“Myth, though, is not a lie. At its most profound – as Tolkien, that devote Catholic, always argued – a myth can be true. To be a Christian is to believe that God became man and suffered a death as terrible as any mortal has ever suffered. This is why the cross, that ancient implement of torture, remains what it has always been: that fitting symbol of the Christian revolution. It is the audacity of it – the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe – that serves to explain, much more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilization to which it gave birth. Today, the power of this strangeness remains as alive as it has ever been. It is manifest in the great surge of conversions that has swept Africa and Asia over the past century; in the conviction of millions upon millions that the breath of the spirit, like a living fire, still blows upon the world; and, in Europe and North America, in the assumptions of many more millions who would never think to describe themselves as Christian. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross. No doubt I should have appreciated this earlier. As it was, only during the early stages of writing this book, when I traveled to Iraq to make a film, did it properly dawn on me. Sinjar was a town that, when I visited it, stood directly on the frontier with the Islamic State. It had been seized from their fighters just a few weeks before. Back in 2014, when they captured and occupied Sinjar, it had been home to large numbers of Yazidis, a religious minority condemned by the Islamic state as devil-worshippers. Their fate had been grim precisely as the fate of those who resisted the Romans had been grim. Men had been crucified; women had been enslaved. To stand amid the ruins of Sinjar, knowing that two miles away, across flat and open ground, were ranged the very people who had committed such atrocities, was to appreciate how, in antiquity, the stench of heat and corpses would have served the conqueror as the marker of his possession. Crucifixion was not merely a punishment. It was a means to achieving dominance: a dominance felt as a dread in the guts of the subdued. Terror of power was the index of power. That was how it had always been, and always would be. It was the way of the world. For two thousand years, though, Christians have disputed this. Many of them, over the course of this time, have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake. Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change. ‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.’ This is the myth that we in the West still persist in clinging too. Christendom, in that sense, remains Christendom still.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [end of book]