TRIGGERnometry - Historian Tom Holland： Islam, Christianity & the West

00:00:00.000 Want to go electric without sacrificing fun?

00:00:04.020 That's the Volkswagen ID.4.

00:00:06.580 All electric and thoughtfully designed to elevate your modern lifestyle.

00:00:10.520 The Volkswagen ID.4 is fun to drive with instant acceleration that makes city streets feel like open roads.

00:00:16.480 Plus a refined interior with innovative technology always at your fingertips.

00:00:21.420 The all electric ID.4.

00:00:23.200 You deserve more fun.

00:00:24.540 Visit VW.ca to learn more.

00:00:27.080 SUVW. German engineered for all. 0.97

00:00:30.660 Got PC Optimum points?

00:00:32.420 Visit Shoppers Drug Mart for the bonus redemption event and get more for your points.

00:00:36.260 Friday, March 6th to Wednesday, March 11th.

00:00:38.340 Valid in-store and online.

00:00:43.480 We are living through a great choke point in the history of this country.

00:00:49.600 What you saw in 2020 and its aftermath was a deeply Christian movement.

00:00:55.100 The 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.

00:01:09.660 Essentially, what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept of the secular. 0.68

00:01:20.000 Islam is a totalizing way of leading your life. 1.00

00:01:23.660 I think Islam is uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset. 1.00

00:01:29.800 And people don't want to admit that.

00:01:32.920 If you've ever wanted to ask one of our guests a question, now's your chance.

00:01:38.460 Members get ad-free, extended and early access episodes.

00:01:42.160 Plus, they can submit questions for upcoming interviews.

00:01:45.160 Click the link in the description of this episode or go to triggerpod.co.uk to join us.

00:01:52.660 Tom Holland, welcome back to Trigonometry.

00:01:54.500 Thanks very much for having me back.

00:01:55.660 It's been a while.

00:01:56.740 It's great to have you back on the show.

00:01:58.180 In the meantime, by the way, you and Dominic, who's also a recent guest of ours, have had tremendous success.

00:02:03.060 So congratulations on the rest of this history.

00:02:05.460 It's absolutely crushing.

00:02:06.840 How are you handling your newfound fame?

00:02:09.200 Oh, I'm struggling.

00:02:10.900 I'm really struggling.

00:02:12.480 It's amazing.

00:02:13.040 I mean, we never in a million years imagined that there was quite the appetite for history that there is.

00:02:22.560 And so I'm happy not just for myself, not just for Dominic, but for history lovers everywhere,

00:02:29.140 that 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.

00:02:38.400 Well, there are a lot of memes online that by the time you're 40 years old, if you're male, this is.

00:02:43.860 A man, by the time he's 40, he's either got to pick World War II or Roman history. 0.76

00:02:47.720 Like, you don't have a choice, really.

00:02:49.540 We like both.

00:02:50.760 So it's great to have you on.

00:02:52.060 It's good to know.

00:02:53.280 I think that the meme I always had was that no male after the age of 40 reads a novel.

00:02:59.240 And so maybe they turn to non-fiction and history, perhaps, is a kind of obvious.

00:03:06.320 And I kind of slightly sense that in myself.

00:03:08.380 I read far fewer novels than I did.

00:03:10.880 That's really true, actually, because I used to read.

00:03:13.820 I was quite a voracious reader of novels.

00:03:16.060 And the older I get, the more I veer towards non-fiction.

00:03:18.740 Yeah, so I was chair of the Society of the Authors, and they prepared a report on this, the gender imbalance, how it operated.

00:03:29.240 And 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. 0.98

00:03:41.080 It is indeed.

00:03:41.600 Well, look, it's great to have you on.

00:03:43.820 Your 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.

00:03:56.660 But starting with Christianity, I mean, the thesis of your book, essentially, is that Christianity is the soup we swim in in the Western world.

00:04:04.160 Yeah, it's the water.

00:04:05.240 We are goldfish, and Christianity is essentially the water that we're swimming in. 1.00

00:04:08.980 Hmm. 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.

00:04:36.800 Yeah. 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.

00:04:53.800 There 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.

00:05:03.700 I think without the Roman Empire, it would not have happened. 0.86

00:05:06.380 And 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.

00:05:23.640 And the cross is for the Romans. It's an expression of their right to torture to death anyone who opposes their rule. 0.98

00:05:36.460 It 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.

00:05:49.800 You 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.

00:05:58.700 He 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.

00:06:06.780 There's no kind of set way of crucifying someone. And you are then a kind of public spectacle.

00:06:13.040 You're like a kind of billboard advertising the power of the state that has put you there.

00:06:20.400 And you can be, you know, you can't ward the birds off as they flock around your eyes and peck them out.

00:06:26.500 You're constantly levering yourself up and down to try and keep your breath.

00:06:31.400 Your suffering and your agony is on absolutely public display.

00:06:36.060 And perhaps when you die, you're left there like a slab of meat.

00:06:40.020 So it is an excruciating, agonizing, horrific death.

00:06:47.060 And 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.

00:06:59.360 And the scale of that value shift, I think, is illustrated by the way in which, in the early decades and centuries of Christianity,

00:07:13.660 the fact that Jesus died on the cross is a cause of deep anxiety or at least embarrassment to Christians who are talking about it.

00:07:30.980 So the earliest Christian writer that we have, the earliest evidence for Christianity, written evidence, is Paul.

00:07:36.660 Paul, and in his letters, he situates the death of Christ on the cross at the center of what he is preaching.

00:07:46.540 But he is also kind of embarrassed about it.

00:07:49.760 And so he says that to the Jews or the Judeans, as I'd rather cause them, it's a stumbling block, his message.

00:08:00.560 But to everybody else, to the Greeks and to the Romans, it's just madness. 0.89

00:08:05.700 And the reason for that is that, for the Romans, what Paul is preaching, the idea that a man can also be a god,

00:08:15.420 I mean, that's not news because Julius Caesar had become a god.

00:08:19.540 Augustus is worshipped as a god.

00:08:21.600 That's not the madness of it.

00:08:23.280 The madness is the idea that someone who had suffered this death that paradigmatically is visited on slaves is a god.

00:08:29.360 That's the lunacy of it.

00:08:31.480 And you sense that Paul is, you know, constantly trying to preempt objections to that kind of position of madness.

00:08:40.640 And it's something that continues throughout Christian writings throughout the second century into the third century.

00:08:44.600 And even when Constantine in the beginning of the fourth century converts to Christianity and Christianity starts to emerge as the, you know, 0.94

00:08:52.740 as something that is first of all permitted and then becomes kind of the state ideology,

00:08:59.840 there's still a reluctance to illustrate Christ on the cross.

00:09:04.380 And when you, so there's, there's an ivory casket in the British Museum, which illustrates various scenes from the Passion.

00:09:13.420 And you have Jesus on the cross there.

00:09:16.260 He looks unbelievably buff.

00:09:17.940 He's got, he's got, he's got his loincloth on and it, he looks like, he looks, well, he looks like an athlete.

00:09:26.900 He looks like someone who's winning first prize in the Olympics.

00:09:29.620 He looks like an Instagram influence.

00:09:31.400 He looks, yeah, well, he looks like a footballer.

00:09:34.060 You know, he's kind of toned, he's muscular, he's relaxed.

00:09:37.140 He's got this kind of completely mellow expression on his face.

00:09:39.860 He does not look like someone who's worried about birds coming and pecking out his eyeballs.

00:09:44.940 And so even there, you still don't have, the artist is reluctant to portray the reality of crucifixion.

00:09:55.560 And it's not for another 500 years, not until just before the first millennium,

00:09:59.980 that you get the first representations of Christ dead on the cross.

00:10:03.560 And then over the course of the Middle Ages, so the high Middle Ages,

00:10:07.300 the culture of Latin Christendom becomes increasingly obsessed with the sufferings of Christ.

00:10:15.820 So it's portrayed in art, but it's also in the liturgy, it's in prayers, it's, it dominates the Christian imagination.

