Alice Roberts, Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity, (Simon and Schuster, 2025), 413 pp.

There is no shortage of excellent books on both the end of the Roman Empire and on the formation of Christendom. Most are by expert historians, many are recent and several are highly accessible works aimed at the general reader. So it may be wondered why another such book has been released and why a non-historian – a biologist – would be considered the best person to write it. At first glance, Alice Roberts’ book seems to be a new, if slightly unnecessary, addition to this topic. Closer inspection shows, however, that this is a book with an agenda – something that usually bodes ill for objectivity and accuracy in a supposed history book by a non-specialist. And in this case, the results are warped, simplistic and reductionist as a result.

It is somewhat puzzling that anyone thought this book by Alice Roberts was necessary at all. There are plenty of fairly recent books on the fall of the Western Roman Empire and plenty on the conversion of western Europe to Christianity and the rise of Western Christendom. For full and scholarly analysis of the conversion, we have Richard Fletcher’s standard study The Conversion of Europe (1997) and on the rise of Christendom it is hard to go past Judith Herrin’s The Formation of Christendom (1989). Then there is Peter Brown’s magisterial The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (1996, 2012), which covers both subjects and far more besides. All of these are highly readable, careful works of objective history by leading experts at the height of their powers.

If we want less academic works aimed at a more general audience we can turn to Bart Ehrman’s The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, (2018 – reviewed here); a book by a skilled public educator with a talent for making complex history easy to understand. Perhaps slightly more academic but still highly accessible and even more recent is Peter Heather’s excellent Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion (2022). Heather is careful, expert, suitably comprehensive, objective, fair, judicious and an elegant writer – all things, as we will see, Roberts is not. So why this book from Roberts? There seem to be a couple of things in play here.

The first is the nature of today’s publishing industry. In a period of decreasing marketing budgets for publishers, an author with “name recognition” is preferred over some writer or academic the general buying public has never heard of. Thus the recent proliferation of novels by movie stars, self-help books by social media “influencers” and cook books by reality TV contestants. To this list we can add history books by unqualified TV presenters. Alice Roberts has a background in anatomy and doctorate in paleopathology. It was this specialisation in the study of ancient bones that led to her appearances as an specialist in this area on the popular British archaeology TV show Time Team; first as an occasional expert and then as a semi-regular presenter. This associated her with archaeology and history in the public’s mind and, as a telegenic and appealing TV presenter with suitable “name recognition”, some publishing deals followed.

Until now her books have tended to stick to her area of expertise: paleopathology and its application in archaeology. So her books Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials (2021), Buried: An Alternative History of the First Millennium in Britain (2022) and Crypt: Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond (2024) all dealt with bodies, bones and burials. They also sold well, and it appears her publisher, Simon and Schuster, was keen for a new book to keep up the run of success. So why the swerve away from pop paleopathology and archaeology to Late Roman and Early Medieval history; complex and technical subjects in which Roberts has no expertise at all? And why the already well-trodden topic of the rise of Christendom?

This appears to be because of the other hat that Roberts wears: the former president and current vice-president of Humanists UK. Roberts is not simply an unbeliever, as I am, but also an activist. Of course, there is nothing wrong with that if you are into that kind of thing, but – as the articles on this site over the last decade have shown – anti-religious activists can get some very strange and very wrong ideas about history. And here Roberts is a serial offender.

For example, in January 2023 she was opining on Twitter/X, commenting that “the Roman Empire adopted a particular state religion [Christianity] and … this religion then dominated politics & economies across Europe for centuries”, noting tartly that she did not think this means “that religious institutions ‘built’ western civilisation” and adding the Church “influenced it certainly – often negatively”. As we will see, this is pretty much the whole thesis of Domination. When someone questioned this reading of history and noted the role of monastic and other Church institutions in the preservation of learning after the fall of the Western Empire, Roberts countered “You’re forgetting the book-burning. So much classical scholarship was destroyed by the early church.”

As discussed here at length before, the idea that a large amount of Classical learning was deliberately destroyed by the Church in wanton acts of “book-burning” is a hoary myth beloved by anti-theist activists, despite it being based largely on their imaginations and being countered by masses of evidence and detailed scholarship (see The Great Myths 8: The Loss of Ancient Learning for other examples of this myth being propagated by people who should know better and for the actual history here). Unsurprisingly, and it seems characteristically, when I dared to challenge the good “Prof Alice Roberts” to back up this dramatic claim she responded by … blocking me. Others have had the same experience: it seems Roberts is highly sensitive about mere peons doubting her pronouncements and has a hair trigger when it comes to silencing them on social media.

More recently she was at it again, this time peddling another myth: that various Christian feasts and festivals are actually pagan in origin. So she assured her many thousands of followers that Christmas and Easter are “both built on pre-Christian festivals”.

But, again, as has been detailed here several times, this is a glib pop history factoid that is often repeated despite being almost entirely wrong. Easter has pretty much no “pagan origin” at all and the only connection it has with any “pre-Christian festivals” is distantly indirect. Its name in English comes from the Anglo-Saxon month name “Eosturmonath” (April), which in turn was named after the obscure goddess Eostre because, as Bede tells us, feasts were held for her in that month. Since Easter often falls in April it took on the month name. But this is not the origin of the feast, which had existed for centuries before it came to Anglo-Saxon England, and nothing of the traditions associated with it can be traced to anything pagan or even pre-Christian (see Easter, Ishtar, Eostre and Eggs for the details and scholarship here). Some pre-Christian elements may be preserved in a few older Christmas traditions, but the date is not pagan in origin and most traditions, including ones often wrongly claimed to be ancient and “pagan”, are actually very modern or at least firmly post-Christian (see Pagan Christmas, Again. on all this). So the biologist professor is wrong again.

