by Sebastian Milbank, The Critic
Alice Roberts misunderstands Christianity and its success
If you hastily grab a copy of Tom Holland’s Dominion from Waterstones, only to reach into your bag and gaze in profound confusion at Alice Roberts’s Domination, you can’t be blamed too much. Quite apart from the similarity of the names, they address the same fundamental question: how did Christianity come to be the dominant force in Western culture?
It’s a fascinating subject, and in the hands of a more capable or objective writer, it would have made for a gripping book. Unfortunately, Roberts is Vice President of Humanists UK, and the book is written as a thinly veiled and poorly researched polemic against Christianity. I can save readers a great deal of time here — her view is that Christianity’s success was due to its usefulness to elites, and that its members were primarily motivated by the desire for wealth and power. That is a precise summary of her view, and at no point in the book does it become more nuanced or complex than that.
I am a keen fan of popular history, and of grand narratives. But Robert’s book is a perfect example of where it goes wrong. She is not an historian or even an archeologist. She has no education in the humanities and is essentially self-taught. I would not bring these facts up if she had written a book that was original but somewhat flawed. Instead, she has done what self-taught people so often do — reproduced a garbled partial version of well-trodden arguments and themes.