00:10:23.380 And I think that the long-term consequence of that is that we as a civilization,

00:10:29.500 people growing up in a world that's still powerfully informed by Christianity,

00:10:33.980 we've been being desensitized to what the cross represents.

00:10:38.380 You know, we see it as a kind of abstract expression of Christianity.

00:10:42.600 We don't stop to think, that's mad.

00:10:45.660 You know, people have said, oh, it's like having, you know, the electric chair as a symbol of your feet.

00:10:50.600 There's something of that.

00:10:51.400 But it is much, much worse to be crucified than to die in the electric chair.

00:10:55.380 Tom, come back with me to what you said earlier, which I thought fascinating,

00:11:00.300 because we talked about the moral inversion, the flipping of morality almost.

00:11:04.180 And what we mean by this is effectively in the civilization in which Jesus was born and lived,

00:11:11.120 the idea was that, you know, it was the strong conquer and win and the weak suffer what they must,

00:11:17.460 or whatever that phrase is effectively, right?

00:11:19.100 It's the ideology that Nietzsche then kind of reinstated later in the 20th century,

00:11:24.240 which was this idea that, you know, the strong must get what they want and the weak are going to suffer

00:11:29.340 and it's good to be strong and it's bad to be weak.

00:11:32.300 And you say this was already there.

00:11:35.680 It came from something that was already there in Roman society, in the Greek society,

00:11:39.940 in the Jewish traditions that these people lived within.

00:11:43.660 So how does that happen?

00:11:45.300 No, I'm not exactly saying that.

00:11:47.100 Okay, correct.

00:11:47.620 I'm saying that there are, if you think of Christianity as a great sea, 0.93

00:11:53.320 there are many rivers that flow into it.

00:11:55.320 So there's the, obviously, the kind of the Jewish inheritance, the scriptural inheritance.

00:12:01.660 And from Greece, there is the philosophical tradition.

00:12:05.300 So the influence of Aristotle and Plato on Christianity as it evolves is absolutely immense.

00:12:12.100 There's a sense in which a lot of theology is just kind of footnotes to Plato.

00:12:15.800 So light philosophy is the influence of Persia.

00:12:21.220 The Persians have this idea that the universe is moralized, that there are rival principles of dark and light, of lies and truth. 0.94

00:12:32.640 And this seems to be a big influence on the formation of Hebrew scripture, because people from Jerusalem are taken as prisoners to Babylon.

00:12:41.340 And then Babylon gets captured by the Persians, and they're allowed to go back and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem.

00:12:47.760 And Cyrus, the first great Persian king, is hailed in the Bible as a messiah, as a kind of a liberator.

00:12:55.100 So that's also a crucial part of it.

00:12:57.000 And then what Rome provides, I think, is the notion of a universal order.

00:13:01.060 So the ideology of Rome is that they have imperium sine fine, as Berger called it, empire without limit.

00:13:08.420 The remit of Rome is universal.

00:13:12.300 And that is something that Christianity kind of takes for granted, that there is a universal global order.

00:13:20.680 And Paul's ability to write his letters to the Galatians or the Ephesians or the Corinthians or the Romans reflects that.

00:13:29.940 The Mediterranean has become a Roman lake. 0.71

00:13:33.320 The shipping lanes can be used without fear of pirates attacking you.

00:13:37.140 And roads are being built, and you can travel on them.

00:13:42.120 It's a globalized world.

00:13:43.820 And so that also is part of the Christian context.

00:13:47.460 The idea that someone who has suffered the death of a slave could in some way be the universal God who has created everything,

00:13:57.080 that's what's novel, that's what's radical.

00:14:01.400 Although, having said that, I think when you look at Paul's letters, so the tradition of Paul,

00:14:07.440 as it's embodied in the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul talks about it himself in his letters,

00:14:11.160 is that he was a persecutor of the church.

00:14:13.920 He obviously thought the Christian notion that Jesus had risen from the dead and was in some way a part of God was powerfully offensive.

00:14:23.180 And then he has a vision of the risen Christ, he says.

00:14:26.260 And 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.

00:14:39.300 And it's like being given the key to a detective story, where you go back and you realize that all kinds of things,

00:14:47.800 you've been thrown off the scent, you've missed what the actual solution to the puzzle is.

00:14:52.260 And I think that's the key that Paul is bringing to Hebrew scriptures.

00:14:55.400 And he's realizing that all the promises that he had thought were contained in scripture,

00:15:01.720 that a powerful warlord would come to redeem God's people, that actually that wasn't what the key was.

00:15:09.480 The key was that the Messiah would come, but he would come as a man of sorrows. 0.81

00:15:14.380 And so he is drawing on the inheritance of Hebrew scripture.

00:15:17.220 It is there. But what Christianity does is to kind of enshrine it at the molten heart of the gospel,

00:15:25.980 euangelion, the good news that Paul is preaching.

00:15:29.680 We know you've been waiting and your full Great Outdoors Comedy Festival lineup is here.

00:15:35.540 On September 11th through 13th at Arendale Park, comedy superstars John Mulaney with Nick Kroll,

00:15:41.560 Mike Berpiglia and Fred Armisen.

00:15:43.500 Adam Ray is Dr. Phil live with Miss Pat and TJ Miller.

00:15:47.540 Hassan Minhaj and Ronnie Chang with Michael Kosta and more hit the stage.

00:15:51.760 Three nights, five shows, huge laughs.

00:15:54.920 September 11th through 13th.

00:15:56.600 Buy tickets now at greatoutdoorscomedyfestival.com.

00:16:00.360 I really like that we've talked about the difference between the Christian God and the gods that preceded it. 0.95

00:16:06.880 Because if you know anything about Roman gods or Greek gods from which they were based on, they come across as petty.

00:16:15.000 I think they come across as unbelievably charismatic.

00:16:17.720 Really?

00:16:18.700 Or both, surely.

00:16:20.480 Well, they...

00:16:21.540 Vengeful?

00:16:23.140 Charismatic pettiness, perhaps you might say.

00:16:25.860 You see, I, as a child, I went to church and went to Sunday school and I loved the Bible stories.

00:16:32.400 I mean, I thought they were great, but I was always very much on the side of the great empires.

00:16:37.120 So I was very much kind of team Pharaoh as opposed to Moses and loved the Assyrians, loved the Babylonians. 0.67

00:16:43.800 You know, very much pro-Pontius Pilate as opposed to Jesus.

00:16:46.820 And one of the reasons for that was that I found their gods kind of more glamorous and exciting.

00:16:54.080 So 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. 0.52

00:17:04.840 I'd love an idol.

00:17:06.380 I thought that was much more kind of glamorous than what we got in the church.

00:17:11.280 And specifically, I loved the gods of Greece.

00:17:14.240 I found them so much more charismatic.

00:17:18.120 But you're right.

00:17:18.700 I mean, they're terrible. 0.58

00:17:19.760 They're awful.

00:17:20.560 But in a way, a god like Athena seemed to me to correspond much more closely to how I felt the world was.

00:17:27.640 You know, she's very, very smart.

00:17:30.620 She's also very violent. 1.00

00:17:33.100 She encourages all the arts of civilization, but she's also unbelievably petty, as you say. 1.00

00:17:39.180 You know, if you offend her, she will inflict appalling things on you. 0.95

00:17:42.840 But she looks after her own.

00:17:45.360 And I kind of always felt as a child that if Athena had been a viable faith alternative, I would absolutely have gone for her.

00:17:52.720 And 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,

00:18:07.720 that 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.

00:18:24.180 And they are not worthy of being followed or worshipped and that the true divine lies beyond these stories.

00:18:33.960 And essentially, it's that understanding of the divine that Christian theologians then kind of adopt and bundle into the package.

00:18:43.940 I'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. 0.93

00:18:54.640 But it's the rejection of them.

00:18:56.540 I mean, in an Oedipal way, very appropriate.

00:18:58.460 The rejection of the philosophers of that kind of quality of the Greek gods is there.

00:19:04.920 And it's interesting.

00:19:05.580 I mean, obviously, this is crucially a part of the context, again, into which Christianity is born.

00:19:11.540 So when Paul has his vision of Christ, according to Acts, Christ says to him,

00:19:18.020 Paul, why are you kicking against the pricks?

