Review

Belief

Books

Creed

6 November 2025

7 min read

Alice Roberts’ new book is the Da Vinci Code without the pretence of fiction

Tomes like Domination are part of the problem of public discourse about Christianity, not the solution

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

Alice Roberts.

alice-roberts.co.uk.

Alice Roberts would like you to read her book, thank you very much.

She recently took to X to bemoan the “epidemic” of people offering thoughts about her latest offering, without actually having read it. The person who prompted Roberts’ exasperation was a senior lecturer in Biblical Studies and the latest in a long of professional scholars of Christianity who had greeted the release of the book with little more than a weary eyeroll.

The reason so many people felt as though they didn’t need to read it is because it is utterly predictable. Even a cursory glance at any of the marketing that has accompanied the publication of Domination: The Fall of the Roman Empire and the Rise of Christianity really does tell you all you need to know. It really is the book you think it is.

You already know what this book is going to argue. Just like you already know how this review is going to go. I’m a theology lecturer who works for the Church of England; Roberts is an outspoken atheist and former president of Humanists UK. Of course I’m going to disagree with this book. It’s hardly the sort of plot twist you endure an M. Night Shyamalan film for.

But, for the avoidance of doubt, let me be clear: I don’t dislike Alice Roberts’ book because I’m a Christian and she’s not. I dislike Roberts’ book simply because it’s not very good.

Roberts seeks to “lift the veil on secrets that have been hidden in plain sight.” (Always be wary of someone who claims to have noticed something no-one else has for the last 2,000 years). These ‘secrets’, she suggests, are that “the main reasons [Christianity spread so successfully] were not to be found in the pages of the Bible, but in a powerful alliance born of complex – and very human – incentives”.

For Roberts, the central, overriding reason why Christianity flourished was simply economic and political power. In her own words, “the worldly aspects of the Church are undeniable. Wealth and power go hand-in-hand, and the Church had both in abundance.” It’s never clear who actually is thought to be denying this, except a vague group described as “apologist historians (including some who claim not to be Christian, but seem to be suffering from some kind of Stockholm syndrome) and theologians”.

And this power-grab has been the aim since the earliest moments of the Church’s existence. The Apostle Paul is painted in cartoonishly Machiavellian tones: “As a Pharisee, a member of an established Jewish sect, Saul would have been a small fish in a big pond. The switch to this new breakaway sect [Christianity] would make him a prominent figure in a small but rapidly growing movement”.

A few pages later – in a section that made me laugh so hard I had to put the book down for a few minutes to collect myself – Roberts offers a genuinely baffling reading of one of Paul’s early letters, to a group of Christians in the city of Corinth. In the letter, Paul speaks about divisions in the Church, with Christians claiming to ‘follow’ different leaders (such as Paul and Apollos). Roberts writes that “there’s a hint that Paul may have viewed Apollos as competitor” and continues:

“When Paul wrote his first letter to ‘the Corinthians’ … he exhorted them to see themselves as united, whether they were following him, [or] Apollos … Paul, however disgruntled he might have been about the competition represented by other, potentially more eloquent, preachers, had decided it was best to team up. Still, he couldn’t quite resist suggesting his superiority – or at least, his priority – to Apollos: ‘I have planted, Apollos watered.’”.

See?! SEE?! It’s all about power!!

Well, that last bit is a quote from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the third chapter and its sixth verse. Now, what Roberts doesn’t tell the reader is that she has left off the rest of the verse, and the verse that follows. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.”

But this is very different indeed to the impression Roberts gives us. Paul is quite clearly not claiming any sense of superiority over Apollos. No, he claims they’re both nothing, and that God alone deserves credit for anything good done by either of them. Not that you would know this from Roberts’ butchering of biblical texts.

(As a slightly technical aside, the bit Roberts does quote should read ‘I planted,’ not ‘I have planted’. This sounds trivial but in the Greek text, Paul writes in a different tense than the one Roberts translates it as. This made me wonder what translation of the Bible was using or whether it was her own. However, there are no notes in the book. At all. And no mention of Bible translation that I could find. If we’re engaging in character assassinations of folk no longer alive to defend themselves, we might think that attention to the precise wording of their thought might be important. Apparently not).

And there’s the rub. Roberts leave precisely zero room for earnest belief in God. Not her belief in God, obviously, but that the people whose words she has hacked and placed before us might earnestly think that their actions seek the betterment of those around them because of their belief in God. No. It’s all about power. I’ve highlighted her treatment of Paul in particular (again, because I found it genuinely hilarious), but time would fail me if I tried to recount all the ways that other figures in Church history are treated similarly.

Roberts’ has complained about Frank Cottrell-Boyce (whom, she notes, is “a Catholic” as though this is in any way relevant to whether he’s right) for describing Domination as ‘cynical’. But how else could we possibly describe this? Yes, it is – of course – completely reasonable to highlight the social, cultural, political, and economic forces at work in and around the development of Christianity (is anyone actually suggesting otherwise?). And yes, of course some people have used Christianity for personal gain (seriously: is anyone actually suggesting otherwise?).

But Roberts goes far beyond both points. Instead, she is simply stripping back the theological content of Christianity and claiming to have found “secrets that have been hidden in plain sight” having done so. But of course human motivation is all that is left once you strip belief in God out of religion, because what else could there be? Roberts’ prose may be captivating, but her argument is deeply immature and reductive. It’s like a toddler who’s just read Michel Foucault’s work on social power for the first time: an impressive toddler, to be sure, but a toddler nonetheless.

Roberts does acknowledge that “people are complex, human societies are complex”, but this is little more than lip-service to nuance. None of this complexity is found in the actual argument of her book. It reminds me of someone saying, “no offence, but …” before going on to say something deeply offensive. A fleeting caveat doesn’t redeem a simplistic argument.

In this respect, it’s quite telling that the front-cover endorsement comes from Stephen Fry who describes it as “a historical thriller of the highest quality.” In one respect, he’s not wrong. It reads like a thriller and – questions of content aside – might easily grip read readers with its compelling prose and rhetorical flourishes. But that’s because this is The Da Vinci Code without the pretence of fiction. A compellingly told conspiracy theory dressed up in just enough spliced-together reality to feign plausibility.

Public discourse about religion and faith is too often conducted with a sneering cynicism that seeks to ride roughshod over the sincerely held beliefs of actual people who would actually describe themselves as religious. Books like Domination are part of the problem, not the solution.

Maybe this is why I find Domination bordering on offensive. Not because of its content. (If I got upset every time someone ascribed bad motivations to the Church I’d never leave the house.) No, I find it borderline offensive because of its sheer existence. Whether you like it or not, religion has been and is an irrevocably vital part of who we are and where we’ve come from. Religious belief deserves at the very least to be understood, even if not agreed with. And so, when I finished Domination, I was left wondering: is that is? Is this the highest standard of discourse society can really be offered about religion? Dan Brown in an academic gown? Heaven help us, if so.

The covers may be similar, and the titles may sound alike, but this is not Tom Holland’s Dominion. Where Holland’s work remains one of the most insightful and thoughtful accessible books about the development of Christianity and modern society, Roberts’ cynicism (for that is what it is) is both tiresome and tiring. (Moreover, that Holland’s book is not even mentioned once speaks volumes about Roberts’ work. That Roberts insists she has read it only makes that absence more baffling).

The Church deserves more rigorous champions of atheism to scrutinise its belief; society needs a better class of conversation about religion and its role in our history. I fear Alice Roberts is not the former; Domination is certainly not the latter.

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Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.