But note the key word she uses in her tweet above: “[Christianity] dominated politics & economies across Europe for centuries”. The idea of domination is key to understanding her view of Christian history: thus the title of her book. More than one reviewer or commentator has also noted the similarity between her title – Domination – and that of Tom Holland’s recent influential bestseller, Dominion (2019). This appears to be no coincidence.

Holland’s book explores a fairly simple and actually largely uncontroversial idea: given Christianity’s long standing predominance in Western Europe for many centuries, it clearly has had a vast influence on western thought and culture. Holland goes on to contrast our ideas about things like universal human rights, charity for unconnected strangers, care for the weak etc. with the very different and, to us, alien or even repugnant views of the ancients. And so he argues that our views are so starkly different to theirs because these things, which we tend to regard as simply natural or normal, are actually Christian in origin.

Many have found his book thoughtful, insightful and persuasive. But others have been displeased with an argument that, to them, seems to make Christianity too much of a force for good in history. That is very much against the thematic drive of the kind of anti-theistic activism that Roberts champions. Holland’s arguments are actually quite nuanced and fairly balanced and his book hardly shies away from the ugly, brutal or exploitative aspects of Christianity’s influence. This has not stopped some of his critics from caricaturing his book as arguing Christianity is unique in the things he highlights, that they had no pre-Christian parallels or precursors or that it is blameless, or wholly moral and good. As we have seen here, some of these critics have gone to great lengths to damn an elaborate straw man version of Holland’s arguments, despite not actually bothering to read his book.

Roberts makes no overt mention of Holland or Dominion, but there are some broad hints that its success and influence drove her to turn from books on her actual area of expertise and strike out boldly into complex historical territory, despite no background in Late Roman and Early Medieval history. In her introductory section Roberts refers to unnamed people who have stressed the uniqueness of Christianity to the point where:

… any ideas or practices that emerged within a Christian framework or setting are seen as entirely de novo inventions. (Some theologians and historians have been guilty of doing this in the past, treating concepts of morality and charity as uniquely Christian, for instance.) (p. xvii)

It should be noted it is not at all clear that this refers to Holland, partially because “in the past” is unlikely to refer to a book published just six years ago, though possibly also because Holland does not actually do this – the entire first third of his work is about the pre-Christian origins and precursors of the elements explored in the rest of his book. But a later passage is rather more likely to be aimed at him. In a section discussing the role of charity and support of the poor in the Late Roman and Early Medieval churches, Roberts observes:

Some historians – a few even writing quite recently – have suggested that the Christian Church effectively invented charity. It’s true that Christianity enshrined an ideal of altruism, where wealthy people were expected to provide for those less fortunate. But this certainly wasn’t a new idea, as is very easily demonstrated, and neither was it exclusively Christian. (p. 244)

Holland, in fact, does not say any such thing, though – as noted above – some of his critics do not limit themselves to engaging with his actual arguments and in some cases even see actually reading his book as entirely optional. In her conclusion Roberts makes another pointed reference to unnamed people who she imagines, probably correctly, will disagree with her arguments:

I’m sure that apologist historians (including some who claim not to be Christian, but seem to be suffering some kind of Stockholm syndrome) and theologians, and lots of other people who want to believe that organised religion is about something other than money or power, will be queuing up to shoot me down on this. (p. 368)

Again, since he is not actually named, we cannot be sure Holland is in mind here. Though it fits with the way his critics try to mischaracterise him as a crypto-apologist. So maybe the name of the book and these oblique references have absolutely nothing to do with Dominion or Tom Holland. Whoever they are aimed at, Roberts makes it clear they are wrong and she needs to set things straight by presenting what she calls “a surprising idea about what the Church actually was” and sets out to do no less than “shed a light on how it became so successful in such a short time.” (pp. xii-xiii). Her publisher’s blurb breathlessly assures us she will “[lift] the veil on secrets that have been hidden in plain sight.” And no less a luminary than actor and comedian Stephen Fry assures us from the front cover that her book is “a historical thriller of the highest quality.” So, as we begin her book expectations have certainly been set high.

A Study in Contrasts

She begins innocuously enough. In fact, the first half or even first two thirds of the book, despite initial promises of veils being lifted on secrets and no less than the revelation of what the Church “really was“, is pretty ordinary stuff. Slightly pedestrian stuff, to be honest. In the first part of the book the reader is brought along on the author’s visits to particular places, with descriptions how they are today, then exposition of their historical significance, and then contextualisation of this in some aspect of the period. This is a very familiar and even quite cosy format, reminiscent of the kind of TV documentary series in which Roberts made her name. In this common and, by now, slightly hackneyed formula, the celebrity presenter, clad in a Gore-Tex jacket, walks toward the camera through a field, gesturing enthusiastically while expounding on standing stones, long barrows or Romano-British villas. And often then happens across a conveniently-placed and similarly-clad archaeologist or academic historian who can give the viewer more detailed information.

So Roberts begins with this kind of “investigative journey” (p. xii) format, though as we move toward the middle of the book it begins to bog down quite a bit, with a lot of contextualising exposition and summary. The book is aimed at the general reader, so this is obviously necessary, given most people do not know their duces from their foederati. The trick with this kind of thing is to keep it lively, but unfortunately Roberts is no sparkling prose stylist. In many places the book feels like reading page after page of Wikipedia entries; workmanlike summaries of material that parse more like expanded student lecture notes than engaging story-telling. Some elements of her prose style also start to grate once you notice them. Roberts regularly uses parenthetical comments – for qualifying statements, noting exceptions, making asides or several other purposes – with these coming at a rate of at least one or two or even more per page. Perhaps a more vigorous editor could have smoothed these and other examples of lumpy prose made and made the book read less like amateur work.

