00:00:43.480We are living through a great choke point in the history of this country.
00:00:49.600What you saw in 2020 and its aftermath was a deeply Christian movement.
00:00:55.100The institutional character of Christianity is often rejected as part of the problem, a part of what has to be rejected, even though it is that institutional structure that has provided people with the ideological framework that enables them to judge it as evil.
00:01:09.660Essentially, what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept of the secular.
00:01:20.000Islam is a totalizing way of leading your life.
00:01:23.660I think Islam is uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset.
00:02:13.040I mean, we never in a million years imagined that there was quite the appetite for history that there is.
00:02:22.560And so I'm happy not just for myself, not just for Dominic, but for history lovers everywhere,
00:02:29.140that they can be reassured that history, it really does seem to kind of tick people's boxes in a way that I had never, ever expected that it did.
00:02:38.400Well, there are a lot of memes online that by the time you're 40 years old, if you're male, this is.
00:02:43.860A man, by the time he's 40, he's either got to pick World War II or Roman history.
00:02:47.720Like, you don't have a choice, really.
00:03:10.880That's really true, actually, because I used to read.
00:03:13.820I was quite a voracious reader of novels.
00:03:16.060And the older I get, the more I veer towards non-fiction.
00:03:18.740Yeah, so I was chair of the Society of the Authors, and they prepared a report on this, the gender imbalance, how it operated.
00:03:29.240And they dug into the stats, and it was genuinely the case that the older men get the less likely to read fiction, which, as a non-fiction writer, was obviously good news for me.
00:03:41.600Well, look, it's great to have you on.
00:03:43.820Your last book, Dominion, we talked about it last time, but it's something we want to come back to a little bit in this conversation and talk about the history of Christianity, but also Islam you've written about, too.
00:03:56.660But starting with Christianity, I mean, the thesis of your book, essentially, is that Christianity is the soup we swim in in the Western world.
00:04:05.240We are goldfish, and Christianity is essentially the water that we're swimming in.
00:04:08.980Hmm. And talk to us, because one of the things I think very few people now understand is how remarkable the mentality shift that came with Christianity was and how different Christian civilization is to the pre-Christian civilization in terms of its values, in terms of the things that it thought were important, in terms of the things that it believed about, you know, human beings and how they ought to act and what they ought to value and so on.
00:04:36.800Yeah. I mean, it is radically different. But just to presage what I'm going to say about that, by pointing out that obviously nothing comes from nothing, Christianity emerges from a particular matrix that you get in 1st century AD Mediterranean.
00:04:53.800There are all kinds of influences on it. There are all kinds of influences on it. The Jewish, most obviously, but also Greek, Persian, and the fact that it is born into the Roman Empire.
00:05:03.700I think without the Roman Empire, it would not have happened.
00:05:06.380And on the topic of the Roman Empire, I guess the clearest demonstration of the vibe shift, if you want to call it that, is to look at the classic emblem of Christianity, which is the cross.
00:05:23.640And the cross is for the Romans. It's an expression of their right to torture to death anyone who opposes their rule.
00:05:36.460It is the fate that is visited, particularly paradigmatically on slaves, because it is the most agonizing, but also the most humiliating form of death imaginable.
00:05:49.800You are stripped naked. So, you know, if you think of pictures of Christ on the cross, he usually has a loincloth. He wouldn't have had a loincloth.
00:05:58.700He would have, you know, it would all have been exposed. And you are nailed or hung by ropes or suspended in a wide variety of ways.
00:06:06.780There's no kind of set way of crucifying someone. And you are then a kind of public spectacle.
00:06:13.040You're like a kind of billboard advertising the power of the state that has put you there.
00:06:20.400And you can be, you know, you can't ward the birds off as they flock around your eyes and peck them out.
00:06:26.500You're constantly levering yourself up and down to try and keep your breath.
00:06:31.400Your suffering and your agony is on absolutely public display.
00:06:36.060And perhaps when you die, you're left there like a slab of meat.
00:06:40.020So it is an excruciating, agonizing, horrific death.
00:06:47.060And what Christianity does is to turn that value system on its head and to say that the person who is crucified triumphs over the person who's crucified him.
00:06:59.360And the scale of that value shift, I think, is illustrated by the way in which, in the early decades and centuries of Christianity,
00:07:13.660the fact that Jesus died on the cross is a cause of deep anxiety or at least embarrassment to Christians who are talking about it.
00:07:30.980So the earliest Christian writer that we have, the earliest evidence for Christianity, written evidence, is Paul.
00:07:36.660Paul, and in his letters, he situates the death of Christ on the cross at the center of what he is preaching.
00:07:46.540But he is also kind of embarrassed about it.
00:07:49.760And so he says that to the Jews or the Judeans, as I'd rather cause them, it's a stumbling block, his message.
00:08:00.560But to everybody else, to the Greeks and to the Romans, it's just madness.
00:08:05.700And the reason for that is that, for the Romans, what Paul is preaching, the idea that a man can also be a god,
00:08:15.420I mean, that's not news because Julius Caesar had become a god.
00:08:31.480And you sense that Paul is, you know, constantly trying to preempt objections to that kind of position of madness.
00:08:40.640And it's something that continues throughout Christian writings throughout the second century into the third century.
00:08:44.600And even when Constantine in the beginning of the fourth century converts to Christianity and Christianity starts to emerge as the, you know,
00:08:52.740as something that is first of all permitted and then becomes kind of the state ideology,
00:08:59.840there's still a reluctance to illustrate Christ on the cross.
00:09:04.380And when you, so there's, there's an ivory casket in the British Museum, which illustrates various scenes from the Passion.
00:09:13.420And you have Jesus on the cross there.
00:11:47.620I'm saying that there are, if you think of Christianity as a great sea,
00:11:53.320there are many rivers that flow into it.
00:11:55.320So there's the, obviously, the kind of the Jewish inheritance, the scriptural inheritance.
00:12:01.660And from Greece, there is the philosophical tradition.
