Dominion summary

Paul was traveling to Damascus when he suddenly saw a blinding light. To him, it could only be one thing: a sign that Jesus was indeed the son of God. Paul would devote the rest of his life to spreading the news despite the danger – and even physical punishment – of promoting a new religion. 

The only thing that mattered, Paul wrote time and time again to scholars in cities around the Mediterranean, was love. All you had to do was believe in Christ’s story. This mattered – not being born into the right family or studying in the right schools. Paul argued that by taking on the nature of an enslaved person, and enduring a humiliating, excruciating death, the son of God had shown that anyone could be redeemed. 

Meanwhile, in Egypt’s ancient Alexandria, Christianity was setting up a worldview through which Jewish and Greek thought were able to mingle. Writing in Greek, the scholar Origen championed Jewish scriptures as the so-called Old Testament, to be enshrined by Christians as well as Jews. Origen also studied a critical question: How could Christians say there was only one God if they also worshipped his son? 

The unity of God, he argued, was in a trinity: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

By the end of the fifth century CE, it was only in the deepest, most remote European countryside that one could find people practicing the old religions. In these pagan religions and cults, as well as increasingly in Judaism, Christians saw darkness and evil. This evil had a face: a new force called Satan. 

To stamp out the last vestiges of paganism, monasteries and convents endorsed by the growing power of the Papacy in Rome were founded in the remote reaches of Europe. Men and women flocked to them, attracted by two passions: they wanted to fight evil, and they strived to confess their sins to regain God’s favor. 

The Papacy wanted to consolidate power, and it needed a plan. Pope Gregory VII came up with a scheme that was both sinister and extremely effective. He deemed that heretics, or those suspected of heresy, could be burned alive. His agents got to work – and soon Europeans were put to the fire in extraordinary numbers. 

Across Europe, people who witnessed those executions decided it was probably unwise to question the Church.

Many in Europe thought the Papacy itself was in need of reformation. It didn’t seem to be making things on Earth that much better. Plague and war were ravaging the continent, and Ottoman Turks were nipping at Europe’s eastern borders. 

Meanwhile, in Spain, an Italian called Christopher Columbus was making a case to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. He wanted them to fund his quest: an expedition to discover a shorter route to India. The profits, Columbus promised, would go to a sacred cause – they’d help take Jerusalem from Arab rule. The royals were sold. And, in 1492, Columbus set sail. 

By the late sixteenth century, Europe was tearing itself apart. 

Thirty years of war in Europe between Protestants and Catholics led to millions of deaths. People wanted to escape the bloodshed, even if that meant hardship and uncertainty. In 1620, a ship called the Mayflower left England and set out for America. Its passengers saw themselves as humanity’s only hope. Their plan was to live purely; they even called themselves Puritans. 

Voltaire dreamed of a brotherhood of man. But his ideas were based in Christian thought, just like almost everything else in French society. To separate France from its Christian roots would require a violent thrust. 

It came in 1793, as the sans-culottes – peasants and laborers who’d been ignored by society for centuries – set out to change France forever. Their revolution was anything but peaceful. In their fervor, people who wanted to destroy the old world set upon the basilicas with sledgehammers and smashed statues of saints. 

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the defenders of Christianity had added a new weapon to their arsenal: so-called natural theology. The life cycle of a butterfly, pastors said, was evidence of God’s grace – only divine will, they claimed, could create something that complicated and beautiful. 

The argument sounded convincing enough until, in 1860, everything changed. That was the year Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Darwin said that human existence – and, indeed, the whole living world – was a product of evolution, not God. 

World War I traumatized the whole of Europe and helped spawn something much, much darker than anything its survivors could have ever imagined. In Germany, a charismatic young politician called Adolf Hitler set up a new movement: National Socialism. 

Originally, he said he supported Christian ideas. But by 1933, Hitler began to see Christianity as a challenge to his totalitarian mission. He thought Germans would never fulfill their racial destiny while adhering to Christian compassion.