This is exacerbated by a feeling, at least for anyone who knows the periods and topics well, that Roberts really does not. There is no sense of someone who is drawing on years of deep reading of the sources and engagement with the scholarship providing a well-founded overview for those for whom this is unknown material. On the contrary, there is more than a little feel of an undergraduate essay written by someone who has crammed the night before. Roberts refers to podcasts twice. To be fair, one of these is a reference to Melvyn Bragg’s excellent In Our Time BBC Four radio series and podcast and quotes Cardiff University’s Professor of Archaeology, John Hines discussing the life of Saint Cuthbert (Thu 28 Jan 2021). But this does not give the strong impression of someone with skill and expertise in the relevant subjects, rather someone who is learning as she goes. Well, an “investigative journey” of sorts, I suppose.

It is very hard, however, not to contrast this with similar works by writers who do know the periods and material and have years of experience in expounding on them, often to audiences of bored undergraduate students. Academics with a genuine skill for this kind of thing – like Bart Ehrman – make it look easy, and it is not until you contrast his writing with that of someone like Roberts that the difficulty of doing it well becomes clear. Certainly Peter Heather’s book mentioned above, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion , shows what it looks like when a seasoned expert historian turns their hand to similar themes and materials.

This contrast is made even more sharp if, as I did, you read Heather’s book in parallel with Roberts’. Heather is the real deal: Professor of Medieval History at Kings College London, with almost 40 years experience in the detailed study of Late Roman history, particularly the Germanic peoples and their interactions with the Roman Empire. His book on the rise of Christendom is a something of departure for him, given many of his previous works have been technical academic texts or on narrower topics. But he has reached the point in his career where he can distil decades of research, reading and deep thought into broader themes and had been doing so more since his The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (2005) and other works of synthesis and analysis for a wider audience in the last two decades.

Heather does not make any promises of revealing hidden secrets or the “true” nature of Christianity. But, in an interesting, judicious and wise introduction, he notes that previous generations of scholars tended, perhaps unavoidably and largely unconsciously, to write as though the success of Christianity in western Europe was somehow natural and inevitable. This was partly due to most of them being Christian believers themselves, though also in no small part due to the extent of that success making it hard to conceive of alternative outcomes. Heather notes that we now stand in a time when different perspectives are more possible, especially since the decline in religious belief in the West makes that seeming inevitability less obvious. He also notes his own lack of religious belief, laying this out at the outset with a little musing about what this may mean about his capacity for analysis – something Roberts, it should be noted, most definitely does not do.

I have been acutely conscious throughout of my many deficiencies. Perhaps the greatest, it might be argued, is the fact that I am not myself a Christian believer. I still love to go (occasionally) to church, and find deep inspiration in some Christian teachings, above all the Easter message that new hope can often be found even in the midst of deepest despair. All that said, I could not call myself anything more than a thoroughly lapsed Anglican. (Heather, p. xxiv)

So he asks “the old chestnut (beloved of old-style general history examiners) of whether the history of religion is best written by believers or non-believers” and gives the shrewd answer of “both!” He is also careful and humble about his areas of expertise and the fact the scope of his book inevitably ranges beyond them.

I am extremely conscious of the limitations of my specialist expertise and the corresponding extent of my dependence on the work of a small army of other scholars (as the notes and bibliography make graphically clear). I am a late and post-Roman historian, versed in the Greek and Latin primary materials of those eras and the diverse scholarly literatures those sources have generated. This project ranges far more widely, and its completion would have been impossible without immense assistance from corresponding scholarly literatures in the whole series of other fields with which it intersects at different points. (Heather, p. xx)

Again, we get no such acknowledgement by Roberts, let alone any corresponding humility, despite her having no expertise in the field of history at all. But the contrasts do not end there. Like Ehrman, decades of practice in writing and in teaching gives Heather the ability to provide the required context and exposition with fluency and ease. He is also often wryly funny, such as his aside about the missionary Ørlygr Hrappson arriving in Iceland with the timbers and consecrated earth ready to immediately assemble a church, observing “clearly the Scandinavian propensity for convenient, pre-prepared, flatpack wooden structures did not begin with IKEA.” Roberts’ book is light on dry humour.

Far more importantly, there is a contrast in how Heather handles turning an analytical perspective on a broad historical subject to provide new insight and understanding. Like Roberts, Heather works to examine and show the importance of political, economic and cultural currents and motivations in the rise, success and ultimate dominance of Christianity in medieval Europe. Unlike Roberts, Heather handles this with objectivity, care, judiciousness and nuance. This is because his book is synthesis and analysis by a skilled historian, whereas hers is, fundamentally, a polemical work by an activist with an agenda. Here is where the contrast is most stark. Roberts actually leans heavily on Heather’s book, calling it “masterful”, referring to it directly no less than 13 times and quoting it five times, twice at length. But this only makes the difference between what his book does, and how it does it, and what hers strives for even more striking.

“The Myth of Asceticism”

The first part of her book sets up the background history and looks for all the world like the nice lady from the telly giving general readers a friendly guide to the transition from Rome to the Medieval world. That is certainly how an enthusiastic review on a card attached to the shelf at my local book shop billed it, calling it “a fascinating expert’s introduction to medieval history”; a description that would make any actual expert arch an eyebrow if they had read the book. But this is laying the foundations for the main argument, which was hinted at in her Introduction:

What I hadn’t anticipated when I set out was that quite so many myths would be uncovered, exposed and pierced in the course of my enquiry: myths of humble origins, asceticism, pacifism (p. xiii)

The “myth” of Christian asceticism is one she sets out to “expose” early on. That early Christianity and its medieval developments had a strong ascetic ideal and a tradition of ascetic practice is not something any actual medieval historian would regard as a “myth”. It was not embraced by all believers by any means, and it was often, like most such things, more an ideal than perfected practice. But it was a key element of religion in these periods. Yet Roberts works hard to convince her readers that all is not what it seems and that these ascetics were less than pure in their application of the ideal or in their motives.