00:19:21.340 You know, why are you kicking against what I'm giving you?

00:19:24.320 And this is a phrase that comes from Euripides' great play, The Bacchae, which describes Dionysus appearing and there are people who reject him.

00:19:36.000 And the fate that is visited on them is terrible.

00:19:38.720 So Pentheus, the king of Thebes, who is Dionysus's cousin, refuses to recognize his cousin as a god.

00:19:44.300 I mean, as he would if your cousin turns up and says, if God's not going to have anything to do with it.

00:19:47.580 And he suffers a terrible fate.

00:19:49.360 He, you know, his aunts go mad, roam the countryside, tearing cattle to pieces and throwing bits of flesh all over the trees and things. 0.53

00:20:00.380 Pentheus tries to arrest them.

00:20:03.040 Dionysus drives him mad.

00:20:04.640 He dresses up as a maenad, as literally a raver, someone who goes to a rave.

00:20:09.580 So he dresses up in whatever, you know, the maenads are wearing, kind of animal skins. 0.99

00:20:14.100 He 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.

00:20:22.440 This is obviously not what Christ is doing to Paul.

00:20:25.980 But there are clearly resemblances between the gods, say, like Dionysus and Christ that even Paul can recognize.

00:20:36.980 How often do you get the chance to access a world-class education for free?

00:20:42.580 That is exactly what Hillsdale College is offering with its new online course, Athens and Sparta.

00:20:48.740 Few rivalries in history have left us deeper mark as Athens and Sparta.

00:20:52.900 One was the birthplace of democracy, philosophy and art.

00:20:56.120 The other built a culture of strength, unity and sacrifice.

00:21:00.060 Dive in today at hillsdale.edu slash trigger.

00:21:03.500 Over nine lectures, distinguished historians Victor Davis Hanson and Paul Ray guide you through the triumphs and failures of these cities.

00:21:10.860 From the Greek victory in the Persian War, which secured freedom and democracy in the West,

00:21:15.380 to the devastating Peloponnesian War that brought Athens' golden age to an end.

00:21:20.380 You will get access to all the lectures, course readings and quizzes completely free.

00:21:24.880 Enroll today at hillsdale.edu slash trigger.

00:21:28.780 That's hillsdale.edu slash trigger.

00:21:31.420 It's such a good point you made, because when I was reading your book and I was going over Greek and Roman history with the gods,

00:21:39.420 the one word that stood out to me was cruelty.

00:21:42.640 It was viciously cruel.

00:21:44.980 Take the story of Prometheus.

00:21:47.160 It gave fire to the human beings, doomed to have, I think it was an eagle rip out his heart every day.

00:21:53.780 His liver.

00:21:54.300 His liver to be ripped out.

00:21:57.420 But then you contrast that.

00:21:58.820 He grows back every day and an eagle comes back and rips it out.

00:22:01.920 Yeah, you know, he liked the diet of awful.

00:22:03.960 Anyway, 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,

00:22:15.940 forgive them, Lord, for they know not what they do.

00:22:18.940 That is a radical transformation, isn't it?

00:22:22.020 It's a radical difference.

00:22:23.000 Yes, it's very radical.

00:22:24.340 And you mentioned Nietzsche.

00:22:25.460 I mean, this is what Nietzsche fixes on.

00:22:29.200 I mean, I said how we've become desensitized to the cross.

00:22:33.780 I 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. 0.85

00:22:48.980 He gets what is radical and subversive about the cross to a degree that theologians haven't really articulated for centuries and centuries.

00:22:58.240 You know, there is something of Paul's bewilderment and perplexity and shock at contemplating the death of Christ on the cross about Nietzsche.

00:23:06.740 And 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,

00:23:21.020 and 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.

00:23:33.040 And Nietzsche thinks that the strong are healthy and that healthiness should be celebrated.

00:23:46.320 And 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.

00:23:56.320 Bring it on.

00:23:57.220 Let's crack on.

00:23:58.040 But there's another aspect of Christianity which is very powerful.

00:24:03.300 Constantine and I went to Sicily and we did a guided tour of these Greek temples and Roman temples.

00:24:10.040 And one of the things the guide said to us was, this was a place, the temple was a place for the high priests.

00:24:17.560 This was a place for the upper echelons of religious society.

00:24:21.740 Whereas the church is a place for everybody.

00:24:25.000 Well, I'm not sure that's entirely true.

00:24:29.200 The temples and the shrines, say, in Greece or Rome, let's look at Athens, the democracy in Athens.

00:24:39.200 The 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.

00:24:57.920 And unless you buy into that, you don't understand what makes a city like democratic Athens tick.

00:25:07.220 So, the power, the kratia of the demos, we translate it as people power and we think of it as democracy.

00:25:17.580 But democracy in English is a kind of, it's a false friend.

00:25:22.260 It doesn't mean what it meant for Athens.

00:25:25.340 We tend to think democracy is founded on rights.

00:25:28.680 People have a right to a vote.

00:25:30.760 So, therefore, the fact that men in Athens had a vote and women didn't is offensive to us.

00:25:39.300 This 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.

00:25:58.140 So, the soil, the people, the gods.

00:26:00.820 Because this is a kind of, it's an ecosystem in which everyone flourishes and everyone has the role.

00:26:08.160 And 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.

00:26:24.960 But just as important, or possibly even more important, is the role of keeping the gods on side.

00:26:32.800 And in that, women have a very, very important role. 0.99

00:26:38.080 They provide, they weave the robes that every year is given to one of the two statues on the Acropolis.

00:26:46.420 So, 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.

00:26:58.500 They feed the holy snakes on the Acropolis with cakes.

00:27:03.260 They practice cults.

00:27:05.180 So, they, the great festival of Dionysus, they welcome Dionysus in. 0.67

00:27:10.600 And women go to a temple in the marshes to Dionysus, and there one of them has sex with the, with a king. 0.91

00:27:23.560 And nobody really knows what this involves, but I mean, it's clearly, something's going on there.

00:27:28.180 And the thing I love is that every young girl in Athens, when she becomes 10, goes to this temple of Artemis,

00:27:34.640 who, like Athena, is a kind of terrifying goddess, virgin goddess, mistress of the beasts, she's called.

00:27:41.420 And girls go out there, and we're told in the classical sources that there they turn into bears. 0.99

00:27:47.100 And scholars debate, what does this mean?

00:27:49.460 I mean, is it a puberty ritual?

00:27:51.600 You know, do they put on the robes of, you know, the skins of bears or what?

00:27:54.880 Nobody pauses to think, well, maybe they did turn into bears.

00:27:57.600 But what if they did turn into bears?

00:27:59.520 What if they did?

00:28:00.200 They are then roaming with Artemis out in the wilds.

00:28:04.440 They have experienced things that men have not experienced.

00:28:07.420 And every man who marries a woman in Athens is marrying someone who's run with Artemis, who's run with the animals. 0.80

00:28:13.080 And I think people believe that.

00:28:16.520 And it gives a shiver of the supernatural and the weird to the functioning of Athens in its golden age

00:28:22.600 that we find very difficult to get a handle on.

00:28:25.100 Because, of course, the instincts of historians are incredibly materialist.

00:28:29.100 And even if they do believe in the supernatural, they don't believe in the Greek gods.

00:28:33.340 But you've got to try and believe in them.

00:28:34.940 And when you do, you see that it's part of the rhythm and the fabric of the functioning of the entire city.

00:28:43.640 And this is why, in the long run, the philosophers are so threatening to that.

00:28:50.420 Because if you're turning around and saying, that's all rubbish, God is kind of perfection in some distant moral order or something.

00:28:59.880 What role is there then for girls going off and turning into bears and running with Artemis? 0.95

00:29:05.120 Well, look, I'm not a historian, but I'm fairly comfortable with the idea of women turning into bears every now and again. 1.00

00:29:12.840 That is a familiar experience.

00:29:15.180 But I was going to come back to Christianity because one of the things that I wanted to ask you about is,

00:29:20.880 from my personal experience, I was surrounded by a lot of Orthodox Christians when I was growing up,

00:29:27.180 my 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. 0.97

00:29:36.760 And then I'd observe people who...

