As a teacher, I try to keep abreast of current issues in my profession generally, as well as trends within my subject areas (philosophy, religion, and ethics) more specifically. One of the most popular online venues for teachers of RE is the REspect facebook group (formally Save RE). There’s a lot I could write about this group, but I’m going to focus on one relatively minor trend which I’ve picked up on over the last few months: the general responses, by fellow RE teachers, to Tom Holland’s book Dominion.
Obviously it’s difficult to give a definitive description of the overall feeling across the whole of this online community. One never knows what facebook, in all its algorithmic wisdom, has decided not to show in my feed. But from my experience lately, it seems that Tom Holland’s representation of Christianity—as our culture’s primary forebear—has not been well-received by many teachers of RE.
“Biased”, and “wrong” are some of the charges laid against Holland by my RE-teaching colleagues. I find these kinds of responses disappointing (though not surprising, for reasons I’m sure I’ll go into another time). Disappointing because, to me, it’s obvious that Holland’s thesis is largely correct: our modern western civilisation, with its associated values, is the inescapable result of two millenia of Christianity. Holland argues this at length, and in some depth, so I won’t rehearse his thoughts here (and I really recommend that you read the book for yourself!) What I will do, though, is throw some light on a hidden, deeper level to the objections raised against Holland.
The go-to response from much of the teaching profession these days, towards anything remotely pro-religion, tends to be one of disdain and ridicule (if not outright opposition). RE, despite its inevitable subject matter, is not immune. Even from the ‘inside’ as it were, RE suffers similar attacks, and even from its own practitioners. Why is this? Let’s interrogate some specific responses to Holland’s contribution, in order to try and understand this phenomenon as it is played-out in RE circles.
The attacks on Holland’s thesis can be roughly categorised under the following two objections:
- Our values can be found in cultures which pre-date Christianity
- Favouring one religion’s narrative is biased
The first objection is a bit odd. The argument seems to go, “there are examples of these things we attribute to Christianity occuring in earlier cultures, therefore we don’t need Christianity to have these things.” This is a bit like someone who’s noticed my nose is near-identical to my father’s telling me, “you’ve inherited your dad’s nose,” and me replying, “nonsense! There were big noses around for hundreds of years before my dad was even born!” Of course, there probably were, but the point is that my nose came from my dad. I can’t very well claim that my nose owes nothing whatever to my dad’s, and that somehow my nose was passed to me, through no clear connection, from amongst the other big noses of antiquity. But this is precisely what the first objection seems to be proposing (through its various iterations of “there were human rights, democracy and equality before Christianity” arguments), thereby denying the Chrsitian genealogy of modern life. And actually, history reveals that there really weren’t any of these things, in any recognisable sense, anywhere other than the Judeo-Christian tradition.
What Holland’s book does, is to chart the actual historical connection between our current culture, and the Christianity which gave birth to it. To argue that our particular values come to us via some other route would require that you detail, or chart, this alternative route – before you discount Holland’s scholarly work.
With the second objection—that Holland biases Christianity—we find a curious assumption: suggesting that, for something to be valid, it must give consideration to every point of view. This is a strange assumption, to say the least, and for similar reasons to those which countered the first objection. The subtitle to Holland’s book is “How the Christian Revolution Remade the World”*, so one would expect Christianity to be the focus; again, for reasons that he himself argues at length. What I suspect is really happening with the “bias” objection, is simply using a charge or “not fair” in order to dismiss Hollands thesis out of hand, without properly engaging with the facts.
*The most recent editions of Dominion have a different subtitle: “The Making of the Western Mind,” but my point remains valid.
Paul S. Baker 