Her analysis of this “myth” begins, oddly, with an extended excursus on modern examples of how “asceticism is never far away in celebrity culture” (p. 37), noting various high profile or high ranking modern examples of politicians and celebrities who cultivated an image of self-denial. She then moves to some early Christian examples which she presents as being more about celebrity and access to power rather than actual, genuine and spiritually-motivated privation. But her examples are carefully curated and her arguments strained.

One of her examples is Simeon Stylites: the fifth century hermit who got his cognomen by spending 36 years sitting atop a pillar in the wilderness about 40 kilometres from Aleppo. You would think a man spending over three decades exposed to the elements practicing austerities so weirdly extreme even his monastery had politely asked him to leave would qualify as “asceticism” in anyone’s book. But not in Roberts’ book:

If [Christian hermits’] intention really was to disappear from public consciousness, these famous hermits failed quite spectacularly in their ambition. Simon Stylites was famous for living on a pillar in fifth-century Syria; he’s said to have climbed the pillar in order to get away from people, but he clearly wanted his asceticism to be seen. (p. 39)

Stylites genuinely had tried to “disappear from public consciousness” after leaving his monastic community, moving to an isolated hut on a mountainside. The problem was news of his devout practices brought crowds of pilgrims asking for counsel and prayers. So, yes, Stylites did climb a pillar so his devotions could be undisturbed. He even chose higher and higher pillars to get further away from the pesky pilgrims. Somehow Roberts has divined, from the distance of 15 centuries, that he was really just an exhibitionist – sitting on a pillar to be “seen”. It is hard to express how patently silly this argument is.

Not much better is her explanation of the ascetics of the early Celtic Church. Settling on remote windswept islands to live lives of prayer and fasting is also not what it seems, according to Roberts. The seventh century Cuthbert of Lindesfarne was a classic example of a certain type of prominent churchman of this period: from a noble family, well connected socially and serving as a monk and a bishop as well as living as a hermit. Noting the discussion on Melvyn Bragg’s podcast, Roberts relates how “Oxford historian and cleric Sarah Foot” (my emphasis) refers to Cuthbert seeking solitude and living in a bare stone cell on a smaller island off Lindesfarne. But counters this with John Hines’ observation that this island, Inner Farne, was actually closer to the mainland and to the royal seat of Bamburgh, “just a mile away” and easily reached by boat. Cuthbert is not fooling Roberts – he wanted access to power.

That Cuthbert was an active part of the social and noble networks of the time is not in doubt: he was a leader in a time when this greatly assisted those who wanted to be truly effective. It is not like there was a WiFi connection on Inner Farne. But if her argument about Stylites is silly, her example of Cuthbert and others like him is selective. We know far more about people like him and Columba in Ireland or Samson in Wales precisely because they were part of these networks. There were literally thousands of mostly unnamed and largely unknown hermits, anchorites and ascetics in and around Britian and Ireland who prayed, drank rain water and lived on fish, seaweed and the occasional puffin egg who never got near an Irish chieftain or Northumbrian king and never wanted to. The remote Irish monastic community on Skellig Michael – a picturesque location beloved by the producers of TV history documentaries on medieval history – lived there, twelve at a time, for centuries. We know the name of perhaps three of them. Less informed readers of Roberts’ book would have no idea they or thousands like them even existed. Apparently the only “ascetics” were well-connected toffs like Cuthbert and they were not really ascetics at all.

Having, allegedly, established the “myth of asceticism” via these distinctly wobbly arguments, Roberts breezes on; though she refers to this supposed “myth” several more times throughout the book (e.g. p. 303; p. 344). In one of her parenthetical asides, she illustrates her claim that “asceticism was something of an affectation of the wealthy and famous” by a quick reference to Eucherius of Lyon:

(Among fifth-century Gallic bishops, Eucherius of Lyon was particularly famous for his asceticism; he took 1,740 litres of wine and 66 kilograms of cheese with him to his Lent retreat at the monastery of Île-Barbe.) (p. 116)

This is meant to be what they call in online discourse “a gotcha”. After all, a bishop taking a large quantity of wine and cheese on a retreat sounds rather elitist and far from “ascetic” to a modern reader. Except, if we look at where Roberts appears to have found this titbit (see Ian Wood, The Christian Economy in the Early Medieval West: Towards a Temple Society, 2022, p. 53) it is not like Eucharius was feasting on this wine and cheese on his own. It is part of a record that also includes an order for 300 modii of wheat (2,610 litres) and 100 pounds of oil (32.88 kilos): so supplies for a community for 40 days. To us, wine and cheese are specialty, artisanal products enjoyed by the elite: clearly the image Roberts is going for. But in the fifth century, they were everyday staples, just like the grain and oil. This is not evidence Eucharius was some bon vivant, just that he planned so his community could eat.

Roberts’ book is full of examples like this. It is hard to know if she does not understand the material she is referring to, misses that she is selecting some examples and ignoring others, or if this is all deliberate. Whatever it is, it is clearly a distortion.

Christianity and the Elites

Another of the “myths” Roberts works to debunk is the idea that Christianity had humble origins and was a religion of the lower classes and impoverished masses. As already noted, she places heavy and repeated emphasis on how the saints and bishops of the first centuries of Christianity in the west were not humble at all: they were eager to engage with aristocratic elites and make themselves part of the political process. More importantly, she emphasises repeatedly that they were part of these elites; coming from noble or rich families and so already well-connected and plugged into those politics, both within the Roman Empire and out in the barbarian west of Anglo-Saxon England and the wilds of Ireland.

So Cuthbert, Columba and Samson, as well as Ambrose of Milan, Gregory the Great or people like the Gallic bishop Sidonius Apollinaris are all examples of how Christianity simply co-opted the elites and how these elite saints and bishops were just doing political and financial business as usual. Roberts repeats this point so many times that her less-informed readers would have no idea anyone in high office in the Late Antique or Early Medieval churches came from anything other than a noble or privileged background.