00:29:38.180 Orthodoxy.

00:29:39.160 There was an orthodoxy that nobody actually did any of those things.

00:29:42.960 They just talked about them.

00:29:44.420 And one of the interesting things to me about Christianity is, I imagine, you know, my Anglican friends, let's say,

00:29:51.120 who are kind of very peaceful and docile, almost, you might say, and very kind and generous, etc.

00:29:57.040 That is not the way that Christianity has been practiced through the centuries in some parts of the world.

00:30:03.340 So how...

00:30:04.940 And how, you know, the message of Jesus turning the other cheek and all these other things,

00:30:09.100 that is not also the way that Christianity has been practiced throughout the ages either.

00:30:14.000 There's been quite militant periods.

00:30:16.100 There's been periods of internal persecution, of, you know, all sorts of recrimination between different branches, etc.

00:30:24.160 How does all of that happen?

00:30:29.900 Christianity, I think, is best thought of as a kind of great pulsing matrix of paradoxes.

00:30:43.480 Paradox structures everything about it.

00:30:48.560 I mean, you know, we've been talking about one.

00:30:50.960 The guy on the cross who proves to be greater than the person who's crucified him.

00:30:56.880 The man who is also a god.

00:31:00.260 And I guess that this is the kind of the Christian understanding of the divine.

00:31:05.520 That, in a sense, paradox structures the inability of the human mind to contemplate the potency of the divine.

00:31:14.700 And that being so, there are many, many different ways of structuring and understanding what it is to be a Christian.

00:31:22.960 And a lot of these are generated by the fact that, you know, and it's a crucial development that might not have happened.

00:31:30.720 But 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.

00:31:45.300 The 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.

00:31:56.120 You know, there's a lot of smiting.

00:31:57.600 And now suddenly Jesus is saying, oh, you know, to turn the other cheek and put up your sword and what's going on here?

00:32:05.660 And 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.

00:32:18.200 And that Jesus had therefore been sent by the true god to kind of put humanity back on the straight and narrow.

00:32:23.720 And he proposed that there should be a very finite number of scriptures.

00:32:33.480 So the Gospel of Luke, Acts of the Apostles, some of the letters of Paul, basically.

00:32:38.600 And this is a key moment because I think you can already by this point talk about Orthodox Christians,

00:32:45.840 Christians who embody the kind of the mainstream or at least the kind of the central gravity in the church.

00:32:51.660 They do not follow that.

00:32:55.000 But they but but because of this challenge, they have to decide what is what you know, what what is the canon going to be?

00:32:59.840 What what what are what are our scriptures going to be?

00:33:02.780 And they they choose the four Gospels because these are the ones that are the most closest to the time.

00:33:08.600 They're the ones that that are generally accepted as being the most authentic record.

00:33:12.480 And, you know, the various letters of Paul and the book of Revelation and so on.

00:33:14.900 And 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.

00:33:27.040 And by doing that, it it sets up opportunities for Christians to emphasize things that perhaps are being emphasized in the passion narratives.

00:33:43.480 Let's put it like that.

00:33:45.220 Well, what I'm getting at, Tom, is let me put it more bluntly.

00:33:49.600 You know, you're very eloquent and a historian.

00:33:51.280 I'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? 1.00

00:34:06.640 These people are heretics and they must be eradicated. 0.97

00:34:09.480 Most Christians would be like, well, that's a bit much. 1.00

00:34:11.780 Do you know what I mean?

00:34:12.420 Well, that's been a long process of weathering and transformation.

00:34:15.320 And the thing is that Christianity isn't a, you know, it's a constantly, I mean, it's best thought of, I think, as a kind of civilization.

00:34:23.400 You would, you know, things evolve and change and different emphases are happening all the time.

00:34:27.020 But this is why I'm asking, because when you talk to Christians today, they will say, say, compare it to Islam, right? 0.81

00:34:33.080 If you say, well, Islam is not as drastic today as it was when it was first created, probably true. 1.00

00:34:38.800 And process of weathering is perfect explanation to my layman understanding.

00:34:43.000 You'll probably rip into this, right?

00:34:44.420 But with Christianity, there was the message of compassion and empathy and turning the other cheek and all of that from the beginning. 0.70

00:34:52.700 So what is it that's being weathered over the 2000 year period?

00:34:55.340 Well, okay, so go back to the issue of paradox.

00:34:59.200 Paul, in his letters, writing to the Galatians, so this is really, I mean, might even be among the earliest of letters.

00:35:06.560 So right at the start of the Christian tradition.

00:35:08.540 He 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.

00:35:16.840 So 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.

00:35:25.400 It's very progressive.

00:35:26.060 Well, he's saying in Christ Jesus.

00:35:29.800 I mean, he's not, the world is fallen.

00:35:33.920 These differences and what stems from these differences are part of the lot of the children of Adam and Eve.

00:35:40.560 You know, we're all part of this fallen world.

00:35:42.840 I mean, that's the gist.

00:35:43.860 But that in Christ, they will be dissolved.

00:35:46.860 This is the heaven that is promised.

00:35:49.160 Now, of course, there is, it's like an acorn from which a great oak will flourish.

00:35:58.800 And I would say that the assumptions that govern a liberal society derive from that.

00:36:07.720 The idea that men and women have an inherent equality, that differences between peoples are, you know, are iniquitous to emphasize.

00:36:20.220 I mean, you know, we'll come to slavery perhaps in due course.

00:36:23.140 But the idea that there should be, I mean, you can see that there is no slave or free.

00:36:31.760 It feeds in the long run into abolitionism.

00:36:33.860 It feeds into the French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution.

00:36:36.900 I mean, these are very, very long-term consequences.

00:36:39.820 I 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.

00:36:48.260 And in due course, Tokyo gets drowned by a tsunami.

00:36:50.680 It's that kind of, that's what it is.

00:36:53.380 But right from the beginning, there is a problem with one of those in particular, which is Paul's assertion that there is no Jew or Greek.

00:37:01.800 He writes, what he means is Judean or Greek.

00:37:05.140 He is a Judean. 0.81

00:37:06.840 He's from Judea.

00:37:08.880 He is therefore a provincial like any other, you know, there are all kinds of people, Judeans, Egyptians, whatever.

00:37:14.840 And he's comparing them to the Greeks.

00:37:17.400 And 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.

00:37:26.680 However, famously, not all Judeans are keen on having their sense of distinctiveness dissolved into a kind of universal mush.

00:37:38.880 And so they do not, in the main, follow Paul's exhortation to accept Christ as Lord.

00:37:45.380 And 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.

00:37:55.920 And that is obviously an incredibly dark shadow that has hung over the entire course of Christianity.

00:38:03.220 But 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.

00:38:12.680 And that is just one verse from one book of the New Testament, which in turn is part of, you know, includes the Old Testament.

00:38:22.380 There 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.

00:38:41.540 Tom, is that why so everyone can drink?

00:38:45.560 So 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.

00:38:58.320 And they come from a Catholic tradition to the way that the British empire behaved.

00:39:05.020 Was that a large part of the way they behaved based on religion or was there something else to it?

00:39:11.160 Well, the Spanish are the first to discover great powers in a world that no one had imagined before.

00:39:21.000 And 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.

00:39:33.680 I played colonization.

00:39:34.820 Okay, but civilization, you know, civilization, you could end up with tanks attacking archers.

00:39:44.740 Yes.

00:39:45.120 And that's basically what you have because the Aztec is kind of bronzed civilization.

00:39:49.240 I 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. 1.00

00:40:03.240 Um, and this innate, and obviously the Spanish interpret this as, as, as an expression of, of kind of God's plan.

00:40:17.020 They're bringing Christ to, to, to people who had previously walked in darkness.

00:40:23.720 If you're someone who values free inquiry and independent thinking, which let's be honest, is why you're probably watching trigonometry, then our sponsor, Venice AI, is the tool for you.

00:40:35.260 Here's a hot take.

00:40:36.540 AI is exploding right now.

00:40:38.460 But seriously, most of the tools out there are just clones with slightly different skins.

