The Unintended Reformation is a deeply provocative book that advances an indictment of modernity, as well as of the Reformation, to which Professor Gregory attributes many of the developments that he regards as characteristic of our contemporary scene: the denial of God's agency in the world; the compartmentalization of Christian theology and its segregation from other modes of knowledge; the proliferation of different points of view and personal moralities; and the ascendancy of rampant capitalism or “the goods life,” as opposed to a life oriented toward the substantive good that was formerly anchored in a broadly shared Christian culture. The book bristles both with erudition and with social commentary that is frequently partisan in its tone. It is this conjunction of a scholarly history of the Reformation and of secularization with a strongly anti-modern polemic that will strike many readers, as it did this one, as the book's defining feature and the source of a number of its strengths and weaknesses. Gregory certainly cannot be accused of shying away from controversy, nor of retreating into the type of micro-history that is most comfortable for specialists in the historian's profession. The Unintended Reformation should provoke an intense debate. No matter what position one takes in this controversy, the book demands and repays careful reading.

The book's main thesis is that the Reformation, against the intentions of those who inaugurated and prosecuted it, contributed to a decline in the prestige and social currency of Christianity that enabled the rise of doctrinal and moral relativism, or what Gregory refers to as “hyperpluralism” (11, 21, 369), meaning the limitlessly individualistic and voluntaristic culture we inhabit today: “Doctrinal disagreement—along with its multiple social, moral, and political effects—is the most fundamental and consequential fact about Western Christianity since 1520” (45). Controversies between Protestants and Catholics and among Protestants themselves exposed a lack of agreement that discredited the authority of religious as opposed to scientific knowledge, facilitating the redefinition of religion as private, the segregation of religious institutions from other domains of society, and the replacement of shared religious motivations with individual definitions of the good, including in terms of the pursuit of wealth or what had formerly been condemned by Christians as avarice.

These developments were “unintended” because Protestants had sought to establish a firm basis for Christian truth by affirming a scriptural standard and extending the process of confessionalization. But such efforts merely exposed the inadequacy of “scripture alone” as a guide to the Bible, which Protestants themselves interpreted in multiple and conflicting ways (92). The doctrinal controversies and bloody battles of the Reformation justified increasing state control of the churches and faculties of theology, and the exclusion, for purposes of maintaining the peace, of religion from civic and economic life. All of this led to consequences that had been very far from the minds of the Reformers, who had much more in common with the Catholicism that they helped to dismantle than with the society to which they unwittingly gave birth (272).

The adjective “unintended,” while central to the book's argument, is intensely problematic. It implies a measure of control on the part of individual historical agents over the longer-term consequences of their actions, and over large-scale social processes, such that these agents may be held responsible for these consequences. This is despite Gregory's disavowals of “teleological” views of history (12). There were, of course, many other factors beyond theological commitments that contributed to secularization. Not all of these factors are emphasized sufficiently in the book. For example, it was not merely “metaphysical univocity” or a naturalistic conception of God's being and agency that led to the discrediting of miracles, as Gregory argues in chapter 1. The increasingly obvious success of scientific explanations that required no recourse to the hypothesis of God's existence surely played a significant role, as did other developments, some of which are addressed below. Gregory's argument that the Reformation introduced pluralism not only renders the medieval Church too monolithic, but appears patently inadequate as an explanation for our contemporary diversity. Our pluralism comes from being part of a global culture, one that includes increasing numbers of non-Christians. Similarly, economic life had its own internal engines that were neither intended nor even reckoned with by either the Church or its Protestant detractors.

What Gregory seems to be arguing is that the Reformation undermined the Roman Catholic Church to the extent that it could no longer serve effectively as an antipode and foil to the forces of modernity, could no longer “put the brakes on things,” so to speak. However, secularization, like the Reformation itself, was just as much unintended by the Church. Should we then blame the Church for failing to maintain its own coherence and hegemony, despite its powers of persuasion and punishment? Gregory's admission that, “judged on [its] own terms . . ., medieval Christendom failed” (364) takes away much of the force of his indictment of the Reformation.