Except, a great many did. The ranks of the earliest Christian writers and leaders came almost entirely from very humble families, including Polycarp, Irenaeus, Hippolytus of Rome and Origen. Even after the conversion of Constantine made it far more acceptable for those from the more elite social strata to be Christian leaders, the fourth century also saw plenty of prominent figures from the lower classes, including Anthony, the aforementioned Simeon Stylites, Martin of Tours, John Chrysostom, Patrick, and Aidan of Lindisfarne. And as the centuries went on, the examples of people from humble backgrounds who rose to positions of authority and significance via the Church multiply, including Willibrord of York, Boniface, Anskar, Cyril and Methodius, Wulfilas and Nino of Cappadocia and many more. Interestingly, Roberts mentions some of these men of low ranking origins but fails to note their families or status, while consistently emphasising that of those from elite backgrounds.

As it happens, Christianity and its institutions and traditions allowed an almost unparalleled social mobility, unlike anything else in the ancient or medieval worlds. Only the Late Roman Army had a similar capacity to elevate the most lowly to high authority, with soldiers from peasant backgrounds able to ascend to the officer class or even the emperorship purely on merit. If Roberts was a historian rather than a polemicist she would have noted this, and even examined it in detail; contrasting the “business as usual” absorption of elements of the elite classes by the churches and their hierarchies with this quite unusual elevation of humble men to high status by their merits or their ambition. But Roberts is not a historian. She has an agenda and pesky things like nuance and counter examples just get in its way.

Roberts does not only emphasise the entanglement of the churches and the elites after Constantine, but insists Christianity was elitist, or at least elite-friendly, long before and throughout its development. So she stresses that in its first three centuries it was not popular among the rural classes and spread primarily in the cities and via trade routes. In Roberts’ telling, this made it a fairly well-heeled and (literally) urbane cult and not the religion of the humble, the downtrodden and the poor. It is certainly true that cities and trade routes were the incubators and conduits of early Christianity and that the rural poor converted much later, with one likely origin of the word “pagan” being the Latin paganus, meaning “rustic” or “villager”. But this does not mean Christianity was some kind of upper class or even upper middle class trend.

Some more recent historians have echoed Augustine of Hippo, suggesting that Christianity largely started to spread within the ranks of the dispossessed and disenfranchised, among people ‘left behind’ – people who had not enjoyed the benefits of progress. But that doesn’t match up with the historical evidence, which reveals that Christianity wasn’t spreading primarily within the lowest echelons of society. Early adopters were to be found, not among the rural, or even the urban, poor of the Empire – but among the urban middle and upper classes. (p. 302)

On the contrary, while there certainly were converts in the cities from both the elites and the well-to-do mercantile classes, most people in the cities were as poor or even poorer than those pagani out in the countryside. Again, we hear more about the richer converts for the obvious reason that they always have more of a voice in any ancient sources (thus the “historical evidence” Roberts has chosen to focus on regarding this), but there is also ample evidence that most of the Christian sect’s devotees were from the urban poor. In fact, this was one cause of conflict as the new faith took hold and challenged the social structures of the Late Roman world. The political clash between the upstart bishop of Alexandria, Cyril, and the Prefect of the city, Orestes, that led to the assassination of Orestes’ advisor, the philosopher Hypatia, was one where the urban lower classes challenged the rich elites of the lower city (see The Great Myths 9: Hypatia of Alexandria, particularly the references to the socio-economic background to the dispute in the studies by Watts and Haas). If a reader had only Roberts as their guide, they would think all of these city-dwelling Christians were comfortably well-off, not a starving and angry rabble.

Roberts takes this line of polemical argument to some silly extremes, working to make even Jesus’ first followers into neatly wealthy types:

It’s unclear how well-off the first generation of disciples had been. Several were fishermen, we’re told, which seems like a humble enough occupation. But then again, we shouldn’t imagine them sitting on jetties, throwing a net into the sea, hoping to catch enough for dinner. James and John appear to have worked in a family business that not only owned boats but also hired others in to help.

Then there was Matthew (also called Levi), who was a tax-collector, an educated professional. They’re not the social elite – but neither are they in its lowest echelons. (p. 298)

There are all kinds of problems here, not least of which is how much we can take any information on these people conveyed in the gospels at this level of face value, given they were written decades later by people who most likely never met James, John or Matthew. Then there is the fact that, even if this is all historical, the lowest echelons of Galilean peasant society were pretty low and to say some men who owned two boats were not at that level is not saying very much at all. But these are the arguments Roberts runs with.

She runs with them rather hard with Paul, to whom she devotes a substantial section. In her telling, Paul is basically an elite player, hobnobbing with the upper classes and wheedling his way into positions where he can spread his message. Unlike Jesus’ earliest followers, Paul does seem to belong to a class above, though also not the social elite. He is educated, highly literate and has at least some connections in the Jewish ruling classes. What we can say beyond that is limited by our source material, given that he only gives a few snippets and hints in his letters. There is a lot more information about him in the New Testament text, The Acts of the Apostles, but this has to be handled with care. Roberts herself briefly notes the issues here:

There are also some biographic details to be found in Acts of the Apostles – although these need to be treated with caution as it’s thought that they were written some twenty to sixty years after Paul’s death, and are not first hand accounts. (p. 282)

Very true. So it is very odd, then, that having noted this, Roberts blithely proceeds as though Acts is a work of impeccable journalism. So she goes on to draw all manner of conclusions about status and elite networks and Paul’s role within them from various episodes in this text, including trial scenes, apologia, speeches, defences before officials etc., as though all this can be taken as more or less historical. There is a vast scholarly literature on why it almost certainly cannot, including how many of those same elements can be found as literary tropes in other literature of the time and are most likely constructs by the author. Roberts gives no impression of any knowledge of all this, let alone engagement with it. Her brief caution on p. 282 is given and then completely ignored.