00:40:43.320 Venice AI is different.

00:40:45.220 It offers uncensored AI chat, images, and coding.

00:40:48.340 Why should a team of programmers at these leading AI apps be the ones who get to decide what is and isn't okay for you to think?

00:40:54.980 Whether you're researching topics that make other platforms nervous, or you're just sick of being told what you can and can't ask, Venice gives you the freedom to explore without limits.

00:41:04.300 No political filtering, no condescending footnotes, just powerful AI, fast.

00:41:09.160 We've tried it ourselves, and if you're someone who thinks about these things, you'll notice the difference immediately.

00:41:14.320 If you want to use AI without fear of handing over your thoughts, ideas, or personal information to a corporation or the government, you can get 20% off a pro plan using our link, Venice.ai.trigonometry.

00:41:27.220 You'll find the link in the description of this episode, or type it in, V-E-N-I-C-E.ai.trigonometry, and see what you've been missing.

00:41:36.820 And now, back to the show.

00:41:38.300 Sorry 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?

00:41:52.360 Obviously, 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.

00:42:01.960 You know, they wouldn't have conquered what they ended up conquering.

00:42:05.180 The lust for gold becomes notorious.

00:42:09.460 It is absolutely about wanting material goods.

00:42:12.860 But 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.

00:42:26.440 There are absolutely people who are going out there who feel that this is, you know, this is absolutely part of God's plan.

00:42:36.760 And 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.

00:42:59.000 And 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.

00:43:22.100 And they're drawing on Greek philosophy for that.

00:43:24.900 And then there is las Casas, who's saying, no, he's drawing on the Gospels, he's saying, you know, slavery is an evil.

00:43:31.980 These are people who are as worthy of respect as anyone else who has been one for Christ.

00:43:38.680 They must be one for Christ.

00:43:40.420 And you can see there the beginnings of kind of ideas that will feed ultimately into kind of notions of international law.

00:43:50.020 And that's a Catholic perspective.

00:43:51.460 The British, obviously, are Protestant, and therefore they bring a slightly different perspective. 0.96

00:44:00.220 One perspective is that the Spanish are evil.

00:44:03.140 So 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. 0.90

00:44:19.860 I mean, it's very much kind of Protestant black propaganda, I think.

00:44:24.980 But the British have their own route to deciding that slavery is wrong.

00:44:30.420 It's as Christian as the Spanish one, but it's distinctively Protestant.

00:44:36.780 And 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.

00:44:55.500 So the simple words on the page, you know, this is inadequate to properly understand it.

00:45:01.580 You have to have the Spirit.

00:45:02.720 You have to have been granted grace by the Spirit, by God.

00:45:07.800 And when you do that, then you can see what it properly means.

00:45:10.720 And this revolution in England is transported to the Caribbean and it's transported to the American colonies.

00:45:21.560 And so Quakers are the most obvious example, but Baptists and people like that. 1.00

00:45:28.300 And this coincides with the development of plantation slavery in the Caribbean and in the American colonies.

00:45:35.420 And Britain is starting to industrialize by this point.

00:45:42.960 And industrialization is about utilizing resources in a way that is more intensive than has ever been done before.

00:45:53.000 And what that means for slaves is obviously horrendous because you industrialize the process of transporting slaves, of exploiting them, of working them.

00:46:03.380 So 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.

00:46:17.620 And 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.

00:46:32.340 Slavery 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.

00:46:41.040 It's just part of the human condition.

00:46:43.240 But radical Protestants in the 18th century and then into the early 19th century are saying,

00:46:49.460 no, actually, no, actually, it may not say this, but I feel the Spirit is telling me slavery is wrong.

00:46:55.780 And it spreads like a wildfire.

00:46:57.940 And the Spirit is conceptualized by Christians as fire, Pentecostal fire.

00:47:01.940 So 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.

00:47:10.340 And it inspires the first great activist movement in Britain.

00:47:17.260 You have people writing to their MPs.

00:47:19.840 You have demonstrations going through the streets of London demanding the abolition of slavery.

00:47:24.620 And it becomes so unignorable for the government that in 1814, Napoleon has been defeated and sent off to Elba.

00:47:32.240 And there's this Congress in Vienna to redraw the map of Europe.

00:47:38.560 And 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.

00:47:49.500 We've got to sort this out.

00:47:50.680 We've got to abolish the slave trade. 0.90

00:47:53.520 And this carries on even, you know, through Waterloo and the second defeat of Napoleon.

00:47:58.620 And the Protestant tradition that Castlereagh is representing is obviously means nothing to the Catholic powers, to the French, to the Spanish, to the Portuguese.

00:48:10.580 So they draw on those traditions that Las Casas had been articulating.

00:48:16.440 So Catholic traditions.

00:48:17.720 And it gets blended with the Protestant traditions.

00:48:20.440 And 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.

00:48:34.880 So 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.

00:48:48.300 And 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.

00:49:09.100 And 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.

00:49:24.880 And 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.

00:49:37.880 And 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. 0.95

00:49:58.460 So 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. 0.92

00:50:06.720 But essentially, that is the framework of international law that governs, you know, upholds the notions of human rights and so on to this day.

00:50:16.260 Tom, 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.

00:50:30.080 It 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.

00:50:44.980 But the way they talked about it was in the form of original sin.

00:50:50.320 We are born into this sin and we are never going to be washed clean and is an indenable stain on our reputation.

00:50:57.980 And fundamentally, our souls as well.

00:51:00.860 Well, so I think what happens is that slavery comes to be seen as the great sin.

00:51:13.400 I mean, it's clearly a monstrous, appalling crime.

00:51:19.300 But we judge that by Christian standards.

00:51:21.360 We accept it as an appalling crime because we have bought into the assumptions of Las Casas or the Quakers or whatever. 0.99

00:51:29.320 If you look at the entirety of global history, it's not in any way a moral given.

00:51:36.140 Civilizations 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.

00:51:50.020 Or it could be founded on caste, the idea that certain people are born to be inferior.

00:51:54.740 Or it could be upon the exploitation of, you know, proletariats, which you get in the 19th century industrial civilization.

00:52:01.700 You always, you know, there is no form of civilization that is not also a reflection of barbarism, is the kind of the famous quotation.

00:52:11.820 I'm paraphrasing.

00:52:12.600 I can't remember it exactly.

00:52:13.800 Oh, to Benjamin comment.

00:52:15.600 So there's always been exploitation.

00:52:16.980 The 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.

00:52:33.100 And 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. 0.81

00:53:01.120 And it kind of bled into anti-imperialism, moving into the 20th century.

00:53:07.920 Again, the idea that powerful countries shouldn't dominate weaker countries.

00:53:12.960 I mean, most, you know, the history of the world is basically the record of empires.

00:53:18.620 The idea that empires are problematic, to use, you know, a favorite phrase of the woke, is, again, a relatively recent one.

00:53:27.680 And 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.

00:53:40.100 There are more Christians, you know, more Christians than any other kind of practicing ideology in the world.

00:53:46.240 That has come to be seen by lots of people as itself evil.

00:53:55.800 The 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.

00:54:11.260 And so the consequence of that is that today we remain the heirs of these Christian impulses, the notion that slavery is an evil. 0.90

00:54:24.680 But 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.

00:54:49.320 And so I think what you saw in 2020 and its aftermath was a deeply Christian movement.

00:54:57.680 I mean, something that the Quakers in the 18th century would have recognized.

00:55:01.180 The kind of the line of dissent from the activism of Quakers in the 18th century is very, very clear.

00:55:08.820 That's what they're doing.

00:55:10.080 But 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.

00:55:27.380 And 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. 0.83

00:55:47.120 It's very, very, very, these are very, very Christian forms of practice.

00:55:55.260 It's just that they have been divorced from the institutional framework that gave them birth.

00:56:01.220 And so how and where they're developing is unclear.

00:56:04.920 And 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.

00:56:17.700 It's very interesting you mentioned that because we had a super viral, very popular interview we did with a journalist called Richard Minneton,

00:56:23.740 which we talked about some of the ideas from Albion Seed, the idea of how the United States became what it became.