Gregory's argument is framed as something of a reductio ad absurdum: because science cannot disprove the existence of miracles (32, 62–63), and cannot (yet) explain everything within its domain satisfactorily (68), there is room for God in nature; because secular philosophers do not agree, they must all be wrong, and reason (unaided by tradition and revelation) itself has been discredited (126); because the Reformation led to pluralism, despite seeking uniformity, it was a mistake. However, it is also necessary when evaluating such an argument to consider whether the alternatives are any more persuasive. Gregory does not offer a serious philosophical defense of miracles, nor of authoritarianism, which alone might counter the pluralism he abhors.

Gregory's book is reminiscent of another he cites that attempted to outline the theological roots of secularization: Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). Yet Taylor deliberately eschewed what he called “subtraction stories” (26–29, 569–79), historical narratives according to which the Reformation led to the loss of a traditional religious culture, rather than to new conformations and different spiritual possibilities. I fear that Gregory has given us precisely such a subtraction story here. He narrates modernity as a slow-motion tragedy and is frankly apologetic in motivation and tenor. In this narrative, the European Middle Ages were anchored on the Church as a true culture, the antipode of what we have become: “late medieval Christianity in all its variety was an institutionalized worldview that influenced all domains of human life” (3; cf. 366). Gregory mourns the loss of this totalizing culture. Despite being counterbalanced by more nuanced depictions of both the medieval Church (see, for instance, 83–84, 157, 250) and the Reformation, the shadow of this vanished, monolithic culture hangs over the entire book, defining its tragic trajectory. Even though the concluding chapter cautions “Against Nostalgia,” Gregory's account evinces a desire to return to a time when we were not abandoned to a culture of “hyperpluralism” where the prevailing sentiment is “whatever.” It is therefore fair to point out that his narrative, in addition to offering no viable (or palatable) alternative to such pluralism, largely ignores questions of power and authority that were central to many of the developments we group together under the rubric of secularization (see, however, 385).

For example, it was not merely the inability of “metaphysical univocity” to reconcile naturalism with God's action in the world that led to a mechanistic conception of the universe, the decline of belief in miracles, and the retreat from a “sacramental view of reality” (41–43). The Deists, who are not discussed in adequate detail on this point (cf. 41), challenged miracles, together with revelation and the “merely positive and arbitrary” commands of Mosaic ceremonial, as the evidences of an arbitrary and capricious God with whom they could not identify (for instance Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation: Or, the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature [London, 1730], 118). They rejected the model of political authority that was expressed in such doctrines in favor of a God who acted in accordance with natural and moral law, which alone they regarded as an adequate basis for securing the integrity and autonomy of human reason. The theological debate over miracles, as Carl Schmitt recognized, had as much to do with politics as with epistemology (Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Theory of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005], 36–37). The radical Reformation entailed the rejection of heteronomy in favor of autonomy. Of course, the Deists may have failed to secure the claims of a universal natural reason, and Gregory rightly highlights the role that Immanuel Kant's sapere aude played in bringing about the culture of “hyperpluralism” that we inhabit (118–19). But the alternative, as both Kant and the Deists correctly identified, was authoritarianism. Neither Gregory's account of the Golden Age of Christianity nor his condemnation of contemporary cultural and moral relativism adequately acknowledges the dangers of this alternative, and the role that it played in precipitating the Reformation. How would one begin to impose a uniform culture now without (or even with) coercion?

Gregory's presentation of modern culture appears one-sided at other times as well. While he highlights the rise of religious skepticism, moral relativism, and economic greed, he pays much less attention to the development of the rule of law, individual freedoms, human rights, and the culture of benevolence that, paradoxically, seems to be flourishing most in some liberal social democracies where the influence of traditional religion is least evident (cf. 177, 289, 375). Despite Gregory's use of the term “hyperpluralism” as a pejorative—like its synonyms “hermeneutical anarchy” (95) and “pullulating pluralism” (111), the term carries moralizing overtones—many Americans would not regard the diversity of belief systems, occupations, and forms of the “pursuit of happiness” as anything other than positive. By tracing secularization to theological disagreements initiated by Protestants, and condemning values pluralism, Gregory seems to be condemning the very act of dissent itself.

