An outstanding analysis of how we got to the undesirable Now, which also contains a great deal of wisdom on how we can achieve a desirable post-liberal society. (The written version of this review was first published June 8, 2018. Written versions, in web and PDF formats, are available here: https://theworthyhouse.com/2018/06/08/book-review-unintended-reformation-religious-revolution-secularized-society-brad-s-gregory/)

This and all Worthy House narrations are offered with accurate closed captions (not auto-generated).

"Exhaustively documented, and in some ways just exhausting, though at the same time exhilarating, Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation is a towering achievement. It synthesizes centuries of history and multiple avenues of thought to analyze how we arrived at certain negative aspects of modernity. Gregory’s claim is that we got here as the result of the unintended consequences of choices made in response to “major, perceived human problems.” Those choices were, initially, the Reformation’s religious choices, which ran counter to the entire worldview of medieval Christianity. But the Reformation did not solve the problems—it made them worse, in a declining spiral, accelerated and exacerbated by subsequent secularization, itself partially the result of the Reformation. The result is a world in which the ability of humans to find meaning in their lives has been crippled, rather than enhanced. We would, implicitly, be better off with something more like the High Medieval synthesis destroyed by Martin Luther." . . .