00:56:30.680 And 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.

00:56:41.080 Very interesting.

00:56:42.140 But 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. 0.98

00:56:50.840 And 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.

00:57:02.000 And I'd love to know more about how that religion came into being, what are its core values, what are its principles.

00:57:08.460 You mentioned some of them already, but can you expand on that?

00:57:10.740 Could 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?

00:57:21.200 Because 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.

00:57:36.520 Because essentially what Christianity has that Islam does not is a concept of secular. 0.93

00:57:47.320 And 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.

00:57:57.720 You know, he's famously asked for a coin and there's the picture of Caesar and he says, whose head is this?

00:58:01.640 And he says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God what is God's.

00:58:04.720 And so, so that sense that there is, um, you're talking about the separation of what the Americans call church and state.

00:58:12.960 And 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.

00:58:20.400 And 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.

00:58:36.920 And this is against the backdrop of the collapse of Roman power.

00:58:40.400 Rome has been sacked.

00:58:42.260 And 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.

00:58:49.760 So, 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.

00:58:56.960 Uh, and now we've abandoned these and the Romans call these religiones.

00:59:01.560 So a, uh, uh, you know, a sacrifice or a festival in honor of a God is a religio.

00:59:05.740 It'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.

00:59:16.000 And these religiones have been abandoned.

00:59:18.260 And Augustine says, no, not a bit of it.

00:59:20.440 Um, 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.

00:59:29.640 But it means the notion that everything is, is doomed to, to, to, to, to pass away.

00:59:35.100 All things must pass, as George Harrison would put it.

00:59:37.760 Um, and he says that he, this is true of, of empires as well as of individuals.

00:59:46.040 Rome is not permanent.

00:59:47.340 Rome has no special significance.

00:59:48.700 It will pass away.

00:59:49.700 It is bound upon the cyclum.

00:59:51.300 If you want eternity, you must, you, you, you must bind yourself to the pure eternity of heaven.

00:59:58.080 That's what the, the real religio is.

01:00:00.460 And it's only the church that can give you this religio.

01:00:02.900 So 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.

01:00:11.760 And over the course of, of medieval history, this becomes institutionalized.

01:00:16.760 And 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.

01:00:27.280 It's separated from what has come to be called religion.

01:00:30.580 And this is a mad idea.

01:00:32.580 No other culture has ever had this idea.

01:00:35.380 So, 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.

01:00:50.780 It's, it's, you know, the, the relationship of people to the gods is like the, the gin in a tonic.

01:00:57.020 You can't separate out the gin and the tonic.

01:00:58.800 What, what, what Christianity does is to say, yeah, you can have gin and here's the tonic and you can separate them out.

01:01:05.580 That's, that's the madness of, of the way that we conceptualize the world in the West.

01:01:10.320 And Islam has no concept that you can separate this out. 1.00

01:01:13.600 And 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.

01:01:26.220 They are told, you know, you can, you can practice your religion as you want.

01:01:30.720 Jews didn't have religion. 0.99

01:01:32.380 They, 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.

01:01:37.700 But you can no longer define yourself as a citizen of, of, of, of Israel.

01:01:41.880 You know, you are now a French citizen who practices what comes to be called Judaism as a religion.

01:01:48.240 And 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.

01:02:00.120 And, and Western secular democracies require Muslims to do the same, to, to, to conceptualize what they belong to as being a religion. 0.86

01:02:09.760 But classically, that's not how Muslims understood it.

01:02:12.980 Islam is a totalizing way of leading your life. 1.00

01:02:17.380 There are, there are rules that govern every aspect of your existence.

01:02:22.580 God is manifested in everything that you do.

01:02:25.320 The 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.

01:02:34.860 And I don't think that most, most kind of enthusiasts for liberal secularism understand this.

01:02:44.560 They tend to, I think they, they think that the notion of the secular is something that is common to everybody.

01:02:49.800 That it's kind of like, you know, everyone has a sense of what a tree is.

01:02:52.760 Everyone has a sense of what a dog is.

01:02:54.200 Everyone has a sense of what the secular is.

01:02:56.920 They don't.

01:02:58.080 And 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.

01:03:06.480 The 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.

01:03:13.420 And I guess what you're saying is the central tension there is, theologically speaking, Islam doesn't allow the separation of politics and Islam.

01:03:24.800 If you are a Muslim. 0.58

01:03:26.300 Well, classically, it has.

01:03:27.420 That's why I said theologically speaking.

01:03:29.280 There are, of course, individual people who are able to do so.

01:03:32.240 But within the way that the religion is, if you follow that faith, then that faith controls everything.

01:03:40.300 It controls the way you participate in society, the way you live your life and the way you might vote in a society.

01:03:48.240 Your loyalty will be to that above other things.

01:03:52.220 Is that fair?

01:03:53.280 Summation?

01:03:54.080 Well, ought to be according to the doctrine.

01:03:57.300 All right, people, it's trivia time.

01:03:59.300 Financial trivia, to be exact.

01:04:01.300 Do you know what retirement asset grew the most in the first six months of President Trump's second term?

01:04:06.060 Many of you probably guessed the stock market was the best since what's backing the most retirement accounts in America today is that.

01:04:13.020 But from January the 21st through July 21st, the Dow Jones grew less than 1%.

01:04:18.420 What about Bitcoin?

01:04:20.040 President Trump loves Bitcoin, so it must have performed well, right?

01:04:23.640 Well, it did.

01:04:24.620 It grew nearly 15%.

01:04:26.420 An impressive six-month investment.

01:04:28.740 But it's not the number one.

01:04:30.340 The heavyweight champion was, wait for it, gold and silver.

01:04:33.840 Gold and silver are considered to be safe haven investments, so many of you will be surprised to learn they both grew by a whopping 25% in President Trump's first six months.

01:04:44.760 25% in six months.

01:04:47.240 Not bad for safe haven investments.

01:04:49.480 Our partners, Augusta Precious Metals, specializes in helping Americans move wealth and retirement into self-directed IRAs backed by physical precious metals like gold and silver.

01:04:59.080 They are consistently scored as the most trusted gold IRA company by major financial publications, and they enjoy an A-plus rating with a better business bureau.

01:05:09.200 In a world where governments print money and rack up debt like it's going out of fashion, I like assets you can hold in your hand.

01:05:16.140 That's why I've always taken steps to secure my family's future with gold.

01:05:19.760 If you have over $100,000 in your current IRA, 401k, or other retirement account, visit triggergold.com.

01:05:28.220 That's triggergold.com to learn how Augusta Precious Metals can become your lifelong self-directed IRA partner.

01:05:35.620 As classically understood, Muhammad is a seal of the prophets.

01:05:39.260 He has brought God's last message.

01:05:41.460 And the Quran is a record of humanity's disobedience to prophets. 0.91

01:05:46.120 Prophets 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.

01:05:53.700 Muhammad is the last prophet, and what he teaches mankind is mankind's last hope.

01:06:01.540 If Islam goes, then mankind is doomed. 1.00

01:06:04.880 Everyone will go to hell. 0.98

01:06:06.160 So it's absolutely existential stakes.

01:06:09.360 And the proof that Islam is true, again, classically, is that Islam is triumphant for most of its existence. 1.00

01:06:20.680 I 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. 0.61

01:06:31.180 And 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. 0.81

01:06:47.460 And over the course of the 19th century, most Muslim powers come under either the direct or the indirect hegemony of Christian Western powers. 0.55

01:07:00.140 And so that's a massive, massive shock, and it requires a recalibration of what Islam is. 1.00

01:07:06.280 I mean, the attitude to slavery would be a classic example.

01:07:10.400 The 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. 0.93

01:07:28.120 They thought it was brilliant.

01:07:28.780 And that it's mandated in Islamic scriptures.

01:07:35.860 The 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.

01:07:41.280 And 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.

01:07:52.660 And this has been part of the kind of the great trauma for Muslims in the modern world is how do you adapt it?

01:08:01.360 And essentially what Muslims did was to kind of Protestantise themselves. 0.97

01:08:08.280 So they slightly adopted the sense that, you know, it's in the heart.

