How women revolutionized the world and transmitted Christianity across generations

In October 2019, President Russell M. Nelson cautioned in an address to women of the church that "if the world loses the moral rectitude of its women, the world will never recover." I believed him, but I confess that for a long time I couldn't see how the moral choices of women could matter that much.

The same month that President Nelson gave these remarks, British historian Tom Holland published his 600 page opus, Dominion, where he chronicles how Christianity revolutionized ancient values and gave rise to Western society as we know it, an ambitious treatment that stretches back to the Persian ruler Xerxes and ends with the #MeToo movement.

Calling Christianity "the single most transformative development in Western history," Holland, who remains agnostic, argues that western values like freedom of conscience, human equality and individual rights cannot ultimately be derived from reason or human nature alone. They were instead inherited from the story of a god who made humanity in his own image and then died a humiliating death to save them.

Where the ancients worshiped capricious gods of unattainable power, Christians worshiped the God who descended below all things, inverting the prevailing assumptions about power and goodness. As Holland traces through the centuries this revolutionary reconception of humankind — as infinitely valuable and saved through sacrifice — the reader sees more clearly how Christian values gave rise to the Enlightenment, modern science, liberalism and western democracy.

As the German atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzche himself lamented , unless you're willing to part ways with the idea of inherent human worth or the belief that we have duties to the vulnerable and oppressed, you're still fundamentally a Christian.

But according to Holland, "so profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view." Because Christian values are the waters in which Westerners swim, they are no longer something we observe; they are the lens through which we observe everything else.

So too, I believe, is the influence of women in our lives. Their influence is so deep and so pervasive that we can't see it, but instead see everything by it.

How do you measure the influence of being brought into the world in a woman's body? Of your first sensations being the sound of a woman's voice and the beating of her heart? What does it mean that your own first feelings are soothed by her touch or awakened by her gaze? What does her nurturance imprint upon us below the surface of our recollection? What impressions about life, love, safety and meaning does she leave upon us, beyond the reach of memory, and therefore, of acknowledgement?

Latter-day Saint leaders have tried to highlight the power of woman's primordial impact. President David O. McKay taught that "motherhood is the greatest potential influence either for good or ill in human life. The mother's image is the first that stamps itself on the unwritten page of the young child's mind. It is her caress that first awakens a sense of security, her kiss, the first realization of affection; her sympathy and tenderness, the first assurance that there is love in the world."

"The work of nurturing, including the temporal caregiving of feeding, tending, bathing, clothing, wiping, and cleaning, is viewed as a holy work" in the faith, writes Jenet Erickson , a social scientist and professor of Religious Education at BYU. After citing numerous studies on the lifelong effects of maternal sensitivity on human development, Erickson adds, "Through the sacrificing love of nurturing life — physically, emotionally, and spiritually — a mother creates a foundation from which self-confidence and integrity are woven into the fabric of her children's character."

A mother's influence creates the framework through which we make sense of every other experience. Erickson cites scholarship from the University of California, Berkeley which found that mother and child share "a common language years before the infant will acquire speech." Before a child reads her first word, she will be fluent in the language of meaning and security.

Of course, not all women will have children in this life, which is why it is no small thing, as Sheri Dew points out , that Eve was called "the mother of all living" before she ever bore a child. To nurture a life, especially in the tenderest years, but also during the many tender times afterwards, is to live up to Eve's calling. And it's to exert the greatest possible influence on another person that one can wield in this life.

This doesn't mean that women should only nurture, nor that only women should nurture. Nurturance is something God expects of men, as the parable of the Lord of the vineyard demonstrates . And female perspectives are needed at every level of society.

Nurturing opportunities are often only tolerated in our larger culture as the consolation prize for women who aren't powerful. If we instead understand nurturing as a powerful — perhaps the most powerful — form of influence, then recognizing a woman's gifts for nurturing is not oppressive or sexist, but empowering.

Nurturing opportunities are often only tolerated in our larger culture as the consolation prize for women who aren't powerful. If we instead understand nurturing as a powerful — perhaps the most powerful — form of influence, then recognizing a woman's gifts for nurturing is not oppressive or sexist, but empowering.

Holland's Dominion attempts to describe how Christianity's shaped nations and became "the most powerful of hegemonic cultural systems in the history of the world." In the end, however, Holland breaks from the grand sweep of history to focus on the personal, where he observes that Christianity has been transmitted across two millennia not through edicts or crusades, but by women. Their concern for the weak and vulnerable has made them the natural ambassadors of a faith in which the lowly are exalted.

Describing his godmother, Aunty Deb, as "a committed and faithful member of the Church of England," Holland asserts that "the story of how Christianity transformed the world, would never have happened without people like my Aunty Deb." Aunty Deb took seriously her commission to introduce Holland to Christian teachings, and her constancy, devotion, and "unfailing kindness," gave him something that outlasted his disdain for the humorless God of his secular studies. She gave him a tangible "model of what ... faith could actually mean."

Like the Savior she worshiped, Holland's godmother brought the divine down to earth and made it flesh — a living, breathing expression of the Christian message. "Inevitably, to attempt the tracing of Christianity's impact on the world," Holland writes, "is to focus on the doings of men."

"But these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women."

In Latter-day Saint scripture, it's women who shape the young men who experience some of the most striking miracles in Book of Mormon warfare. As the record reads , "they had been taught by their mothers, that if they did not doubt, God would deliver them" — with the young soldiers rehearsing the words of their mothers, saying, "We do not doubt our mothers knew it."

We are not driven by the mind, but by the heart, and it is the nurturance of women that gives love, sacrifice, and even life, their first and most lasting meaning. "Through ordinary caregiving work, 'love become[s] flesh' ... through its constant physical expression," writes Erickson. Through their divine gifts of nurturing — of mothering, regardless of childbearing — women gain direct access to the highest and holiest seat of understanding: the heart.

That's why in the end it's no hyperbole to say that, "if the world loses the moral rectitude of its women, the world will never recover."