Tom Holland: Why atheists are more ‘Christian’ than they realise

Best-selling historian and author Tom Holland responds to the latest British Social Attitudes survey which shows declining Christianity and rising atheism

The success of Christianity, the most influential framework for making sense of human existence that has ever existed, has always depended on people who tend not to feature in history books. It was not in churches, or monasteries, or universities that the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. Rather, it was in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of 2,000 years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature.

Down the generations, down the centuries, down the millennia these teachings have been passed. Only Jews can lay claim to anything comparable: a living tradition that can be traced back along an unbroken line to the long-vanished civilisation of the Roman Empire.