00:12:05.300So the influence of Aristotle and Plato on Christianity as it evolves is absolutely immense.
00:12:12.100There's a sense in which a lot of theology is just kind of footnotes to Plato.
00:12:15.800So light philosophy is the influence of Persia.
00:12:21.220The Persians have this idea that the universe is moralized, that there are rival principles of dark and light, of lies and truth.
00:12:32.640And this seems to be a big influence on the formation of Hebrew scripture, because people from Jerusalem are taken as prisoners to Babylon.
00:12:41.340And then Babylon gets captured by the Persians, and they're allowed to go back and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.
00:12:47.760And Cyrus, the first great Persian king, is hailed in the Bible as a messiah, as a kind of a liberator.
00:14:01.400Although, having said that, I think when you look at Paul's letters, so the tradition of Paul,
00:14:07.440as it's embodied in the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul talks about it himself in his letters,
00:14:11.160is that he was a persecutor of the church.
00:14:13.920He obviously thought the Christian notion that Jesus had risen from the dead and was in some way a part of God was powerfully offensive.
00:14:23.180And then he has a vision of the risen Christ, he says.
00:14:26.260And I think in the aftermath of that experience, he goes away and he reads through the scriptures to try and make sense of what he has seen.
00:14:39.300And it's like being given the key to a detective story, where you go back and you realize that all kinds of things,
00:14:47.800you've been thrown off the scent, you've missed what the actual solution to the puzzle is.
00:14:52.260And I think that's the key that Paul is bringing to Hebrew scriptures.
00:14:55.400And he's realizing that all the promises that he had thought were contained in scripture,
00:15:01.720that a powerful warlord would come to redeem God's people, that actually that wasn't what the key was.
00:15:09.480The key was that the Messiah would come, but he would come as a man of sorrows.
00:15:14.380And so he is drawing on the inheritance of Hebrew scripture.
00:15:17.220It is there. But what Christianity does is to kind of enshrine it at the molten heart of the gospel,
00:15:25.980euangelion, the good news that Paul is preaching.
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00:16:23.140Charismatic pettiness, perhaps you might say.
00:16:25.860You see, I, as a child, I went to church and went to Sunday school and I loved the Bible stories.
00:16:32.400I mean, I thought they were great, but I was always very much on the side of the great empires.
00:16:37.120So I was very much kind of team Pharaoh as opposed to Moses and loved the Assyrians, loved the Babylonians.
00:16:43.800You know, very much pro-Pontius Pilate as opposed to Jesus.
00:16:46.820And one of the reasons for that was that I found their gods kind of more glamorous and exciting.
00:16:54.080So everything that the Hebrew prophets were condemning, you know, they condemned the gods of Egypt or Babylon as so much stock and stone that it's, you know, they're just great idols and things.
00:17:45.360And I kind of always felt as a child that if Athena had been a viable faith alternative, I would absolutely have gone for her.
00:17:52.720And I think the sense that the philosophers have, so going back to the 6th century and then through to Plato and Aristotle and to particularly the Stoics,
00:18:07.720that they are reacting as you do, that Plato famously says we shouldn't have poets in our ideal republic because the poets make you feel the charisma of these gods.
00:18:24.180And they are not worthy of being followed or worshipped and that the true divine lies beyond these stories.
00:18:33.960And essentially, it's that understanding of the divine that Christian theologians then kind of adopt and bundle into the package.
00:18:43.940I'd say you could, in that sense, say that the Greek gods, in a kind of weird way, are the malign step-parents of Christianity.
00:19:05.580I mean, obviously, this is crucially a part of the context, again, into which Christianity is born.
00:19:11.540So when Paul has his vision of Christ, according to Acts, Christ says to him,
00:19:18.020Paul, why are you kicking against the pricks?
00:19:21.340You know, why are you kicking against what I'm giving you?
00:19:24.320And this is a phrase that comes from Euripides' great play, The Bacchae, which describes Dionysus appearing and there are people who reject him.
00:19:36.000And the fate that is visited on them is terrible.
00:19:38.720So Pentheus, the king of Thebes, who is Dionysus's cousin, refuses to recognize his cousin as a god.
00:19:44.300I mean, as he would if your cousin turns up and says, if God's not going to have anything to do with it.
00:20:04.640He dresses up as a maenad, as literally a raver, someone who goes to a rave.
00:20:09.580So he dresses up in whatever, you know, the maenads are wearing, kind of animal skins.
00:20:14.100He goes up to try and spy on his mother and his aunts and they see him and rip him to pieces as though, you know, as though he's a wild animal.
00:20:22.440This is obviously not what Christ is doing to Paul.
00:20:25.980But there are clearly resemblances between the gods, say, like Dionysus and Christ that even Paul can recognize.
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00:21:58.820He grows back every day and an eagle comes back and rips it out.
00:22:01.920Yeah, you know, he liked the diet of awful.
00:22:03.960Anyway, but you had like Jesus who, when he was dying, said to God, whilst he was suffering the most horrendous and brutal of fates on the cross,
00:22:15.940forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.
00:22:18.940That is a radical transformation, isn't it?
00:22:25.460I mean, this is what Nietzsche fixes on.
00:22:29.200I mean, I said how we've become desensitized to the cross.
00:22:33.780I think it's amazing that Nietzsche, who is the most brilliant of all atheist writers who have emerged in the West, he gets the cross.
00:22:48.980He gets what is radical and subversive about the cross to a degree that theologians haven't really articulated for centuries and centuries.
00:22:58.240You know, there is something of Paul's bewilderment and perplexity and shock at contemplating the death of Christ on the cross about Nietzsche.
00:23:06.740And he finds it repellent because he thinks that what he famously calls Christianity a slave religion, that it's a religion for the weak and the poor,
00:23:21.020and that its popularity is driven by the resentment, the kind of mingling of resentment and hostility that those who are weak feel for the strong.
00:23:33.040And Nietzsche thinks that the strong are healthy and that healthiness should be celebrated.
