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As I have already observed here in SCF, there is a concert between Nietzschean atheists and Protestants to sustain that Christianity is meritorious because, like a bolt from the blue, it proposed for the first time a humanitarian morality that values the weak. The Nietzschean opposition between the virile heroism of pagans and the “slave morality” of Christians is praised instead of lamented.

This new alliance between atheists and Protestants is well represented by Richard Dawkins’ change. Before, the most annoying atheist in the world was always calling Christians stupid; now, he recognizes their civilizational value… in the face of the Muslim threat. The ideologist of this alliance is probably Tom Holland, a famous historian from the BBC. Before it was fashionable, he already defended the civilizational virtues of Christianity – but of course he did not do it gratuitously, since the backdrop was already the Islamic threat. Tom Holland is also dedicated to hunting down “anti-Semites” in England, even before October 7, 2023.

I also observed in SCF that Judaism went through a curious process, which caused atheist Jews, influenced by fundamentalist evangelicals, to take the lead in the Jewish community and make a heretical idea become orthodox. Namely: the migration to the Holy Land before the arrival of the Messiah. In the end, the dispensationalism of English-speaking Protestants began to guide the religion of the Jews, thanks to the atheists of the Zionist movement. There is a symbiosis between the English-speaking Protestant world and Judaism. Thus, there is a possibility that this part of Christianity can be led by atheists with political objectives, in the same way as the Jews.

I then read Dominion: Making of the Western Mind (also published as Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, in U.S.), a work by Tom Holland published in 2019, to see how he tells the story of Western Christianity.

He does indeed present Christianity as a radical and permanent rupture. First, it was a rupture not only with paganism in general, but also with the values ​​of Roman society. In other words, it is as if all of Antiquity was made up of ruthless warriors, until Christianity appeared with its “slave morality”. It turns out that Rome was already special. First, all you need to do is read Cicero’s De officiis to discover that even the master had duties towards the slave, and it was advisable to pay him for his work as if he were free. Second, if Rome is presented as just another ruthless society among others, with no compassion for the weak, how can we present the horrific Aztec Mexico and the infanticidal Carthage? Rome lived at war with Carthage until it destroyed it and put an end to the sacrifice of children to Baal, which so scandalized other Mediterranean societies in Antiquity.

Christianity was not opposed to Rome. Precisely because he rejects the supernatural, an atheist should consider that, if Christianity emerged on the outskirts of the Empire and conquered it without weapons, it must be its byproduct, rather than an alien force. Compare the conversion of Rome to the conversion of Mexico: the first was unarmed and had its main miracle far from the center of power and relevant witnesses; the second was armed and had its main miracle just in the capital, with visible and lasting material proof, subject even to inspection by NASA.

But in addition to breaking with Rome, Tom Holland sees Christianity as a permanent revolution that breaks with itself all the time. Thus, the greatest difference between this historian and other right-wing atheists is that he sees Wokeism as a consequence of Christianity, rather than treating it as contrary to the spirit of the West.

Holland is correct that Wokeism comes from Christianity, since (as I have shown in detail here) Wokism emerged from the Unitarian Church, which is Protestant and liberal. However, this is not the explanation he gives. His explanation consists of pointing to moral reform in defense of the oppressed as an essentially Christian characteristic and saying that Wokism is a continuation of this. This argument is the sequel to another, which establishes a continuity between Catholicism and Protestantism in England and between Catholicism and the Enlightenment in France: the first Christians tore down pagan idols, Pope Gregory VII undertook a bold reform aimed at moral purification, the movement initiated by Luther had the same impetus, and in the end both the English Puritans and the French Enlightenment destroyed Catholic images in order to promote moral reforms. For Tom Holland, then, Christianity is a permanent revolution. This is a mistake. He takes a characteristic of Protestantism, later inherited by liberalism, and considers it as essential to Christianity. After all, only Protestant Christianity lacks the concept of heresy.

Permanent revolution is incompatible with the concept of progress because it is the enemy of the past. Now, when Saint Augustine accepted slavery, he was not a Christian who needed the enlightenment of the Bible burners abolitionist Quakers praised by Tom Holland. Saint Augustine was a man of his time and, as a Christian, he would not have accepted every treatment given to a slave. Having accepted slavery does not make him, in the eyes of the overwhelming majority of Christians today, an authority to be destroyed. Saint Augustine and any other saint who lived with slavery did not defend it. The very notion of papal infallibility is in line with the possibility of moral progress: if the popes of the future will issue new bulls and will not correct the popes of the past, then there are still new things to be established. Pope Gregory VII did not make any previous pope flawed. Luther, on the other hand, transformed the entire Catholic Church into a diabolical conspiracy of liars. And the wokes treat anyone who says that women don’t have penises, that is, almost every human who has ever walked the earth, like Hitler.

