very strong and very impressive development in Britain. Anyway, thank you very much for that. And really, really fun to engage on a tricky and interesting subject.

Maybe we need to return to it. Yeah, and enjoy your Christmas break. Happy Christmas. See you soon.