In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad
Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant
Reformation""and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over
the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of
religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common
good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism all
these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that
marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity
provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral
life in the West.
Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an
institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for
earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals.
The Reformation s protagonists sought to advance the realization of
this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections,
retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually
replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the
West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual
disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized
discourse; a notion that modern science as the source of all truth
necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a
therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with
which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the
institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can
pursue knowledge.
"The Unintended Reformation" asks what propelled the West into
this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers
deep in our medieval Christian past.
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