There are numerous historical infelicities in this section, such as her odd claim that the word Χριστός (Christos, Christ) was an epithet introduced by Paul, and not simply the Greek form of the Hebrew mashiach (anointed one, Messiah) used throughout the Septuagint and extensively in the Dead Sea Scrolls texts long before Paul was born. More relevantly, she refers to how Paul “had the means to buy parchment and ink for his letters” (p. 300) as evidence he was far from poor. Except the only mention of “parchments” anywhere in the Epistles is in 2Tim 4:13 (” …  bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments [μεμβράνας].”), and most critical scholars do not regard that text as authentically Pauline. Letters were rarely written on the extremely expensive medium of parchment, and tended to be on far cheaper materials like papyrus, wooden boards, reusable wax tablets or even palm fronds.

This is, of course, a trivial example but it is indicative of how Roberts works. Anything that can be marshalled to bolster her line of argument is emphasised and pumped up. Anything contrary is dismissed or ignored. Again, this is not to say that Paul was not most likely higher up the social strata than most. Nor is there any problem with noting, as many have and do, that once Constantine removed most of the social stigma associated with Christianity, it quickly enmeshed itself in the social structures and hierarchies of the Late Roman state and society. These things are true and there is no problem with discussing them in detail or even highlighting them as, for example, Heather does. The issue is that Roberts over-emphasises these things almost to the exclusion of all else. Because she has an agenda.

Constantine

The emperor Constantine inevitably looms over any analysis of the rise of Christianity. There is no doubt that his reign marked a turning point in the history of this faith, removing previous Roman suspicion and periodic persecution of Christianity and putting it on the path to dominance across the Empire and beyond for centuries to come. But the evidence regarding Constantine’s conversion is famously complicated and ambiguous. The contemporary and near-contemporary Christian sources do their best to make it not so, striving to present Constantine as the Christian emperor par excellence who received his faith in a vision and was blessed with victories by God in reward. Unfortunately, differences in their accounts and some other awkward elements in the evidence mean this neat story quickly unravels. What he saw in this vision, when it was, what he did afterwards and what all this meant depends on which accounts you choose to give weight to.

Historians have picked a path through this evidence via a number of routes, but two recent readings of it indicate how it can be variously read. In The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, Bart Ehrman presents a fairly popular route. The contradictions and paradoxes can be reconciled, he argues, if we read the evidence as reflecting a Roman soldier and general who saw Jesus as yet another solar deity like Mithras or Sol Invictus, chose to worship him as a giver of military victories, and then, over the course of his life, came to develop a more sophisticated theological understanding and orthodox Christian faith, eventually eschewing all other gods. Heather, in Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion presents an alternative reading. For him, the evidence shows someone who had always been a Christian, or had been one since his teens, but had to slowly reveal this given the unpopularity of this persecuted faith among the elites: the Army, the equestrian class and the senatorial echelon.

Roberts briefly notes Heather’s reading (p. 177), but quickly breezes past it; “but back to the story”, she says, moving on. The story she wants to tell is rather different, because she needs to make it fit her agenda. While she hedges her argument with caveats that we cannot know what Constantine genuinely thought and believed, she goes to some lengths to read the evidence as him adopting Christianity as a political move. There are so many problems with her arguments here that they would require a long article of its own to unpick them. Suffice it to say Roberts does all she can to play up anything that could indicate his conversion was not sincere or even not actually a conversion at all. And to stress that it was overtly and clearly “political”.

Her key problem here is that it is not clear how exactly this “political” conversion would give Constantine some kind of advantage. As Heather’s analysis shows, Christianity was not popular, particularly among the people that mattered. It was not even popular in the broader sense: Heather critiques the arguments of sociologist Rodney Stark who argued that by the early fourth century Christianity represented 10-15% of the population of the Roman Empire and concludes “at most [Christians] will have been no more than about 1 or 2 per cent of the total imperial population.” (Heather, p. 22) Strangely, Roberts herself refers to this much lower estimate (p. 350), which she appears to have got from Heather, yet on the same page she assures her readers “as early as 312, Constantine may have realised how politically useful the Christian Church could be”. Why would he have “realised” this? How was this tiny, unpopular, persecuted sect “politically useful”? In previous parts of her argument Roberts alludes to this political “usefulness” without explaining how it worked. Roman emperors were not elected. Nor were they supported in their bids for power or sustained by rich merchants as donors. So even if we accept all Roberts’ dubious claims about Christianity being an elite faith or something close to it, the fact is Constantine gained power and sustained it the way all emperors in this period did: by military brute force and dominance.

Roberts tries to debunk the “myth” of Christian pacifism in another tranche of arguments riddled with her usual problems: selective examples, disregard of contrary evidence, overstatements and exaggeration. The fact is that, as has been long known, there were some Christians in the Late Roman Army and Christianity was already finding ways to reconcile its teachings about peace and non-violence with the increasingly militarised and violent reality of the third century. But the key word in the sentence above is “some”. If Christians only made up 1 or 2 per cent of the civilian population, we have good reason to think the proportion among soldiers was much lower. And the path to imperial power in the late third and early fourth centuries was one with an army at your back.

There is no evidence his troops cared what gods their general – and, later, emperor – did or did not worship anyway. Constantine had the loyalty of the armies his father had led by merit of being the son of Flavius Constantius; the tetrarch of the West appointed by Diocletian who had led them to victories over the Rhine. Constantine soon showed he too could win them victories, fighting against the Franks and gaining his men loot and rich donative bonus payments. This was what won the Army’s loyalty. Constantine then kept on winning victories and his troops kept on profiting by it.

Nor were the equestrian class who ran the Empire or the senators who were its richest citizens enamoured or swayed by Christianity. Quite the opposite, with the aristocrats and senators being the last class to convert even as late as the fifth or even sixth centuries. So what is this political usefulness that Roberts claims Constantine must have “realised”? She never really makes this clear. As Heather shows, Christianity was actually a political liability to Constantine, not a benefit. This is why, in Heather’s quite convincing telling, the evidence indicates an emperor slowly “coming out” as a Christian, as he equally slowly secured and consolidated his power. Constantine became and stayed emperor despite his conversion, not because of it.