00:23:46.320And that if strength involves strapping up someone who has annoyed you to a rock and sending an eagle to devour his liver every day, well, brilliant.
00:23:58.040But there's another aspect of Christianity which is very powerful.
00:24:03.300Constantine and I went to Sicily and we did a guided tour of these Greek temples and Roman temples.
00:24:10.040And one of the things the guide said to us was, this was a place, the temple was a place for the high priests.
00:24:17.560This was a place for the upper echelons of religious society.
00:24:21.740Whereas the church is a place for everybody.
00:24:25.000Well, I'm not sure that's entirely true.
00:24:29.200The temples and the shrines, say, in Greece or Rome, let's look at Athens, the democracy in Athens.
00:24:39.200The temples are seen as, and the rituals and the rites that are practiced to keep Athena and the other gods happy, are fundamental to the health of the entire demos, the entire people.
00:24:57.920And unless you buy into that, you don't understand what makes a city like democratic Athens tick.
00:25:07.220So, the power, the kratia of the demos, we translate it as people power and we think of it as democracy.
00:25:17.580But democracy in English is a kind of, it's a false friend.
00:25:22.260It doesn't mean what it meant for Athens.
00:25:25.340We tend to think democracy is founded on rights.
00:25:30.760So, therefore, the fact that men in Athens had a vote and women didn't is offensive to us.
00:25:39.300This is not how it operated in Athens, because the role of the men and women, all those who were sprung from the soil of Attica, are part of a continuum that reaches back into the past, forward into the future, and is in a kind of relationship with the gods.
00:26:00.820Because this is a kind of, it's an ecosystem in which everyone flourishes and everyone has the role.
00:26:08.160And the role of men in this ecosystem is to keep the demos, secure the demos against external enemies, so to go out and fight against rival cities, and also to draw up the laws that will enable the city to prosper in the kind of the dimension of the mortal.
00:26:24.960But just as important, or possibly even more important, is the role of keeping the gods on side.
00:26:32.800And in that, women have a very, very important role.
00:26:38.080They provide, they weave the robes that every year is given to one of the two statues on the Acropolis.
00:26:46.420So, every fourth year, there's an enormous one that goes to the statue of Athena in the Parthenon, and every year, a slightly smaller one to the kind of the ancient wooden statue of the goddess.
00:26:58.500They feed the holy snakes on the Acropolis with cakes.
00:29:15.180But I was going to come back to Christianity because one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is,
00:29:20.880from my personal experience, I was surrounded by a lot of Orthodox Christians when I was growing up,
00:29:27.180my family, Orthodox Christians, and one of the things I found quite incongruous was that there was a doctrine of what you're supposed to do.
00:31:00.260And I guess that this is the kind of the Christian understanding of the divine.
00:31:05.520That, in a sense, paradox structures the inability of the human mind to contemplate the potency of the divine.
00:31:14.700And that being so, there are many, many different ways of structuring and understanding what it is to be a Christian.
00:31:22.960And a lot of these are generated by the fact that, you know, and it's a crucial development that might not have happened.
00:31:30.720But in the second century, there's a guy called Marcion who makes, points out that the god of the New Testament seems quite different to the god of the Old Testament.
00:31:45.300The god of the Old Testament, you know, he's busy, you know, King David holds a census and God goes ballistic and kind of wipes all the children of Israel out with a plague.
00:31:57.600And now suddenly Jesus is saying, oh, you know, to turn the other cheek and put up your sword and what's going on here?
00:32:05.660And so Marcion's theory was that the god of the Old Testament was a different, essentially a kind of subordinate angel who had usurped the true god's role.
00:32:18.200And that Jesus had therefore been sent by the true god to kind of put humanity back on the straight and narrow.
00:32:23.720And he proposed that there should be a very finite number of scriptures.
00:32:33.480So the Gospel of Luke, Acts of the Apostles, some of the letters of Paul, basically.
00:32:38.600And this is a key moment because I think you can already by this point talk about Orthodox Christians,
00:32:45.840Christians who embody the kind of the mainstream or at least the kind of the central gravity in the church.
00:32:55.000But they but but because of this challenge, they have to decide what is what you know, what what is the canon going to be?
00:32:59.840What what what are what are our scriptures going to be?
00:33:02.780And they they choose the four Gospels because these are the ones that are the most closest to the time.
00:33:08.600They're the ones that that are generally accepted as being the most authentic record.
00:33:12.480And, you know, the various letters of Paul and the book of Revelation and so on.
00:33:14.900And they also decide to keep what they come to term the Old Testament and the sense that God had prefigured the coming of Christ in the Hebrew scriptures.
00:33:27.040And by doing that, it it sets up opportunities for Christians to emphasize things that perhaps are being emphasized in the passion narratives.
00:33:45.220Well, what I'm getting at, Tom, is let me put it more bluntly.
00:33:49.600You know, you're very eloquent and a historian.
00:33:51.280I'm just what I'm saying is in my understanding, why Christians behaved in monstrous way throughout history, for example, I guess what I'm saying is my experience of Christians today is that if somebody stood up and went, you know what?
00:34:06.640These people are heretics and they must be eradicated.
00:34:09.480Most Christians would be like, well, that's a bit much.
00:34:44.420But with Christianity, there was the message of compassion and empathy and turning the other cheek and all of that from the beginning.
00:34:52.700So what is it that's being weathered over the 2000 year period?
00:34:55.340Well, okay, so go back to the issue of paradox.
00:34:59.200Paul, in his letters, writing to the Galatians, so this is really, I mean, might even be among the earliest of letters.
00:35:06.560So right at the start of the Christian tradition.
00:35:08.540He writes to them and he says that in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek, there is no man or woman, there is no slave or free.
00:35:16.840So he's dissolving the traditional boundaries that are separated, you know, the two sexes, the different peoples of the world, and the different social orders.
00:35:49.160Now, of course, there is, it's like an acorn from which a great oak will flourish.