Even capitalism is treated unfairly. Under capitalism, “Practices once regarded as dangerous and immoral because detrimental to human flourishing and to the common good have in a dramatic reversal been redubbed the very means to human happiness and to the best sort of society” (242). The seventeenth–century Dutch Tulip craze (277), as well as the financial collapse of 2008 (284), are cited as examples of the fallacy of this reversal. But one might feel compelled to ask: What did human flourishing mean under an authoritarian, feudal system with an otherworldly salvation ethic (criticized most famously by Friedrich Nietzsche) that condemned many to lives of physical hardship while promoting both ascetic deprivations on the one hand and, on the other, the expenditure of money on gold ornaments for churches (rather than on tulips)? Capitalism needs to be regulated in the interest of real human needs, but even Gregory does not deny that it has led to an unprecedented standard of living for an unprecedented number (238).

Gregory's desire to present secularization as a tragedy, as something “unintended,” leads him to neglect the positive dimensions of the Reformation as a progressive unveiling of new spiritual possibilities grounded in a reinterpretation of traditional Christianity. Quite a number of the developments he outlined would be described more aptly as “intended” by Christians. One of the causes of both the privatization of religion and the decline of the “sacramental view of reality” was the redeployment by Protestants of Paul's valuation of spirit over flesh, grace over law. Protestant anti-ritualism, including that of the Deists, deepened complaints against Jewish ceremonialism as well as Catholic sacramentalism. The notion that Christian salvation meant precisely freedom from such modes of tradition influenced economic rationalization, as Weber already argued (The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, trans. H. H. Gerth and Don Martindale [New York: Free Press, 1958], 37–38, 112). It also influenced ideas of religious toleration, as we see in Roger Williams, whose arguments were based largely upon earlier Christian typological views that, under the Gospel, true religion ceased to be a matter of external ritual performance (Robert A. Yelle, “Moses' Veil: Secularization as Christian Myth,” in After Secular Law, eds. Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, Robert A. Yelle, and Mateo Taussig-Rubbo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 23–42 at 30–31). Gregory occasionally acknowledges the contribution made by such theological ideas (132, 161, 215), while also dismissing the “hyper-Pauline” views of certain Protestants (148); but by not granting these ideas enough of a historical role, he is bound to read such developments as the rise of toleration and the privatization of religion as a subtraction rather than a consummation of Christian ideals.

Ironically, Gregory plays into the hands of those secularist narratives that sideline Christianity and present modernity as the triumph of scientific reason over religious superstition. He rightly criticizes the evolutionist assumptions of such “supersessionist” narratives (9, 14, 307). But one source of such narratives, and of the idea of disenchantment, was the Christian supersessionist claim that, with the Crucifixion, the rituals of the old (Jewish) law were no longer binding, and the pagan oracles had been silenced (see Robert A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India [New York: Oxford University Press, 2013], 18-22; Yelle, “Moses' Veil”). Extending these narratives, Protestants argued further that, with the coming of Christ, miracles, magic, and mystery had ceased. It was Romantics who later reported these events in a tone of mourning and loss. Such narratives also influenced the secular Enlightenment. Thomas Sprat, historian for the scientists of the Royal Society, argued that experimental science was “a work well-becoming the most Christian Profession. For the most apparent effect, which attended the passion of Christ, was the putting of an eternal silence, on all the false oracles, and dissembled inspirations of Antient Times” (History of the Royal Society [London, 1667], 362–63). Science would complete the work of Reformation by progressively disenchanting the world. This lends force to Robert Merton's argument that Puritanism gave impetus to the nascent scientific movement in seventeenth-century England (Science, Technology & Society in Seventeenth Century England [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970]). From this perspective, it can scarcely be claimed that secularization was “unintended.” Whether we tell this history in a mood of celebration, resignation, or despair is an open question.