In 2019 atheist historian Tom Holland published Dominion, an ambitious work detailing the revolutionary impact Jesus Christ and Christianity have had on Western civilization. Holland set out to explain why “in a West that is often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain thoroughly Christian.” Though dismissive of Christianity’s truth claims, Holland nevertheless concedes that it is impossible to account for the moral and cultural architecture of the modern West apart from the influence of a seemingly insignificant first-century rabbi from Nazareth.
Holland’s account, however, leaves an unavoidable question largely unexplored. Why has Christianity proven so uniquely life- and world-transforming? Is the Christian story merely one successful moral revolution among many—arriving at the right time with the right ethical insights—or does its durability point to something deeper than historical contingency alone?
Truth Changes Everything by Jeff Myers does not attempt to answer Holland directly, nor does it engage Dominion as a sustained interlocutor. Myers cites Holland only briefly and appreciatively, as an unexpected witness to Christianity’s enduring strangeness. Instead, Myers writes from within the Christian tradition itself, asking a different but related question: What follows if Jesus Christ is not merely the historical source of certain moral instincts but Truth itself—the one in whom reality and history ultimately hold together? Christianity’s enduring cultural influence, Myers argues, cannot be adequately explained apart from the identity of Christ. It is not simply that Jesus of Nazareth inspired a movement that happened to change the world; rather, the magnitude of that transformation only makes sense if Jesus is, as he claimed, the Truth.
Myers’s stated aim in Truth Changes Everything is twofold: first, to explore the difference between what he calls the “Truth” viewpoint and the modern “truths” viewpoint; and second, to answer the inevitable So what? question that follows. The cultural moment he addresses, however, is no longer defined merely by relativism—the belief that all truths are equally valid—but by a deeper inversion in which claims grounded in historic Christian truth are increasingly recast as moral threats. To affirm Truth with a capital T is no longer simply to risk being dismissed as quaint or misguided but to be labeled exclusionary, dangerous, or socially corrosive. It is precisely within this contested landscape that Myers situates his project. The same truth that once generated institutions and moral frameworks now collides with rival moral authorities that continue to borrow Christian categories while denying their source.
The book is organized accordingly. Myers opens with several chapters devoted to the knowability and moral authority of truth before turning to a series of thematic chapters that trace how Jesus followers have shaped human life, charity, education, science, art, politics, justice, and work. The aim is not to provide exhaustive histories of these domains but to recover a moral imagination capable of recognizing how truth claims about Christ have historically moved outward into culture, institutions, and patterns of life—often most visibly in moments of crisis.
Truth and the Pursuit of Justice
One section that stood out to me in particular is Myers’s treatment of criminal justice. Here the book moves from broad cultural diagnosis to concrete institutional questions, pressing the implications of truth for how societies hold people accountable for wrongdoing. The chapter functions as a test case for Myers’s larger claim: If Truth is not real, knowable, and grounded beyond individual self-perception, then justice itself loses coherence. Myers rejects both naïve utopianism and a flattening moral relativism, arguing that justice requires the moral clarity to name wrongdoing as wrongdoing while also preserving the Christian conviction that offenders remain morally responsible agents capable of reform. His critique of therapeutic or quasi- spiritual frameworks that dissolve personal responsibility into impersonal forces—however rhetorically exaggerated at points—underscores a real tension in contemporary discourse: Systems of justice that lose confidence in moral agency ultimately struggle to uphold justice at all. In this way, the criminal justice discussion does not merely illustrate one application of Myers’s thesis; it exposes what is at stake when Truth is treated as negotiable. A justice system that cannot meaningfully speak of guilt, responsibility, and reform will be unable to protect the vulnerable or restrain the violent.