00:35:58.800And I would say that the assumptions that govern a liberal society derive from that.
00:36:07.720The idea that men and women have an inherent equality, that differences between peoples are, you know, are iniquitous to emphasize.
00:36:20.220I mean, you know, we'll come to slavery perhaps in due course.
00:36:23.140But the idea that there should be, I mean, you can see that there is no slave or free.
00:36:31.760It feeds in the long run into abolitionism.
00:36:33.860It feeds into the French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution.
00:36:36.900I mean, these are very, very long-term consequences.
00:36:39.820I mean, another metaphor, I love mixing up the metaphors, would be that is, you know, that is a grumbling of the earth, a grinding of the tectonic plates.
00:36:48.260And in due course, Tokyo gets drowned by a tsunami.
00:37:08.880He is therefore a provincial like any other, you know, there are all kinds of people, Judeans, Egyptians, whatever.
00:37:14.840And he's comparing them to the Greeks.
00:37:17.400And he's saying that the differences between Judeans and Greeks will dissolve in Christ, i.e. there will be a kind of universal brotherhood, sisterhood, whatever.
00:37:26.680However, famously, not all Judeans are keen on having their sense of distinctiveness dissolved into a kind of universal mush.
00:37:38.880And so they do not, in the main, follow Paul's exhortation to accept Christ as Lord.
00:37:45.380And that then means that there is a fracture point right from the beginning between people who will come to be defined as Christians and Jews.
00:37:55.920And that is obviously an incredibly dark shadow that has hung over the entire course of Christianity.
00:38:03.220But you can see how what seems to us a progressive message has kind of led to what we could also see as very dark consequences.
00:38:12.680And that is just one verse from one book of the New Testament, which in turn is part of, you know, includes the Old Testament.
00:38:22.380There is a lot of material there that can provide sanction for a broad, broad array of responses and that can also set in train all kinds of trends that, you know, would have seemed unimaginable in the first century A.D.
00:38:41.540Tom, is that why so everyone can drink?
00:38:45.560So my mother's Venezuelan, and it's really fascinating to see the way that the Spanish conquistadors behaved in South America and the Portuguese empire behaved in South America.
00:38:58.320And they come from a Catholic tradition to the way that the British empire behaved.
00:39:05.020Was that a large part of the way they behaved based on religion or was there something else to it?
00:39:11.160Well, the Spanish are the first to discover great powers in a world that no one had imagined before.
00:39:21.000And so when they, when they conquered the Aztec empire and then the, the Inca empire, they, I mean, I don't know if you played, you know, a game like civilization.
00:39:45.120And that's basically what you have because the Aztec is kind of bronzed civilization.
00:39:49.240I mean, beautiful, fascinating, extraordinary, but collapses before everything that the Spanish bring because they're the kind of beneficiaries of thousands of years of Eurasian, you know, crops and cattle and all kinds of things like that.
00:40:03.240Um, and this innate, and obviously the Spanish interpret this as, as, as an expression of, of kind of God's plan.
00:40:17.020They're bringing Christ to, to, to people who had previously walked in darkness.
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00:41:38.300Sorry to interject very briefly, how much of it was that, were they genuinely seeking to expand in the new world for religious reasons, or was there a lot of pragmatism to it, you know?
00:41:52.360Obviously, it varies. I mean, the conquistadors are unbelievably brutal in the main, and if they hadn't been brutal, then they wouldn't have done what they did.
00:42:01.960You know, they wouldn't have conquered what they ended up conquering.
00:42:09.460It is absolutely about wanting material goods.
00:42:12.860But to imagine that the desire to win souls for Christ is simply cynical window dressing is a very, you know, that's a very anachronistic take.
00:42:26.440There are absolutely people who are going out there who feel that this is, you know, this is absolutely part of God's plan.
00:42:36.760And there are friars, of whom the most famous is a guy called Bartolome de las Casas, who condemns the oppression and the greed of the conquistadors as an offense against God.
00:42:59.000And there is a great kind of scholarly debate in Spain between those who are drawing on Greek philosophers, particularly Aristotle, to essentially, you know, the strong do what they will, the weak must suck it up kind of argument, that there are those who are destined to be slaves and there are those who are destined to be masters.
00:43:22.100And they're drawing on Greek philosophy for that.
00:43:24.900And then there is las Casas, who's saying, no, he's drawing on the Gospels, he's saying, you know, slavery is an evil.
00:43:31.980These are people who are as worthy of respect as anyone else who has been one for Christ.
00:43:51.460The British, obviously, are Protestant, and therefore they bring a slightly different perspective.
00:44:00.220One perspective is that the Spanish are evil.
00:44:03.140So what they call the black legend, the idea that the Spanish are uniquely appalling, which is often they're drawing on las Casas and other Spanish writers like him to kind of condemn the Spanish.
00:44:19.860I mean, it's very much kind of Protestant black propaganda, I think.
00:44:24.980But the British have their own route to deciding that slavery is wrong.
00:44:30.420It's as Christian as the Spanish one, but it's distinctively Protestant.
00:44:36.780And what you have with the kind of radical form of Protestantism that develops in England in the Civil War and then the Commonwealth and its aftermath is this notion that the Spirit descends on you and enables you to read Scripture in the way that it's meant to be properly understood.
00:44:55.500So the simple words on the page, you know, this is inadequate to properly understand it.
00:45:02.720You have to have been granted grace by the Spirit, by God.
00:45:07.800And when you do that, then you can see what it properly means.
00:45:10.720And this revolution in England is transported to the Caribbean and it's transported to the American colonies.
00:45:21.560And so Quakers are the most obvious example, but Baptists and people like that.
00:45:28.300And this coincides with the development of plantation slavery in the Caribbean and in the American colonies.
00:45:35.420And Britain is starting to industrialize by this point.
00:45:42.960And industrialization is about utilizing resources in a way that is more intensive than has ever been done before.