The Business of the Church

Roberts spends a lot of time emphasising the economic aspects of what she calls “the Church”. Even her Paul is really all about the money: she notes references in his letters about collections of funds and encouraging donations. Readers unclear on what these references mean might think he is gathering this money for himself or at least for “the Church” in general. But the evidence indicates it was a collection to help sustain the impoverished members of the Jesus sect in Jerusalem, particularly those who had left their livelihoods in Galilee and in the context of a famine in Judea in the 40s AD. Roberts does not bother to give that context.

Indeed, whenever she can, she emphasises any element of the Christianity of the Late Roman and Early Medieval periods which so much as hints at churchmen amassing wealth, growing rich or living in anything other than poverty. Again, the issue here is not that this did not happen – it clearly did. But the drumbeat of emphasis from Roberts is such that her readers would have to conclude this was the main point of the exercise; and that is clearly the author’s intention. Evidence to the contrary is ignored or, worse, dismissed as just reinforcing her point. She mentions that Cyprian criticised bishops in North Africa for amassing wealth through money lending and neglecting their congregations. But he notes this in support of her assertion that “it was … problematic if Church officials looked too money-grabbing or focused on commercial interests” (p. 279). So it was not that Cyprian genuinely believed this was a bad thing, it was all about how it “looked“, according to Roberts.

Similarly her treatment of the strong Christian tradition of charity for the poor is framed not as genuine but as ulterior. Charity existed long before Christianity, Roberts points out. This is true. But what she fails to note is that the pre-Christian charity in the Roman Empire had defined limits. A patron might give charity to a client in need. A collegium could give charity to members. A city grandee could give relief to the city’s poor in times of famine. The emperor could give tax relief or grain shipments to some subjects as aid, favour or reward. These all worked within systems of obligation and hierarchy. What made Christian charity is that it was meant, at least in theory, to be owed by all who could give it to all who needed it, simply because they were human. That was radical yet, in Christianity, it became normal.

Of course, this did not mean that it always worked in practice as it was presented in theory or that some did not profit from it as church community structures took over charity from the Roman state. Again, Roberts emphasises this with relish over many pages. This means, if you had no idea about any of this except from what Alice Roberts chooses to highlight, you would be forgiven for thinking that the whole thing was a scam.

Throughout her work she seems to make a careful point of using the language of commerce in her descriptions of any activities by Christians. So charity was “a lucrative business” (p. 147), and “a profitable business” (p. 259). Altruism is really “a personally profitable business-like deal” (p. 260) and Christian leaders really just wanted the poor to remain poor as part of their “business model” (p.262). She does admit that all this charity stuff “may never have been part of the business plan” (p. 272), but three pages later she is referring to “the whole business model” without any caveats (p. 274). And there is a lot more of this, page after page. Subtle she is not.

This mercantile language is applied to pretty much everything religious so that the reader really gets the point. She repeatedly refers to theology and the drive to define and counter heresy as “brand management” (p. 341). She establishes this idea early, insisting that “heresy wasn’t just a spiritual scourge, it was a real threat to the coherence of the Christianised Empire” (p. 124). She warms to this theme in a section titled “Schism and Brand” (p. 348), where she talks about how “the medieval Church would jealously guard its monopoly and its control of the theological marketplace” (p. 349). And all this is not just a sustained metaphor. The whole vast enterprise of Late Antique and Medieval theology was really, according to Roberts, just a business controlling its brand:

And then, peel away the religious overlay and what you’re left with is a huge, sophisticated system of interconnected businesses: welfare, health, legal, agribusiness, shipping, education – fingers in many pies. …. Once you notice it, the religious nature of this business almost seems like a distraction – a veil draped over it. But it’s important – essential, fundamental to the brand. All those businesses could have been independent enterprises, but the powerful ideology of the Church was used to bring them together to create a behemoth. Some will baulk at this approach – lifting the veil. And yet you can’t explain what was happening in Europe in the third, fourth and fifth centuries without peeking underneath – and when you do, what emerges into the light is a different (though in so many ways, very familiar) story from the one we’re usually sold. (p. 334)

Any baulking at all this is not because there was no economic aspect to Christianity in these centuries; clearly there was. It is because this is reductionist to the point of absurdity. These elements were not the point of the exercise and certainly not the result of some nefarious “business plan”. They were by-products of other dynamics, means to different ends, supports for ideological enterprises and whole welter of other things besides. But Roberts is not interested in any of that. She has her agenda and she wants to drive it home with all the finesse and nuance of a hammer drill.

She marshals the work of two economists, Robert B. Ekelund Jr. and Robert D. Tollison, who took this kind of emphasis to giddy heights in some books in the 1990s that were widely accepted by other economists but largely ignored by medieval historians. Their ideas were rather neatly skewered in an essay by medieval historian David d’Avray (see “The medieval church as an economic firm?”, Public Choice, vol. 201(1), pages 1-20, October 2024), which is worth reading. Unsurprisingly, Roberts likes Ekelund and Tollison’s framing of the medieval Church a lot and seems genuinely baffled as to why d’Avray was so “rudely dismissive” (p. 337). Anyone who has studied the sprawling, varied and complex phenomenon that was the Crusades would be less baffled when they find Ekelund and Tollison define them neatly as being launched “to protect [the Church’s] monopoly position and to expand market areas” or see them describe the Northern Crusades as the Church “[acquiring] the rights to supply ‘essential’ dogma and salvation services.” (quoted in d’Avery, p. 7).