01:08:12.420 You know, it may say this in the Koran, go out and crucify people who are offenders against God.

01:08:18.020 But what that actually means is that you should try and be kind to them.

01:08:21.020 I mean, that's the kind of, you know, it's the...

01:08:25.020 So this is the people who say jihad is the internal struggle.

01:08:27.660 Jihad is, yeah, which it kind of, I mean, that is a part of it, but it's not...

01:08:32.880 The entirety of it.

01:08:33.720 It absolutely is not part of it.

01:08:35.540 But yes, absolutely.

01:08:39.640 And so you have the, you know, you look in your heart and therefore you can adjust and adapt the legacy of Islamic society. 1.00

01:08:51.020 The scripture for the modern world, you know, get on the right side of history, all these kind of very Protestant ideas.

01:08:57.540 Or the counter reaction to that is, again, a very Protestant one, which is to go fundamentalist.

01:09:03.720 Because in 20th century Protestantism, you have Protestants who are, you know, faced with Darwin and all this kind of stuff.

01:09:10.740 And they say, we've got to go back and interpret the scriptures literally, which neither Christians or Muslims had ever really done.

01:09:18.660 They have, you know, they have very, very sophisticated, complicated, almost poetic understanding of the scriptures.

01:09:24.880 But fundamentalist Protestants were saying, well, what does the Bible say?

01:09:28.640 It's inerrant.

01:09:29.380 That's what we're going to do.

01:09:30.560 And so Muslims also have adopted that policy.

01:09:33.560 And 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.

01:09:48.960 And so that's, you know, part of the problem.

01:09:51.920 Well, quite.

01:09:52.720 And this is so informative, Tom.

01:09:54.900 I'm so glad we're talking about this, because I'm really keen to understand this from a deep perspective.

01:10:00.400 And 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?

01:10:18.240 For a number of reasons, one of them being the Quran is the literal word of God and the last word of God. 0.85

01:10:24.800 This is kind of the problem.

01:10:26.320 You can't have a reformation if this is it, right?

01:10:30.660 Like, you can't challenge any of it.

01:10:32.500 I think Islam is uniquely indigestible for a secular mindset. 1.00

01:10:38.680 And people don't want to admit that in a way, because there's a default assumption that secular civilization can swallow anything up.

01:10:52.460 There's a kind of arrogance there.

01:10:55.060 The secular civilization of the West is such a broad tent that everyone can be brought into it.

01:11:01.380 But Islam is at least as sophisticated a civilization as the civilization of the Christian West, and a very ancient one.

01:11:16.100 Islam, and for most of its existence, has been much, much more powerful than the Christian world. 0.95

01:11:24.160 And therefore, the idea that it should accommodate itself to what liberal secularists think it should do isn't a given.

01:11:34.780 So Muslims in, say, in a country like Britain, have freedom of religion.

01:11:41.020 But there are lots of Muslims who do not see Islam as a religion because they see religion as a Christian category.

01:11:49.220 Islam is much more than a religion.

01:11:51.180 It's something that saturates every aspect of existence.

01:11:54.460 And therefore, they don't necessarily want that.

01:11:57.700 They want to live in a world where, you know, as has traditionally been the case, Islam is everywhere. 1.00

01:12:06.740 But that is obviously something that the liberal state is not prepared to offer.

01:12:10.120 So there are limits to what secularism and liberalism can and will offer.

01:12:16.000 So what's the obvious question is, and I mean, it's probably an unfair question to ask a historian, but where is this going?

01:12:23.080 I don't know.

01:12:24.780 I'm not a prophet, unlike Mohammed. 1.00

01:12:31.040 I mean, my guess is that Islam, rather in the way that Judaism has done, will accommodate itself to the host society.

01:12:46.800 I mean, that's traditionally what happens.

01:12:49.120 But that there will always be kickback because of what makes Islam distinctive.

01:12:55.220 And also, obviously, the more Muslims there are, the more weight their voices will have. 1.00

01:13:01.900 And so the more under pressure the kind of the secular assumptions of the West will come.

01:13:08.680 And I don't quite know.

01:13:09.620 I don't know where that would go.

01:13:11.040 Because, I mean, the worry for a lot of people is, it's not necessarily Islam.

01:13:18.160 It's that kind of very hard extremist edge of Islam that we see in this country. 1.00

01:13:25.560 And if you go, will that remain?

01:13:29.080 Will it ever be weathered?

01:13:30.580 I mean, these are impossible questions to ask.

01:13:32.700 Because I think that's a worry for a lot of people, Tom.

01:13:37.220 Yeah, I think it is.

01:13:38.760 And if there's no reformation possible, then is this just a continuation?

01:13:42.880 Well, 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. 0.66

01:13:54.660 And Islam has repeatedly been doing that. 1.00

01:13:57.720 It's a constant kind of summons to reform Islam. 0.91

01:14:04.380 And so certainly, you know, the ideologues of the Islamic State would say that they were reformers.

01:14:09.960 That's why they, for instance, completely dismiss any notion of international law.

01:14:15.300 It's why they dismiss notions of human rights.

01:14:17.100 It's why they think that slavery shouldn't just be allowed, but should be positively encouraged because it's in the Quran. 0.79

01:14:23.720 And therefore, if you want to be true to God's message, you should have slavery.

01:14:28.020 I mean, that's a very, very radical minority position.

01:14:33.060 But it is an example of the direction of travel that a certain understanding of the Islamic inheritance can lead people in.

01:14:46.220 And it's, you know, it's, of course, it's a worry.

01:14:49.820 But 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.

01:15:03.720 But you are still a product of Christianity. 0.97

01:15:06.520 Yes.

01:15:06.840 And as a result of that, you look at the world, whether you accept it or not, through Christian eyes. 0.69

01:15:12.680 Yes.

01:15:13.100 And 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.

01:15:22.740 Yeah.

01:15:22.900 Well, 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. 0.55

01:15:40.020 And 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.

01:16:06.760 You know, one will give it a little bit of garnishing from the Gospels, one from the Koran, one from the Bhagavad Gita or whatever.

01:16:13.600 But basically, it's the same core message.

01:16:16.100 And the idea, you know, and this is...

01:16:18.020 And what is that message?

01:16:19.060 Be kind, diversity.

01:16:19.900 Be kind, it's brilliant.

01:16:21.100 Yes, we're all basically the same.

01:16:23.260 There are many roots to God.

01:16:25.480 There are many paths up the mountain.

01:16:26.860 Isn't that all true?

01:16:27.760 No, I don't think it's remotely true.

01:16:29.020 I 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.

01:16:47.080 And 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.

01:16:58.680 Why wouldn't you do it?

01:16:59.860 And that's as true of Athenians in 5th century Athens as it is of us today in 21st century Britain.

01:17:07.820 We just assume that the way we see the world is the way that the world is.

01:17:13.540 But it clearly isn't.

01:17:14.540 And 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.

01:17:41.940 Investing is all about the future.

01:17:44.440 So what do you think is going to happen?

01:17:46.360 Bitcoin is sort of inevitable at this point.

01:17:48.860 I think it would come down to precious metals.

01:17:51.440 I hope we don't go cashless.

01:17:53.560 I would say land is a safe investment.

01:17:56.100 Technology, companies.

01:17:57.280 Solar energy.

01:17:58.280 Robotic pollinators might be a thing. 1.00

01:18:00.880 A wrestler to face a robot.

01:18:02.580 That will have to happen.

01:18:03.840 So whatever you think is going to happen in the future, you can invest in it at Wealthsimple.

01:18:09.760 Start now at Wealthsimple.com.

01:18:13.340 I mean, it's a very powerful point.

01:18:15.840 I guess the next logical question is we've got this new religion, whatever this is, as you've said yourself.

01:18:23.260 But to me, it doesn't seem more a religion.

01:18:25.640 It seems kind of a mishmash of ideologies with no real.

01:18:28.540 That is what religion is.

01:18:29.620 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:18:30.740 I take, I take.

01:18:32.000 You know, that's.

01:18:32.760 But there is no God.

01:18:34.320 But there is no God.