00:45:53.000And what that means for slaves is obviously horrendous because you industrialize the process of transporting slaves, of exploiting them, of working them.
00:46:03.380So you have the conjunction of that, the industrialization of slavery and this radical notion that you can only understand God's purpose by reading the Scriptures with a sense of the Spirit.
00:46:17.620And it combines to inspire in Quakers and evangelical Anglicans a sense that slavery is wrong, even though famously, notoriously even, nowhere in the Bible does it say that slavery is wrong.
00:46:32.340Slavery is taken for granted in the Bible because it's seen as, you know, in the way the fact that hunger is or poverty or homelessness or whatever.
00:46:41.040It's just part of the human condition.
00:46:43.240But radical Protestants in the 18th century and then into the early 19th century are saying,
00:46:49.460no, actually, no, actually, it may not say this, but I feel the Spirit is telling me slavery is wrong.
00:46:57.940And the Spirit is conceptualized by Christians as fire, Pentecostal fire.
00:47:01.940So it's literally some Pentecostal fire blazing across the Atlantic in Britain, in the Caribbean, in the North American colonies, particularly in the Northern colonies.
00:47:10.340And it inspires the first great activist movement in Britain.
00:47:19.840You have demonstrations going through the streets of London demanding the abolition of slavery.
00:47:24.620And it becomes so unignorable for the government that in 1814, Napoleon has been defeated and sent off to Elba.
00:47:32.240And there's this Congress in Vienna to redraw the map of Europe.
00:47:38.560And Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, has to go to Vienna and basically say, guys, I'm really sorry, but I've got all these guys who are, you know, people in London who are holding street demonstrations and things.
00:47:53.520And this carries on even, you know, through Waterloo and the second defeat of Napoleon.
00:47:58.620And the Protestant tradition that Castlereagh is representing is obviously means nothing to the Catholic powers, to the French, to the Spanish, to the Portuguese.
00:48:10.580So they draw on those traditions that Las Casas had been articulating.
00:48:17.720And it gets blended with the Protestant traditions.
00:48:20.440And so also do the radical traditions of the French Revolution, kind of the radicalism of that, because the French Revolution had abolished slavery in the Caribbean and then Napoleon had brought it back in.
00:48:34.880So essentially it's a pooling of these three traditions, all of which are bred of the marrow of Christian Europe, the Protestant, the Catholic, and the kind of the Enlightenment tradition, if you want to call it that.
00:48:48.300And this is what gives birth essentially to international, the concept of international law, the idea that there are principles that transcend religious doctrine so that a Protestant and a Catholic can equally accept the dictates of international law.
00:49:09.100And this is what enables British ships when they are patrolling the Atlantic, that gives them the legal right to stop Portuguese or Spanish slave ships and arrest those who are doing it and say, put them on coast of Cuba and try them under international law.
00:49:24.880And it's also provides a rubric for what then happens in the 19th century when the British start to go on the attack against the Muslim slave trade, because of course, Muslims have very different sanctions for slavery.
00:49:37.880And so the process by which Muslim powers come to accept that slavery is an evil kind of requires them to accept the primacy of international law, which is a massive, massive deal for Muslims because they have a framework of law that derives supposedly from God.
00:49:58.460So it's much trickier for them than it is for Christians, because Christians don't have that notion of a God-given corpus of laws that have come from God.
00:50:06.720But essentially, that is the framework of international law that governs, you know, upholds the notions of human rights and so on to this day.
00:50:16.260Tom, when you were talking about the fact that it was a religious movement that spread like wildfire that helped to eradicate, well, for the British Empire to stop using slaves and to eradicate slavery in the empire.
00:50:30.080It made me think, and I'm only going to touch on it briefly, with the way that the woke movement talked about slavery and how we were the beneficiary of slavery, which to a certain extent we are.
00:50:44.980But the way they talked about it was in the form of original sin.
00:50:50.320We are born into this sin and we are never going to be washed clean and is an indenable stain on our reputation.
00:51:00.860Well, so I think what happens is that slavery comes to be seen as the great sin.
00:51:13.400I mean, it's clearly a monstrous, appalling crime.
00:51:19.300But we judge that by Christian standards.
00:51:21.360We accept it as an appalling crime because we have bought into the assumptions of Las Casas or the Quakers or whatever.
00:51:29.320If you look at the entirety of global history, it's not in any way a moral given.
00:51:36.140Civilizations have always depended upon the exploitation of the masses, and that could be chattel slavery of the kind that you have in Greece and Rome and then in the Atlantic in the 18th century.
00:51:50.020Or it could be founded on caste, the idea that certain people are born to be inferior.
00:51:54.740Or it could be upon the exploitation of, you know, proletariats, which you get in the 19th century industrial civilization.
00:52:01.700You always, you know, there is no form of civilization that is not also a reflection of barbarism, is the kind of the famous quotation.
00:52:16.980The idea that slavery is therefore not just an unfortunate corollary of the way of things, but a moral stain that has to be eradicated is very, very novel.
00:52:33.100And because it's, because it happened in a uniquely horrible form in the Atlantic, and because it was Christians who drove that, to a degree it contaminated, I think, the kind of Christian record in the eyes of people who were themselves absolutely saturated with Christian assumptions.
00:53:01.120And it kind of bled into anti-imperialism, moving into the 20th century.
00:53:07.920Again, the idea that powerful countries shouldn't dominate weaker countries.
00:53:12.960I mean, most, you know, the history of the world is basically the record of empires.
00:53:18.620The idea that empires are problematic, to use, you know, a favorite phrase of the woke, is, again, a relatively recent one.
00:53:27.680And it's meant that Christianity, which is a universal religion, Christians believe that it's for the good of the world that everyone becomes a Christian.
00:53:40.100There are more Christians, you know, more Christians than any other kind of practicing ideology in the world.
00:53:46.240That has come to be seen by lots of people as itself evil.
00:53:55.800The kind of the evangelical impetus of Christianity is seen as, you know, going out and, you know, overthrowing the right of the Aztecs to do what they want, even if that is human sacrifice or, you know, whatever.