Even if Roberts, like defenders of Ekelund and Tollison (she leans on political scientist Anthony Gill’s rather heavily qualified support for the economists), are right that this kind of thing has great utility, they are not actually talking about “what was happening in Europe in the third, fourth and fifth centuries” at all. They were talking about the period a good 1000 years later: a very different proposition in all respects. By then the network of Jesus sect communities and churches and bishoprics had indeed became something closer to a single enterprise we can call “the Church”. By then there was at least the beginning of a system of canon law and the first signs of a financial infrastructure, however rudimentary, that did funnel some measure of funds up through a multinational hierarchy. But this was all long after the periods Roberts writes about. This was the result of the “domination” Christanity managed to achieve, not its cause. Roberts puts the chicken before the egg and projects a much later “Church” back onto a period in which no such thing existed. To quote Heather:

In the later twelfth century, and perhaps from the reign of Pope Alexander III when the decretal revolution really exploded, it starts to make sense for the first time to talk about the Latin Church as a singular corporate entity. Up to this point, the Christian Church of western Europe had in reality consisted of largely autonomous local Christian communities, with generally devolved, polymorphous authority structures. The impact of more centralized decision-making was only periodic and limited, in the area primarily of doctrine under late Roman emperors, and of practice under their early Carolingian successors. Even under the latter, the impact was more theoretical than practical. (Heather, p. 504)

Roberts tries to jam the earlier period – the one of those largely autonomous communities and generally devolved, polymorphous authority structures – into an image of “the Medieval Church” that was not to even begin to come into existence for about 800 years after the periods covered by her book. This is a major reason her book is so hopelessly muddled and wrongheaded.

Final Thoughts

I will admit that Roberts’ past form with peddling silly claims about Christian history and the overblown promises of this book’s pre-publication marketing campaign did not fill me with great hope. But I waited to read it before passing judgement on the book as opposed to passing it on the author’s social media persona or her publisher’s marketing. After all, I went into reading Catherine Nixey’s latest book Heresy with low expectations after the giddy nonsense of her The Darkening Age (2017) and ended up finding the new book generally okay. For the first half of Roberts’ book I thought it may be much the same – a not especially well-written and rather unnecessary book but okay for readers new to the subject.

But once she got her teeth into her agenda, that all changed. In the second half of the book the nice lady in the anorak from the telly largely disappeared and the strident polemicist from HumanistsUK came rushing to the fore. The weird thing is, when you step back from it her story is not radical and definitely is not new. Essentially, she tells the story of how a scheming emperor, Constantine, took control of Christianity and gave it political power, thus corrupting it into an institution that was more about power and money than any genuine faith. If this story sounds familiar it should: it is essentially traditional Protestant historiography. As many, including the dreaded Tom Holland, have observed: “New Atheist” anti-Christian polemic is, to a large extent, just old Protestant stuff with a fresh lick of paint.

Of course, Roberts puts in occasional nods to the fact that she knows she is not telling the whole story and says she is just emphasising things that usually get ignored. But none of this stuff actually gets ignored at all – anyone reading Peter Brown or Judith Herrin gets all of this in vast detail, just minus all the selective evidence and heavily skewed language. Or the disingenuous caveats and asides. I lost track of how many times she briefly comments “some of [the Celtic saints] may have been truly, deeply pious” (p. 16), or “some of these desert monks may have been devout” (p. 44) or “some may have been drawn in through deeply moral and charitable motives” (p. 257) and about a dozen other examples besides: all where anything genuinely devout or based on real belief is alluded to in passing and couched in the highly qualified language of “some” and “may”. Roberts really wants you to not think much about any genuine believers, lest they distract you from her agenda.

That agenda is to explain the “domination” of Christianity that was achieved by the twelfth century. This was not achieved because of any real beliefs or piety, she wants you to know. The “surprising idea about what the Church actually was” she promised turns out to be that it was a purely political and economic enterprise and anything else was either incidental, peripheral or non-existent. Roberts wants you to accept that she has lifted the veil “on secrets that have been hidden in plain sight” and shown that without the power of the Roman Empire that transformed Romanitas into Christianitas, Christianity would not have become dominant and would probably not even have been significant. It was all politics and economics.

But was it? Is this far too reductionist? The simple fact is that Christianity did gain “dominion” and that this certainly was substantially thanks to a range of political and economic forces, including the ones Roberts focuses on. But if things had been different, would Christianity still have been highly successful and influential without achieving “domination”? Was there something actually attractive about its message and ethos that could have made it successful even if it had never been adopted by Constantine and become part of the apparatus of the Empire?

As it turns out, we can look at this alternative scenario by turning from the history of Christianity in the West to the history of it in the East. Because, just as the faith spread west from the Middle East and then up into northern Europe and beyond, it also spread east, out through the Persian Empire, onto the steppes of Central Asia and into India and China. And in all these places it did extremely well for many centuries, despite never attaining the political advantage and economic boosts it got in the Late Empire and Early Medieval Europe.

As Philip Jenkins details in his superb The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died (2008) Christianity was highly successful across the whole continent of Asia in exactly the period Roberts talks about, and all without imperial support, political authority and great economic power. The Shahs of Persia did not convert and the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs were tolerant at best. But when Franciscan friars visited the Mongol khans they found Nestorian priests already at their courts. And when Portuguese missionaries got to India they found Saint Thomas Christians with churches already centuries old. In the ninth century, when Anglo-Saxon England had just two archbishops, the Syrian Patriarch Timothy I presided over nineteen, with 85 bishoprics and a vast array of communities over a huge area, speaking Syraic, Persian, Turkish, Soghdian, Chinese and Tibetan. Clearly something other than imperial power and money drove all this.

A better writer would explore this. They would also not just relegate those who were “truly, deeply pious” to dismissive passing comments, but actually look at them, what they believed and why. Brown does this. So does Herrin. Heather’s book, by design, focuses on the politics and economics, but he too looks at the genuine emotional, spiritual and existential appeal of Christianity. Non-believers can do this and do it fruitfully.

But Roberts is not interested. This is because she is not a historian, she is an activist with a message. And this is the main reason why Domination is not a very good book.