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(OPINION) Tom Holland might be one of the smarter and more engaging guys I’ve heard. The British novelist, popular historian and podcast host, who attended Cambridge and Oxford universities, seems to know everything that can be known about ancient cultures.

Plus he possesses the rare kind of mind that can put it all together for simpletons like me.

Some of his insights are surprising, including his contention that modern developments including the transgender rights movement and a recent spike in atheism probably wouldn’t exist were it not for the West’s Christian philosophical and moral foundations.

In addition to writing award-winning books, Holland co-hosts with Dominic Sandbrook a top-10-rated podcast called “The Rest is History.”

I first encountered him during the holidays on a podcast other than his own: Bari Weiss’ “Honestly.” Fortunately, Weiss is as fine an interviewer as Holland is a raconteur. Their topic was “how Christianity remade the world.”

For Holland, that’s not an exaggeration. He says everything from the way we measure time to our fondness for underdogs to the American and French revolutions was generated largely by the life and teachings of Jesus.

In the West, even secular progressives who dismiss Christianity as superstitious mumbo jumbo are actually driven by early Christian assumptions about the nature of God, humans and justice.

Without realizing it, such critics “are the slaves of some defunct theologian,” Holland said.

He makes these observations although he doesn’t much believe Christianity is true. He was raised in the Church of England, but developed early on as an atheist.

Gradually, in adulthood, his pleasure in atheism wore off.

“I found it boring ultimately,” he said.

As a scholar of ancient cultures, he kept finding himself running into the works of great Christian writers. He also remembered the teachings of his Anglican youth, in which he rediscovered enormous beauty.

Today, he said, he exists in a “shadowlands” somewhere between belief and agnosticism. He likes to think the ancient Christian version of God could be true — although he mainly still doesn’t think it is.

“It makes my life more interesting,” he told Weiss.

What’s beyond question is Christianity’s unique staying power, he said. Jesus turned the world upside down, and it’s never been the same since.

Jesus did something almost entirely new. It wasn’t beyond comprehension for Romans, say, to believe a man could become a god or rise to heaven to join his divine father there. Romans said Julius Caesar had become divine, as had his own son, Augustus. When Augustus died, he supposedly ascended to sit at Julius’ right hand in heaven.

What threw the Romans and nearly everybody else off kilter was the contention that Jesus had done these things after being crucified.

For them, crucifixion was the ultimate bad news about Jesus. The scandal of death by crucifixion was almost beyond our ability to comprehend. It was a state execution carried out by public, humiliating torture, reserved for rebellious slaves and the worst criminal dregs.

Roman society was all about empire: about winning, conquering, dominating. It idolized the strong, the heroic. People perceived as losers — slaves, the poor, prisoners, the sickly, the conquered — were fit only for contempt and abuse.

Jesus came along teaching unprecedented things about such outcasts: blessed are the poor, the hungry, the sick. The last will be first, and the first last.

Then he was crucified. And resurrected. Then he was raised into heaven as the rightful heir of God, as if he were God himself, or as if, you might say, he was the cosmic Caesar.

The idea that a crucified person could do this was simply madness. It made a hero of victims. It implied that God is closer to the weak than to the mighty. That any beggar might be divine. That the slave had triumphed over the master. That the tortured had bested the torturer.

Yet this new faith stuck, for multiple reasons beyond my limited space here. People who weren’t atop the cultural hierarchy found Christianity appealing, obviously.

St. Paul soon expanded the message, making it universal rather than local. Everyone is equal in God’s sight, Paul proclaimed. There’s neither slave nor free, man nor woman, Jew nor Greek. God loves everyone and will accept you regardless of your station in life.

These, too, were staggering concepts. Within four centuries of Jesus’ death, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, as Weiss observes in her introduction to the podcast. By then, Christianity had 30 million followers — half the empire.

The Christian message proved inherently subversive. Kings were no more important to God than any given beggar. Every human deserved to be treated with dignity.

As the centuries rolled along, such teachings sowed the seeds of revolutions, as I mentioned. They eventually led to the rights of free speech and religious practice —  everyone, being made in God’s image, could keep her own conscience and speak her own mind, up to and including denying God’s existence.

Because Christianity began with Jesus, the ultimate victim of misused power, it bestowed “an inherent virtue within victimhood,” Holland said.

“The idea that to be oppressed is the source of power. I mean it’s a very radical idea that Christianity weaponizes and has weaponized again and again and again. It would seem mad to the Romans that to be a victim would be something that you could weaponize. … (But) that is still going very, very strong.”

Today we encounter such ideas in the air we breathe, not to mention the news we consume. We take them for granted. Nevertheless they, and our way of life, wouldn’t exist without Jesus and the religion he inspired.

Christianity has never managed to fully embody all the lofty ideals it proclaimed. It’s taken a sadly circuitous path in its quest for equality, justice and mercy, with countless failures. But it is undeniably the source for much of what is best about our way of life.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.