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How to Write About Christianity While Knowing Nothing About It
Alice Roberts has a gift. Few can make stones live the way she does. An archaeologist by training, a storyteller by nature, she takes broken tiles and battered fragments and makes them shine. Roman ruins gain a voice, altars rise again, and the past presses close. But when people step into her tale, when faith and conviction enter the picture, the poetry fades. Her new book, Domination, is where the awe ends and the arrogance begins.
Christianity, she says, was nothing more than Rome’s second act, empire dressed up as faith.
Roberts sets out to explain how Christianity, born in Judea’s dust, grew into a force that reshaped the world. Her thesis is rather blunt: the Roman Empire never truly fell. It simply shifted shapes. Christianity, she says, was nothing more than Rome’s second act, empire dressed up as faith. (RELATED: Christianity at the Crossroads)
It’s a tidy tale, but one that reduces human beings to pawns. Roberts refuses to allow that believers might have meant what they said, or that faith could matter more than politics. That refusal drains her account of depth. The bishops of Nicaea become nothing but schemers. Creeds are recast as cover stories. Doctrines turn into dismal propaganda. Of course, politics mattered. No one denies it. But to claim it was only politics is to turn history into a cartoon. In her telling, Christians are either con men or fools. (RELATED: Nicaea’s Echo: The Creed)
Her treatment of Saint Paul shows this most clearly. She paints him as a fiendish fraud, a salesman peddling stock. Yet his letters burn with urgency. He argued, pleaded, contradicted himself, circled back again and again like a man who knew the stakes were eternal. He faced hostile cities and tied himself to communities he barely knew. He carried the gospel from its Jewish roots into the Roman world, reshaping not only theology but the moral order of the West. To dismiss him as a charlatan is like dismissing Beethoven as a piano player for hire or Shakespeare as a ticket hawker.
At the heart of Domination sits a fatal flaw. Roberts assumes that because Christianity shaped politics, it must have sprung from politics. Because bishops lived in palaces, the gospel must be a scam. Because faith built empires, faith itself must be counterfeit. By that logic, every great human endeavor would be worthless. Democracy discarded because demagogues exploit it. Science rejected because governments use it for war. Art dismissed because rich men hang it on their walls. What Roberts calls sharp insight is really just cynicism with citations.
Take her treatment of the island saints. She jokes about Columba and Aidan for founding monasteries on Iona and Lindisfarne, noting they weren’t truly isolated since trade routes passed nearby and the mainland was visible. True enough, but so what? The point was never to disappear. It was to confront power from a place of stark contrast. From Lindisfarne, you look straight toward Bamburgh Castle. Each day, the king in his fortress saw across the water men who owned nothing, carried no swords, and yet commanded attention. Their poverty preached. Their humility defied. Their presence rebuked worldly power. Roberts notices geography, but she misses the gospel.
The pattern repeats. She marvels at glorious manuscripts, then mocks the monks who made them. She admires the arches of cathedrals, then sneers at the faith that stacked stone upon stone. It is like gazing at the Cross and calling it carpentry.
Her conclusion is as laughable as it is lamentable. The church, she insists, was really a corporation — with CEOs, franchises, and products to sell. But that is our world she’s describing, not theirs. Corporations don’t create martyrs who choose death over denial. They don’t carve art that still unsettles a thousand years later. (RELATED: The Digital Crucifixion of Christianity)
And if Christianity was only Rome in new robes, why did it keep producing movements that unsettled Rome’s own logic? Why did it give rise to men and women who defied emperors, toppled idols, and unnerved tyrants? Why did it continue to shake the very order it supposedly existed to serve?
Roberts claims to stand for humanism. But her version of humanism is heartless and hopeless. Suspicious of belief. Contemptuous of transcendent values. Dismissive of longing. It drains humanity of the very things that make us human: our hunger for meaning, our sense of wonder, our refusal to accept that life is nothing more than survival of the fittest.
Christianity did not conquer the empire by copying it. It triumphed by offering what the empire never could: dignity for the despised, and a purpose beyond power. It spread not by promising palaces but by proclaiming a kingdom not made by hands. That, not politics in disguise, explains why slaves and fishermen embraced it, why emperors knelt before it, and why its cathedrals still tower while Rome’s legions lie in dust.
Roberts has written a book about Christianity while refusing to admit what gave it force. On the cover, she calls herself “Professor,” a pretentious flourish from an unserious writer presuming to tackle the most serious subject in history and failing spectacularly. In the end, Domination does what reductionism always does. It explains everything while understanding nothing.
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