Let’s go back to Mexico. We learn that one of England’s regrets was not having been able to repeat in India the Spanish feat of converting an ancient civilization to Christianity. The pressure came more from the general population than from the Crown itself, which put mercantile considerations first, and this demand was made through the newspapers: a columnist described in the newspaper terrible customs, such as setting widows on fire at their husbands’ funerals, and a popular outcry followed. It occurred to me that this erratic and easily manipulated way of approaching national issues became common with the establishment of liberal democracies around the world.

Well, instead of converting the Indians to Christianity, the English would have, as Holland convincingly argues, taught the Indians to see and defend themselves in the Protestant way: Hinduism is a religion and, being a religion, it has a theology; and, having a theology, argues that Hindus who burn widows are not true Hindus, because Hinduism was falsified at a certain point in history… Well, the Puritan project of making India a Christian country resulted in India becoming a constitutional democracy with religious pluralism. In the end of the day, that’s what being Western is for Holland. And Islam, unlike Judaism, stands against that.

According to Holland, the great propaganda advantage of Islam, which was capable of converting Christians when it first appeared, is the claim that Islam brought ready-made laws straight from God, while Christians were abandoned to their Greco-Roman heritage and had to construct their own theology, philosophy, etc. Thus, faced with the advance of the Western world, Muslims stuck to a law from the time of Muhammad and ended up becoming interpreters of the spirit of the law, that is, they began to reason like Protestants. But then the Salafists appeared, ready to restore the Islam and, again according to Tom Holland, they resemble the bloody Münster of the Anabaptists. In other words, everything is like Christianity; and if everything is like Christianity, nothing is like Christianity. However, he never paints Islam as charitable, and even ascribes Nietzschean passions to their warriors.

In the final chapter, Tom Holland discusses Dawkins’ new stance, who prefers the sound of church bells to the cry of Allahu Akhbar. He also portrays the End of History thesis as mistaken, and presents as proof the fact that George W. Bush said that Islam was the religion of peace. In other words, the problem is not that Bush went to war against Iraq, but that he was wrong about the real nature of Islam, which is warmongering and does not want to live in a liberal democracy. Tom Holland is, in fact, a follower of Samuel Huntington and his theory of the clash of civilizations.

I do not know enough about the history of Islam to know whether the habit of arguing for the spirit of the law was copied from Protestants, but I do know that pluralism has ancient precedents precisely in the Muslim empires: just look at the mountain of faiths that have coexisted for more than a millennium in the Middle East, most of the time peacefully, under the Ottoman Empire. If in the West for a long time there were only Jewish ghettos diverging from Catholicism, in the East Judaism was just one religion among many. In other words, it makes more sense to say that Protestants have become Islamized than to say that they are the essence of Christianity. (As for Salafism, it does make sense to see it as a repetition of radical Protestantism – and the funding of Salafist groups is the subject of commentators on geopolitics and hybrid warfare.)

Finally, I would like to comment on a type of Christianity that he does not mention at all: Calvinist supremacism. Holland writes about the enthusiasm for eugenics in Christianity as something of German Protestants during the time of Hitler. In the chapter “Science”, he discusses the moral and theological implications of 19th-century Darwinism for the English-speaking world; he discusses Carnegie, the Calvinist millionaire who prided himself on his wealth and sponsored paleontologists. However, he does not mention a very important Calvinist theologian: Josiah Strong, one of the fathers of the Social Gospel. He praised the United States as the homeland of a new master race destined to evolve, conquer the world, and extinguish the inferior races (first in the Americas, then in Africa), in conformity to the divine plan to populate the world with a fittest race. Josiah Strong even explained the origin of the Reformation and liberalism through scientific racism: the superior races are freedom lovers, Protestantism arose among the Saxons, papal authoritarianism is a thing of the Latin and Celtic races, and Protestantism was further perfected among the Anglo-Saxons, who are liberals. This is in the fourteenth chapter of Our Country.

In other words, praising the liberalism of the Anglo-Saxons as superior to the Teutonic military spirit is something that has a Christian, racist, and genocidal precedent. Since it is difficult to invent much in propaganda, we must work with the following hypothesis: that Anglophone atheists are plotting to frame Christianity along the supremacist lines of Josiah Strong, ready to annihilate inferior Arabs under the pretext of the Islamic threat.