00:54:11.260And so the consequence of that is that today we remain the heirs of these Christian impulses, the notion that slavery is an evil.
00:54:24.680But Christianity has been implicated in that, and so therefore the institutional character of Christianity is often rejected as part of the problem, of part of what has to be rejected, even though it is that institutional structure that has provided people with the ideological framework that enables them to judge it as evil.
00:54:49.320And so I think what you saw in 2020 and its aftermath was a deeply Christian movement.
00:54:57.680I mean, something that the Quakers in the 18th century would have recognized.
00:55:01.180The kind of the line of dissent from the activism of Quakers in the 18th century is very, very clear.
00:55:10.080But because they have jettisoned the Christian scripture, the Christian practice, the Christian self-identification that had provided structure for the Quakers and the early activists, they essentially have to construct their own traditions.
00:55:27.380And so that's why you had all the toppling of statues, which is kind of a very Protestant thing to do, toppling idols, taking the knee, people, you know, offering themselves up as penitentials, white people.
00:55:47.120It's very, very, very, these are very, very Christian forms of practice.
00:55:55.260It's just that they have been divorced from the institutional framework that gave them birth.
00:56:01.220And so how and where they're developing is unclear.
00:56:04.920And I think that they are clearly mutating very fast because once you unmoor ideas and stories and traditions from the context that gave them birth, they can mutate very, very quickly.
00:56:17.700It's very interesting you mentioned that because we had a super viral, very popular interview we did with a journalist called Richard Minneton,
00:56:23.740which we talked about some of the ideas from Albion Seed, the idea of how the United States became what it became.
00:56:30.680And one of the things he explained to us, I think this may have been off camera, was how many of these work ideas originate from the very areas of America where the Quakers would have once settled.
00:56:42.140But moving on, Tom, one of the other great religions that I think we are incredibly uneducated about, and I speak for myself above anyone else here in the Western world particularly, is Islam.
00:56:50.840And it's becoming a bigger conversation politically and societally because of immigration policy, because the number of Muslim followers, followers of Islam in the Western world is growing.
00:57:02.000And I'd love to know more about how that religion came into being, what are its core values, what are its principles.
00:57:08.460You mentioned some of them already, but can you expand on that?
00:57:10.740Could I just, before I do that, just put Islam in the context of the kind of the Christian story as manifested in the present West?
00:57:21.200Because I think that's important to understand why there are tensions between Islam and Western secular liberalism and why there is such a reluctance to acknowledge this on the part of enthusiasts for secular liberalism.
00:57:36.520Because essentially what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept of secular.
00:57:47.320And this goes right the way back to ultimately, I mean, you can trace it to the story of Jesus being asked whether taxes should be paid to Caesar.
00:57:57.720You know, he's famously asked for a coin and there's the picture of Caesar and he says, whose head is this?
00:58:01.640And he says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God what is God's.
00:58:04.720And so, so that sense that there is, um, you're talking about the separation of what the Americans call church and state.
00:58:12.960And they, and, and we call it here church and state, you know, the notion of church and state, there isn't synagogue and state, there isn't mosque and state, it's church and state.
00:58:20.400And in the West, that's because this notion of there being two rival orders gets enshrined by the towering theological genius in the Latin church, Augustine, um, great in, in North Africa in the late fourth, early fifth century, um, AD.
00:58:36.920And this is against the backdrop of the collapse of Roman power.
00:58:42.260And there are Romans who say, this is because we have rejected the old order, the old customs that enabled us to keep the gods on side.
00:58:49.760So, you know, going back to that stuff I was saying about Athens, these rituals, these festivals are like kind of insurance payments to keep the gods happy.
00:58:56.960Uh, and now we've abandoned these and the Romans call these religiones.
00:59:01.560So a, uh, uh, you know, a sacrifice or a festival in honor of a God is a religio.
00:59:05.740It's a bond that joins you to, um, to, to, to, to a God and is a kind of guarantee that this God will then look after the, after the city.
00:59:16.000And these religiones have been abandoned.
00:59:18.260And Augustine says, no, not a bit of it.
00:59:20.440Um, and the reason for that is that everything in the fallen world is bound upon what he calls the cyclum, which is basically the span of human life.
00:59:29.640But it means the notion that everything is, is doomed to, to, to, to, to pass away.
00:59:35.100All things must pass, as George Harrison would put it.
00:59:37.760Um, and he says that he, this is true of, of empires as well as of individuals.
01:00:00.460And it's only the church that can give you this religio.
01:00:02.900So there you have the, you know, as the Roman empire falls, this notion of, of there being an order of the cyclum, the order of religio.
01:00:11.760And over the course of, of medieval history, this becomes institutionalized.
01:00:16.760And it, going into the kind of the, the reformation and into modernity, it mutates to become this idea that there is this space called the secular, which is kind of neutral.
01:00:27.280It's separated from what has come to be called religion.
01:00:32.580No other culture has ever had this idea.
01:00:35.380So, so when you read about, you know, ancient Greek religion, they did, they had no concept of religion and they certainly had no concept of religion as being something that is separate from the kind of the, the, everything else.
01:00:50.780It's, it's, you know, the, the relationship of people to the gods is like the, the gin in a tonic.
01:00:57.020You can't separate out the gin and the tonic.
01:00:58.800What, what, what Christianity does is to say, yeah, you can have gin and here's the tonic and you can separate them out.
01:01:05.580That's, that's the madness of, of the way that we conceptualize the world in the West.
01:01:10.320And Islam has no concept that you can separate this out.
01:01:13.600And so this means therefore, yeah, that what we have in the West is an idea that you have freedom of religion and Jews in the 19th century had freedom of religion in the wake of the, the French revolution.
01:01:26.220They are told, you know, you can, you can practice your religion as you want.
01:01:32.380They, they were a people, but they're being told if you want to become the citizens of the French Republic, that's, that's brilliant.
