The Cross That Refused to Fall: How Tom Holland's Journey from Atheist to Believer Will Make You Question Everything

The Cross That Refused to Fall

Tom Holland gasped for breath. His head spun. He loosened the straps on his bulletproof vest and doubled over in pain. “Oh, I’m going to be sick,” he said, standing in a deserted town of pulverized homes and mounds of rubble. “I’ve got to sit down.”

It was July 2016, and Holland was in Sinjar, northern Iraq, embedded with a BBC film crew. ISIS had been pushed out of the town just three months earlier, but the evidence of their brutality was everywhere. The stench of death was so overpowering that Holland—an award-winning British historian—couldn’t keep talking on camera.

As he paused to compose himself, the camera panned to something startling: a wooden cross, perched precariously atop the rubble of a demolished church, still standing over Sinjar’s skyline. That cross would change his life in ways he never expected.

Holland knew ancient history. He’d written bestselling books about ruthless Spartan and Roman leaders—the “apex predators” of the Greco-Roman world. They lived by the Athenian dictum: The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. ISIS applied that same logic to Sinjar. They executed hundreds—some say thousands—of men. They sold women into sexual slavery. They desecrated churches and hung victims on crosses.

Holland arrived as an atheist-turned-agnostic who had rejected the Christian faith of his upbringing. He was writing a book about Christianity, but from an objective historian’s point of view. He had little use for the Bible or stories about miracles. Yet somehow, investigating Jesus’ crucifixion transformed him—along with what he describes as a possible brush with the supernatural.

The Book That Landed Like a Bombshell

In 2019, Holland published “Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.” One commentator said it “landed like a bombshell … and continues to send shockwaves through the academy and popular discourse.”

His argument is simple but provocative: Reports of Christianity’s death are greatly exaggerated. Plenty of non-Christians—atheists, agnostics, secular humanists—hold Christian beliefs without knowing it. Western secular values like compassion, equality, and human rights are not universal human instincts. They are products of Christianity.

“To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions,” Holland wrote. “This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable—indeed the inescapable—influence of Christianity.”

The most revolutionary idea Christianity introduced to the West is reflected in its central symbol: the cross. For the Romans, dying on a cross was the most agonizing and humiliating death imaginable—reserved for slaves, criminals, and political rebels. But early Christians turned the cross into “the most globally recognized symbol of a god that there has ever been”—and used it to declare that God identified with the weak and powerless instead of the strong.

Holland didn’t fully appreciate this inversion until he went to Sinjar. ISIS reminded him of the Romans he’d written about. The Romans worshipped power and dominance. They admired Julius Caesar, who enslaved a million people and killed another million during his conquest of Gaul.

“To be in this place where people had been crucified for exactly the reasons the Romans crucified people—to intimidate as a statement of power—opened up this existential abyss for me,” Holland told CNN. “This was a place that had been occupied by a people who saw the world as the Romans saw it.”

The Debate He Sparked

Holland’s views have made him a controversial figure. Fish Stark, executive director of the American Humanist Association, says Holland’s belief that Western morality is based on Christianity is not only wrong but dangerous.

“The idea that we should love our neighbor and treat everyone with dignity—Christianity has never had a monopoly on those ideas,” Stark said. “Those concepts exist in every religious tradition, and they also have existed in every non-religious tradition.”

Stark points to scientific research suggesting humans are born with instinctive desires to protect and care for others. In books like “Survival of the Friendliest,” scientists argue humans are hardwired to cooperate.

But Holland has found admirers among evangelicals. The Rev. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said Holland’s premise about Christianity’s influence on Western civilization is “fairly unassailable.”

“Tom Holland’s point is just so correct,” Mohler told CNN. “There are basic Christian impulses, even explicit Christian language, that show up in places that modern Westerners think are secular. Those places aren’t nearly as secular as you think.”

From Dinosaur Doubts to Midnight Prayers

Holland’s journey from skeptic to believer wasn’t linear. He was born in Oxford and raised in a village outside Salisbury. His first crisis of faith started with a dinosaur. At age seven, he opened a children’s Bible in Sunday School and saw an illustration of a brachiosaur sharing the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve.

“I knew no human being had ever seen a brachiosaur,” Holland recalled. “So I asked them what was going on here, and it was obviously above their pay grade.”

He became an atheist as an adolescent, then moved toward what he called a “mushy agnosticism.” As he studied the Greeks and Romans, their morality seemed increasingly alien. They glorified violence and casually accepted infanticide. The strong dominated the weak—and thought it was right.

“The Romans thought that they were the most moral people—that was why the gods had given them the world to rule,” Holland said. “But it was not my morality. And I found it frightening when I got close to it.”

Then came December 2021. Holland was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Doctors warned his prognosis didn’t look good. While waiting for test results, he attended a midnight mass at St. Bartholomew the Great, one of London’s oldest churches. After the service, he did something he hadn’t done since he was ten. He prayed.

“There’s no atheists in foxholes,” Holland said, repeating the old aphorism. “I begged assistance.”

The test results came back: His cancer had not spread. Today he’s clear of cancer.

Was it a miracle? Holland won’t say for certain. “It’s a coincidence, but I don’t want to 100 percent say it’s a coincidence,” he said. “I like seeing the shimmering possibility of the supernatural. I love the idea of being in receipt of a Marian miracle.”

So, Is He a Christian?

In the past, that question made Holland visibly uncomfortable. Two years ago, he called himself a “Protestant agnostic.” Today?

“I would say I’m a Christian,” he said.

As for what kind, he doesn’t cite doctrine. He mentions a poem by Welsh poet R.C. Thomas as emblematic of his faith—poetry described as “the poet of the Cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness.” Holland likes the combination of doubt and religious triumph.

“There are other ways to approach God,” he said. “Poetry would be one, or surrendering to symbolism or mystery.”

His mother, Janet Holland, 92, didn’t hesitate when asked if her son is a Christian. “Yes, I do. But he never quite acknowledges it, does he?” she said. “I think he kind of needs it.”

Holland still struggles with belief in miracles. “There are times where I can feel that I believe it. There are times when I don’t feel it at all,” he said. “But I would like to be able to believe it because, aside from anything else, it does provide nutrients and sustenance to the roots of my beliefs. It also makes the universe more interesting.”

His ambivalence isn’t unusual. Jesus’ first disciples shared it. Some didn’t recognize him on Easter morning. Others reacted with terror. One Gospel ends abruptly with women fleeing the empty tomb.

Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that Holland veers between faith and doubt. Apex predators still roam the earth. Armies still march. The weak still suffer. The atrocities Holland saw in Sinjar persist today.

But at least for some, there’s still the cross—still standing, pointing toward another way.