01:18:35.760 And what I was trying to say is there doesn't seem to be a core.

01:18:40.380 And I guess my question.

01:18:41.300 No, it's floating.

01:18:42.400 Yes.

01:18:43.120 And I guess my question is, unpleasant as it may seem, is can society last without this core to it?

01:18:51.760 We will find out.

01:18:52.580 I mean, I would say.

01:18:54.660 That's an optimistic answer.

01:18:55.820 I 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.

01:19:08.400 You know, there are many, many different perspectives.

01:19:12.560 And, and those aren't just political, they're cultural, all kinds of ways.

01:19:17.060 But 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. 0.79

01:19:39.020 Um, it's, it's like the head of the rocket.

01:19:46.020 It's gone through the atmosphere, all, everything else underneath it has been jettisoned.

01:19:50.320 And now it's got the power to blast through the solar system.

01:19:53.040 And 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.

01:19:59.800 It's just baggage.

01:20:00.280 We don't need, it's just baggage.

01:20:01.080 It's gone.

01:20:01.640 It's drifted.

01:20:02.060 It's, you know, it's, it's detritus.

01:20:03.500 Um, 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.

01:20:25.940 And therefore, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's culturally determined.

01:20:31.520 I 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.

01:20:41.180 It's, it's, it's, it's going on its own way.

01:20:42.840 Another, another option, which the history of the 20th century suggests is that the default assumption among humans is that strength and might is right.

01:20:57.680 Power does have a, a glamour and this is what Nietzsche predicted.

01:21:02.000 You 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.

01:21:09.740 And 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. 0.74

01:21:21.780 In a way, one of the reasons I think for the decline of institutional Christianity is that Hitler has taken the place of the devil. 0.75

01:21:29.300 Um, and that, that, that a modern liberal now, rather than ask, what would Jesus do?

01:21:34.160 As his Victorian forebear would have done says, what would Hitler do?

01:21:37.400 And does the opposite.

01:21:38.100 Uh, 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.

01:21:50.560 So 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?

01:22:08.160 I'm very rich.

01:22:08.820 I'm very powerful.

01:22:09.660 Why shouldn't I do exactly what I like?

01:22:11.760 And 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.

01:22:19.940 And 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.

01:22:32.060 Maybe I, you know, maybe I should take this a bit more seriously than I have been.

01:22:35.260 And there are kind of things, I think, tentative signs that that might be happening.

01:22:38.800 What's fascinating is, I would argue, there are signs of all three of those things happening.

01:22:42.560 Of course.

01:22:42.820 And that's what I'm saying is that all of these things might be happening.

01:22:45.180 And of course, we will also have the growth of Islam.

01:22:47.960 So that also provides a fourth option.

01:22:51.520 Um, and quite how all these different traditions will cope with each other.

01:22:57.000 Oh, you know, it's going to be interesting.

01:22:58.920 But, but doesn't it also, he seems very excited about this for reasons that are beyond it.

01:23:03.340 Well, you know, I think, I mean, I think.

01:23:05.260 I think we are living through one of the.

01:23:06.880 You're going to get some fascists. 0.92

01:23:08.580 You're going to get the rise of Islam. 1.00

01:23:10.380 You're going to get these woke idiots running around, ruining everything. 1.00

01:23:12.900 And what was the other one? 1.00

01:23:14.060 Oh, the resurgence of Christianity.

01:23:15.700 I mean, that's the one I'm most happy with.

01:23:16.720 So 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.

01:23:26.400 And Western civilization.

01:23:27.640 Yeah, absolutely.

01:23:28.380 And, you know, in terms of British history, we've had periods where the culture of, say, just looking specifically at England has radically changed.

01:23:40.000 So the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution.

01:23:43.180 And I think that, that we are on the verge of going through something similar now.

01:23:50.420 Brilliant.

01:23:50.800 And I don't know where it's going to go.

01:23:52.340 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:53.180 I mean, people, people in, you know, 1790, looking at Birmingham or Manchester would have had no idea where that was going.

01:24:02.580 But it, everything changed and, and maybe we're going through something, we're on the verge of going through something similar now.

01:24:09.700 Well, at least you said it with a smile on your face, Tom.

01:24:12.120 Brilliant.

01:24:12.940 But I was going to say just one thing.

01:24:15.260 Doesn't this talk about an arrogance of our culture?

01:24:20.100 But all cultures are arrogant. 1.00

01:24:21.540 I was going to say that. 0.95

01:24:22.980 They are.

01:24:24.000 But aren't we especially arrogant to think we can divorce society?

01:24:27.600 No, that's your arrogance showing me.

01:24:29.020 Yes.

01:24:29.320 Am I not really special about thinking I'm special?

01:24:32.960 Yeah, I am special.

01:24:34.340 The mother said so, but, um, no, she didn't.

01:24:36.400 But I was going to say.

01:24:38.020 Explains the comedy career, mate.

01:24:40.080 But thinking that we can, surely aren't we the only society that has ever thought we can divorce culture and religion? 0.80

01:24:47.620 Yes.

01:24:48.620 We are.

01:24:50.840 Is that not arrogant?

01:24:52.240 Yeah, it is arrogant.

01:24:53.180 But 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.

01:25:04.380 Um, and therefore, basically, we've, you know, we've got the answer.

01:25:07.640 And I think, obviously, that, that now rubs up against all kinds of anxieties about, um, Western exceptionalism.

01:25:14.420 But I think it does.

01:25:15.620 The idea that, um, our secular liberal society is uniquely advanced.

01:25:26.120 I mean, to be progressive is itself a very Western thing.

01:25:29.980 And if you're progressive, you're progressing ahead of everybody else.

01:25:33.220 I mean, a sense of arrogance is baked into that word, I would argue.

01:25:36.420 Well, it's going to be a very interesting time.

01:25:40.280 Uh, Tom, thank you so much.

01:25:41.320 It's always such a pleasure speaking with you.

01:25:42.840 We're going to ask you a bunch of questions from our supporters, which they've submitted.

01:25:46.580 Uh, but before we do, uh, what's the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:25:52.140 Before Tom answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our Substack.

01:25:57.240 The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.

01:26:00.320 What's required in the character traits of a historian to engage hostile audiences with their most controversial academic insights?

01:26:09.380 Is Christianity's resurgence in the West a response to Islam's growing presence? 1.00

01:26:14.580 What has Tom changed his mind about during his career?

01:26:17.420 Well, um, I, have you talked about, um, the, uh, cultural and social significance of sport on your...

01:26:30.320 We have not.

01:26:30.940 Um, I, I, I think that because, um, uh, we've just had this incredible climax to a cricket series.

01:26:40.000 Um, and I went on the Today programme this morning to talk about it and was reminded...

01:26:47.040 I, I went to the Oval yesterday where it was played and the sense of tension was unbearable.

01:26:51.500 And I'd been through this, um, quarterfinal in the Champions League where Villa, who we were talking about earlier, had played against PSD.

01:27:00.120 And that also had been so excruciating.

01:27:03.680 And I realised that these are the two moments where I have lived most fully this year.

01:27:08.960 And that is, I am just one person among millions, perhaps billions, who share in experiences like that.

01:27:16.100 And it is obviously part of an enormous, vast, global, industrialised, um, construct.

01:27:26.340 I mean, it's enormous.

01:27:28.560 And the way that this has evolved, the fact that we take it for granted, I said, it, it suddenly struck me.

01:27:35.940 This is very odd.

01:27:37.160 This is, this is something I've always taken for granted that actually is very, very strange and unusual.

01:27:42.380 So maybe, maybe something on that.

01:27:44.940 Excellent.

01:27:45.380 Uh, head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where we ask Tom your questions.

01:27:52.500 Apocalyptic millenarian cults have played an important part of Western Christianity's history and culture.

01:27:58.480 Do you see any similarities in today's movements which would indicate the emergence of such cults in the present day?

01:28:15.380 Ap spoiler?

01:28:15.860 See, there's a situation where we ask Tom your questions.

01:28:20.820 Yeah, I know, hi.

TRIGGERnometry - September 07, 2025

Historian Tom Holland： Islam, Christianity & the West

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript