For years, I prided myself on my ability to resist popular podcast trends. Whether friends were urging me to follow the New York Times’ “Daily” or Father Mike Schmitz’s “Bible in a Year,” I stood firm against the siren song of mass culture. But when I was finally convinced to hear an episode of the “Rest Is History”—the world’s number-one history podcast—my inner contrarian promptly gave way to a shameless conformist.
What caused this transformation? Part of it was the show’s gripping narration, which retells the greatest episodes from world history with color, detail, and drama. Part of it was the endearing rapport between hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, who ham their roles as bookish aristocrat and red-blooded yeoman with hilarity, warmth, and evident friendship. After a year’s worth of listening, however, what keeps me pressing the play button—and the share button—is how the “Rest Is History” portrays its titular content: not as the mere playing out of material forces, but as the story of men and women, their relationships and choices, and their sense of the supernatural.
This is a far cry from the historiographical mainstream. Since the 1960s and 70s, Western scholars have tended to analyze the past through either Marxist or quantitative social-science lenses. The Marxist extreme is epitomized by the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which attempts to reduce the American Founding to an economic power play by colonial slaveholders. The quantitative extreme is epitomized by Jared Diamond’s bestselling book Guns, Germs, and Steel, which paints the arc of world civilizations as predetermined by geography. Most modern textbooks probably fall somewhere in the middle, combining a focus on class struggle with a devotion to maps, charts, and statistics. But regardless of which approach a historian favors, he or she is likely to downplay the role of character, choice, and religion.
This is inevitably dissatisfying, because not only do reductive, materialistic accounts of history lose that most vital component of any writing—human interest—they also ring false to reality. For human beings, in reality, are more than pawns of economics or cogs in a mathematically determined machine. They are rational animals made in the image of—and naturally conscious of their dependence on—God. This makes history a story of spirituality, intellect, and will more fundamentally than it is a story of class struggle or statistics. It is not that the latter are unimportant, but that the former are more central to the human experience. As the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson wrote in Progress and Religion, “every living culture must possess some spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for that sustained social effort which is civilization.” In other words, the core of culture, literally as well as linguistically, is always “cult.”
The “Rest Is History,” over and against the historiographical mainstream, brings this point home time and again. When Holland and Sandbrook recount the discovery of the New World, for example, they dismiss Marxist accounts of Christopher Columbus’s motivations, instead wading deep into the explorer’s religious convictions. Similarly, when they discuss the Reformation, they lead not with the financial ambitions of the 16th-century German princes, as some might be tempted to do, but with Martin Luther’s interior life. And by their telling, the development of the French Revolution had as much to do with key figures’ perversions of Catholic ideals as with international economics or the pressures of scientific enlightenment.
Of the two hosts, Holland pays particular attention to the role of religion in history. As with his 2019 book Dominion, he frequently uses the “Rest Is History” to detail how modern concepts of justice and human rights derive from uniquely Christian principles—a point that is hard to deny when accompanied by facts about the normality of rape and human sacrifice in pre-Christian societies like Ancient Rome and the Aztec Empire. On the show, Holland also openly admires religious figures like St. Catherine of Siena and St. Thomas More to a degree that, in today’s often anti-religious academic environment, is nothing short of remarkable.
None of this is to suggest that the “Rest Is History” is a religious podcast per se. Holland claims to have been formed by Christian culture, but he professes no real faith. Sandbrook, who jokingly refers to himself as the Thomas Cromwell to Holland’s More, occasionally relishes his own skepticism. Both hosts are tied to the historical-critical method and therefore prone to reject “unprovable” accounts, such as the legend of St. Juan Diego and the Lady of Guadalupe, out of hand.
This ultimately cuts against the show’s deepest insights, for how are we to explain religion’s power to motivate human beings throughout history if religion itself has no basis in history? Moreover, why should we put our faith in religious principles or admire religious heroes, as Holland does, if their rationale descends from self-delusion? Bishop Robert Barron, in his review of Dominion, astutely observes that “it is finally impossible to separate Christian ethics from metaphysics and from history…. [J]ust as cut flowers will last only a short time in water, so those ideas will not long endure if we deracinate them from the startling facticity of the cross of Jesus.” The “Rest Is History’s” hosts would do well to consider this, if only because of its implications for the logical consistency of their scholarship.
Thankfully, Holland and Sandbrook’s secularist shortcomings are more than outweighed by their show’s rich humor and even richer content. This is to the credit of the hosts’ self-awareness, which never allows them to take themselves or their opinions too seriously. But it is also to the credit of their love for history itself. For the task of understanding the past demands honesty, humility, and respect for all aspects of human nature, from the material to the intellectual and volitional and—above all—the spiritual.
Image via World History Encyclopedia