01:01:37.700But you can no longer define yourself as a citizen of, of, of, of Israel.
01:01:41.880You know, you are now a French citizen who practices what comes to be called Judaism as a religion.
01:01:48.240And so Jews in the 19th and in the 20th century have to adapt the, you know, their traditions to fit this very specific modern Western secular template.
01:02:00.120And, and Western secular democracies require Muslims to do the same, to, to, to conceptualize what they belong to as being a religion.
01:02:09.760But classically, that's not how Muslims understood it.
01:02:12.980Islam is a totalizing way of leading your life.
01:02:17.380There are, there are rules that govern every aspect of your existence.
01:02:22.580God is manifested in everything that you do.
01:02:25.320The idea that there are kind of safe spaces where everyone can meet up and kind of join in a, in a secular space is something completely alien.
01:02:34.860And I don't think that most, most kind of enthusiasts for liberal secularism understand this.
01:02:44.560They tend to, I think they, they think that the notion of the secular is something that is common to everybody.
01:02:49.800That it's kind of like, you know, everyone has a sense of what a tree is.
01:02:52.760Everyone has a sense of what a dog is.
01:02:54.200Everyone has a sense of what the secular is.
01:02:58.080And so Muslims are being forced in, when they come to the West, are being forced into this kind of Procrustean bed of the secular notion of what a religion is.
01:03:06.480The only reason I keep trying to interject is I'm trying always to convert what you're saying into simpler, more easier to understand language.
01:03:13.420And I guess what you're saying is the central tension there is, theologically speaking, Islam doesn't allow the separation of politics and Islam.
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01:05:35.620As classically understood, Muhammad is a seal of the prophets.
01:05:41.460And the Quran is a record of humanity's disobedience to prophets.
01:05:46.120Prophets arrive, they reveal God's wishes, they then ignore it, or they corrupt God's message or whatever, and so more prophets have to come.
01:05:53.700Muhammad is the last prophet, and what he teaches mankind is mankind's last hope.
01:06:01.540If Islam goes, then mankind is doomed.
01:06:09.360And the proof that Islam is true, again, classically, is that Islam is triumphant for most of its existence.
01:06:20.680I mean, it pulverizes the Sassanian Empire, it dismembers the Roman Empire, conquers vast swathes of the Christian world, the kind of ancient Christian heartlands of Mediterranean Christianity.
01:06:31.180And it's really only with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt at the very end of the 18th century that Muslim powers are suddenly brought up against the fact that the despised Christian powers are incredibly powerful.
01:06:47.460And over the course of the 19th century, most Muslim powers come under either the direct or the indirect hegemony of Christian Western powers.
01:07:00.140And so that's a massive, massive shock, and it requires a recalibration of what Islam is.
01:07:06.280I mean, the attitude to slavery would be a classic example.
01:07:10.400The reason that the sultan in Constantinople is willing to contemplate banning the slave trade, even though it had been legitimized by the fact that Muhammad had slaves and that the early caliphs, you know, they were all in favor of slavery.
01:07:28.780And that it's mandated in Islamic scriptures.
01:07:35.860The only reason he was willing to do that was that he needed the help of the British and the French in the Crimean War against the Russians.
01:07:41.280And so he essentially kind of employed his top scholars to try and work out a way in which, you know, this Islamic law could be squared with this radical new notion.
01:07:52.660And this has been part of the kind of the great trauma for Muslims in the modern world is how do you adapt it?
01:08:01.360And essentially what Muslims did was to kind of Protestantise themselves.
01:08:08.280So they slightly adopted the sense that, you know, it's in the heart.
01:08:12.420You know, it may say this in the Koran, go out and crucify people who are offenders against God.
01:08:18.020But what that actually means is that you should try and be kind to them.
01:08:21.020I mean, that's the kind of, you know, it's the...
01:08:25.020So this is the people who say jihad is the internal struggle.
01:08:27.660Jihad is, yeah, which it kind of, I mean, that is a part of it, but it's not...
01:09:30.560And so Muslims also have adopted that policy.
01:09:33.560And the consequence of that has been a kind of very brutal understanding of Islam, because there's quite a lot in the Quran and in the Hadiths and in the life of Muhammad that, if interpreted in a kind of brutally literal way, sanctions quite a lot of bloodshed.
01:09:48.960And so that's, you know, part of the problem.
01:09:54.900I'm so glad we're talking about this, because I'm really keen to understand this from a deep perspective.
01:10:00.400And one of the things that I wanted to ask you about in this context is, how is it, is there a unique challenge for Islam to, you call it, Protestantize itself, which is to start to develop an interpretation that's more compatible with modern reality?
01:10:18.240For a number of reasons, one of them being the Quran is the literal word of God and the last word of God.
01:13:38.760And if there's no reformation possible, then is this just a continuation?
01:13:42.880Well, I mean, I think Islam, to a degree, has had a reformation because the reformation is all about going back to scripture and getting rid of the kind of accretion of what's seen as superstition.
01:13:54.660And Islam has repeatedly been doing that.
01:13:57.720It's a constant kind of summons to reform Islam.
01:14:04.380And so certainly, you know, the ideologues of the Islamic State would say that they were reformers.
01:14:09.960That's why they, for instance, completely dismiss any notion of international law.
01:14:15.300It's why they dismiss notions of human rights.
01:14:17.100It's why they think that slavery shouldn't just be allowed, but should be positively encouraged because it's in the Quran.
01:14:23.720And therefore, if you want to be true to God's message, you should have slavery.
01:14:28.020I mean, that's a very, very radical minority position.
01:14:33.060But it is an example of the direction of travel that a certain understanding of the Islamic inheritance can lead people in.
01:14:46.220And it's, you know, it's, of course, it's a worry.
01:14:49.820But I find this conversation very valuable, actually, because what you are actually explaining that even people who go, I'm an atheist, I don't believe in God, I don't believe in Jesus Christ, I reject all of that.
01:15:03.720But you are still a product of Christianity.
