num_pages: 539
description: 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 consumerismall 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 scienceas the source of all truthnecessarily 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.
language: English
title: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society
publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press