At the same time, readers interested in the criminal justice question will benefit from supplementing Myers’s formative sketch with more sustained treatment. One particularly valuable companion is Matthew Martens’s Reforming Criminal Justice,1 which offers a careful, legally informed, and pastorally sensitive account of how Christian moral commitments should shape contemporary debates about punishment, reform, incarceration, and mercy. Myers provides moral orientation; Martens supplies institutional and policy-level depth. Read together, the two works model how Christian reflection on justice can remain both morally serious and practically responsible.
Strengths
A defining strength of Truth Changes Everything lies in Myers’s consistent focus on what he is actually trying to accomplish; he does not attempt to write a comprehensive history of Christian influence, nor does he offer a technical philosophical defense of realism. Instead, he aims to recover confidence in Truth as a moral authority capable of sustaining human flourishing. His narrative method—returning repeatedly to concrete lives lived under pressure—gives the book cumulative force without collapsing into triumphalism. The figures Myers highlights are earnest and often flawed, but their lives illustrate how truth claims about Christ have historically reordered moral imagination and produced durable cultural fruit.
The book is also effective in diagnosing a distinctly modern condition: a culture that continues to rely on Christian moral categories while increasingly rejecting Christianity’s metaphysical foundation. Myers’s contrast between the “Truth” viewpoint and the “truths” viewpoint is not philosophically exhaustive, but it is pedagogically effective. It equips readers—particularly students, educators, and pastors—to recognize that contemporary conflicts often hinge not on policy details but on deeper disagreements about reality, authority, and the grounds of moral judgment.
Finally, the work carries genuine pastoral urgency. Myers’s reflections on suffering, despair, and hope—shaped by his own experience with serious illness—frame the book as a call to courage rather than retreat. Truth, on this account, matters most precisely when it is costly.
A Limitation
This book’s most evident limitation emerges in its use of history. Myers deploys historical examples primarily as moral testimony to the formative power of Christian truth rather than as sites of sustained causal analysis. This occasionally results in compressed lines of influence and limited attention to the political, economic, institutional, and confessional complexities that also shape historical outcomes. Such compression reflects the book’s formative purpose rather than any failure of intellectual seriousness. Readers will do best to treat these historical sketches as orienting narratives rather than comprehensive explanations of how particular developments came to be.
Recommendation
As a work of formation rather than academic reconstruction, Truth Changes Everything will most naturally serve readers who sense that contemporary disputes are not merely political but metaphysical—contests over what is real, what is good, and what authorities may define moral obligation. Pastors, educators, students, and thoughtful lay readers engaged in worldview formation will find Myers a clear and earnest guide. The book is accessible without being simplistic and challenging without being shrill. It will be especially helpful for Christians unsettled by the growing dissonance between conviction and cultural approval, not because it offers a tactical manual for navigating hostility but because it reorients readers toward faithfulness in a moment when love of neighbor is increasingly likely to be met with misunderstanding rather than welcome.
Readers seeking a tightly argued academic monograph or a comprehensive history of Western institutions may find the book less satisfying on its own terms. But readers willing to be formed by story—to consider how Christian truth claims have not only comforted individuals but generated institutions, habits, and moral expectations—will find Myers’s project both timely and clarifying. Whatever one makes of its historical compression at points, Truth Changes Everything succeeds in pressing a question that modern culture cannot easily evade: not merely how Christianity once reshaped the world but why its truth claims continue to unsettle every age that attempts to preserve Christian moral instincts while cutting itself off from the Christ who made them intelligible in the first place.
Note
- Matthew T. Martens, Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal (Crossway, 2023).
©Erik Warren O’Dell. All Rights Reserved.
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Erik Warren O’Dell
Erik Warren O’Dell is a Christian educator, writer, and curriculum developer in the classical humanities tradition based in the Houston, Texas area. He holds an MA in Theological Studies from Westminster Seminary California (2018) and teaches and develops homeschool curriculum from a confessional Reformed perspective. He also leads a church-history-as-apologetics Sunday school series at Christ Presbyterian Church, where he worships with his wife, Jessica. His work focuses on helping students and readers think clearly, historically, and faithfully about Christianity in a skeptical age.
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