01:15:13.100And I don't think that people quite understand what that means, particularly when we look at religions like Islam or we look at other cultures and we're like, we're all the same.
01:15:22.900Well, so that is, I mean, that is the foundational principle of whatever our new religion is, this kind of, this gelded, mutated, be kind, isn't Paddington wonderful kind of post-Christianity that remains the kind of the dominant ideology.
01:15:40.020And I would say that the, you know, the paradigmatic pulpit that this religion has is Thought for the Day on Radio 4's Today program, where you will have Catholic priests and Anglican bishops and rabbis and Islamic scholars and Sikhs and Hindus all preaching exactly the same message.
01:16:06.760You know, one will give it a little bit of garnishing from the Gospels, one from the Koran, one from the Bhagavad Gita or whatever.
01:16:13.600But basically, it's the same core message.
01:16:16.100And the idea, you know, and this is...
01:16:29.020I think that what the study of history reveals, and it's why it's so fascinating, is the infinite number of ways there are to be human and the infinite number of ways there are to order a society.
01:16:47.080And that at any given time, the majority of people who live in a particular place at a particular time will assume that their way of doing things is obviously the standard way of doing it.
01:17:14.540And you just have to look at the world through the eyes of, I don't know, Protestants in the 18th century or Muslims in the 14th century or Aztecs in the 15th century to realize and to try and see the world through their eyes and to realize how relative one's own cultural assumptions are.
01:18:55.820I mean, I would say that there are, I mean, that there are many, many paths and many paths that our society will take because it's, it's fracturing in all kinds of ways.
01:19:08.400You know, there are many, many different perspectives.
01:19:12.560And, and those aren't just political, they're cultural, all kinds of ways.
01:19:17.060But I would say that, say for, for Britain, this ancient Christian country, um, one, one, one path is that, um, this, this kind of post-Christian Paddingtonism, if you want to call it that.
01:19:39.020Um, it's, it's like the head of the rocket.
01:19:46.020It's gone through the atmosphere, all, everything else underneath it has been jettisoned.
01:19:50.320And now it's got the power to blast through the solar system.
01:19:53.040And all that kind of, all, all, you know, all the stuff that's been jettisoned is all the nonsense about the Bible and Jesus and the church.
01:20:03.500Um, we have now blasted out and we're going forward and, um, the secular principles, the liberal principles are sufficiently self-evident, self-evidently right and good that it will sustain the future evolution and development of our society for, for decades and centuries to come.
01:20:25.940And therefore, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's culturally determined.
01:20:31.520I mean, it's, it's, it's clearly derives from Christianity, but, but you don't need Christianity anymore to kind of provide the rocket fuel.
01:20:41.180It's, it's, it's, it's going on its own way.
01:20:42.840Another, another option, which the history of the 20th century suggests is that the default assumption among humans is that strength and might is right.
01:20:57.680Power does have a, a glamour and this is what Nietzsche predicted.
01:21:02.000You know, he said when Christianity, Christianity goes, there will be this great convulsion and there will, you know, it will be terrifying powers will emerge.
01:21:09.740And of course he was right because they emerged in the form of fascism and fascism and Nazism cast such a shadow over us that we've lived in their shadow.
01:21:21.780In a way, one of the reasons I think for the decline of institutional Christianity is that Hitler has taken the place of the devil.
01:21:29.300Um, and that, that, that a modern liberal now, rather than ask, what would Jesus do?
01:21:34.160As his Victorian forebear would have done says, what would Hitler do?
01:21:38.100Uh, and that's kind of kept us on our liberal straight and narrow, but that is clearly fading as, as the, you know, experience of fascism becomes in Europe becomes a, you know, dies out, lived experience of it.
01:21:50.560So the, the, the, the kind of the, the, the bogeyman power of Hitler will fade and people who are no longer bounded by Christian inhibitions or assumptions, I can imagine them turning around and saying, well, what's wrong with, why shouldn't I do what I like?
01:22:09.660Why shouldn't I do exactly what I like?
01:22:11.760And it's not obvious what the answer to that is, I think, if you don't have the kind of, the, the, the, the Christian answers.
01:22:19.940And I suppose a third possibility is that, um, people will return to the, the, the source and say, well, actually, maybe, maybe I am Christian.
01:22:32.060Maybe I, you know, maybe I should take this a bit more seriously than I have been.
01:22:35.260And there are kind of things, I think, tentative signs that that might be happening.
01:22:38.800What's fascinating is, I would argue, there are signs of all three of those things happening.
01:23:15.700I mean, that's the one I'm most happy with.
01:23:16.720So I think, I think we are, we are living through a great choke point in, in the history of this country and of, of, of this continent more generally.
01:23:28.380And, you know, in terms of British history, we've had periods where the culture of, say, just looking specifically at England has radically changed.
01:23:40.000So the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution.
01:23:43.180And I think that, that we are on the verge of going through something similar now.
01:24:53.180But the arrogance, people would say that's justified because of the fact that we have the most, um, we're the products of an incredibly advanced civilization that's industrialized.
01:25:04.380Um, and therefore, basically, we've, you know, we've got the answer.
01:25:07.640And I think, obviously, that, that now rubs up against all kinds of anxieties about, um, Western exceptionalism.
01:26:30.940Um, I, I, I think that because, um, uh, we've just had this incredible climax to a cricket series.
01:26:40.000Um, and I went on the Today programme this morning to talk about it and was reminded...
01:26:47.040I, I went to the Oval yesterday where it was played and the sense of tension was unbearable.
01:26:51.500And I'd been through this, um, quarterfinal in the Champions League where Villa, who we were talking about earlier, had played against PSD.
01:27:00.120And that also had been so excruciating.
01:27:03.680And I realised that these are the two moments where I have lived most fully this year.
01:27:08.960And that is, I am just one person among millions, perhaps billions, who share in experiences like that.
01:27:16.100And it is obviously part of an enormous, vast, global, industrialised, um, construct.