The book of the year – and so I said in this paper’s roundup – is surely Tom Holland’s Dominion, which establishes, I think conclusively, that Christianity is the fons et origo of our idea of human rights and that of equality, including the equality of men and women.

The book of the year – and so I said in this paper’s roundup – is surely Tom Holland’s Dominion, which establishes, I think conclusively, that Christianity is the fons et origo of our idea of human rights and that of equality, including the equality of men and women. Indeed, he could have gone further and, like Larry Siedentop in his groundbreaking Inventing the Individual, attributed the very idea of the individual to Christianity. A copy of Holland’s book should be under every Catholic Christmas tree, if only to cheer us all up.

But I wonder whether we should, as the common parlance has it, “own” the excesses of liberal humanitarianism to which the idea of rights and equality has given rise in our own time, at least in the Anglophone world and especially in our universities. All the aspects of the culture that are so intensely aggravating ultimately derive from these values – the cult of victimhood, the notion of checking your privilege, the abnormal sensitivity to any language that might possibly give offence to anyone, the perpetual willingness to take offence on behalf of others, the idea of safe spaces, the elevation of the rights of minorities (most recently trans or non-binary individuals) over that of the majority – the idea of calling out anything which might conceivably offend against the correct way of thinking. All this ultimately derives, I’d say, from the Christian cult of the underdog, the exaltation of the humble, the revolutionary idea that the last shall be first. And that holds true even if young people show every sign of indifference to Christianity. As one humorist put it years ago: “The meek have inherited the earth … now look at it.”

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