












































[Expositions 6.2 (2012) 41-47]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Gregory, Brad S. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized 
Society. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University 
Press, 2012. 574 pp, hb $39.95. ISBN: 978-0-674-04563-7. 
 
 
In recent years, scholars from a range of disciplines – chiefly philosophy, theology, and history, 
but also literary criticism – have produced a surprising number of ambitious volumes asserting 
that seemingly arcane theological and ecclesial debates within Christendom were so foundational 
to early modernity in the West that their impact continues to exercise decisive influence upon our 
own era. Of course, the notion that inner-Christian theological debates have had implications for 
more secular realities such as law, politics, economics, etc. is nothing new; however, what is 
striking about this recent spate of texts is their drive towards comprehensiveness in 
demonstrating that theological debates – including controversies concerning the 
institutionalization of authority – can function as a sort of collective Rosetta Stone, a means by 
which to untangle most if not all of the strands constituting the hotly contested territory of how 
best to diagnose the “condition” of modernity (not to mention “late” or “post-” modernity). 
Given both the scope and the subsequent impact of such works as Mark C. Taylor’s After God1 
and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age2 upon interdisciplinary conversations, it seems that we might 
be entering a time in which the term “magisterial” functions less as an adjective and more like a 
genre in its own right.  

A recent intervention into this genre is Brad S. Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation, which 
bears its thesis in its subtitle: “How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society.” The 
“revolution” in question is the trajectory inaugurated by the European Reformation of the 
sixteenth century, and the “society” in question is precisely our own – the twenty-first century 
West (and, to the extent that other parts of the globe have adopted the characteristic features of 
Western modernity, the planet as a whole). Gregory, a professor of early modern European 
history at Notre Dame, has written a volume that bears all the hallmarks of an agenda-setting 
text. First, it ranges widely both historically (covering trajectories from later medieval centuries 
through the Enlightenment, and occasionally beyond) and conceptually (encompassing 
discussions of metaphysics, the politics of emerging nation-states, economics, transitions in 
university curricula, etc.); at the same time, however, it filters these diffuse topics through one 
focused inquiry, namely the ways in which these different aspects of modernity owe their 
peculiar character to the legacy of the Reformation. Second, it reflects the well-established 
scholarly belief that intellectual genealogy – tracing the contingent developments of ideas across 
time, with special attention to the “roads not taken” at key moments – is a necessary step in 
combating the various philosophical and political maladies of the modern age (which itself 
assumes that modernity is characterized chiefly by its defects, perhaps even to the point of being 
a “failed experiment”). And third, as early reactions to the text in both academic and popular 
journals have already shown, it is controversial: anyone working in my field (historical and 
systematic theology) has by this time almost certainly read at least one of the numerous high-



The Unintended Reformation  42 
 

profile reviews of Gregory’s work, and has noted the varying levels of ire that it has raised in 
various quarters of the academy. What this means is that most readers picking up this book for 
the first time likely will have failed to sequester themselves from being influenced by the debate 
around the book that is already happening.  

To be sure, Gregory demonstrates throughout the text that he is not afraid to pick a fight. In 
his methodological introduction to the text, he explicitly denies that historians should hold back 
from applying insights gained from their study of the past to cultural commentary on the present; 
thus, nearly a third of the total text of his book consists of discussion of the state of the twenty-
first century West. The notes that he strikes concerning virtually every major discourse of 
contemporary Western society – including politics, moral philosophy, economics, ecology, 
religion, science, and academia – are consistently pessimistic and polemical.  

Indeed, across this wide survey Gregory’s core complaint remains the same: Western society 
no longer has any agreed-upon first principles, no fixed points of axiomatic agreement, by which 
to adjudicate what Gregory terms the “hyperplurality” of contending viewpoints that characterize 
the modern marketplace of ideas. This lack of consensus undermines the ability of every facet of 
Western experience to shape life into a meaningful whole. Throughout the book’s chapters, one 
by one, potential unifying achievements are assessed and found wanting. Politics? Even as our 
world faces unprecedented economic and environmental challenges, no single vision of the good 
life funds any point of agreement or compromise among world leaders. Economics? A vision of 
the good life as moderation and self-discipline has given way to what Gregory continually calls 
“the goods life,” the belief that accumulation of material goods is the be-all and end-all of life 
and that any classical virtues that might temper that acquisitiveness will be derided as archaic (in 
no small part because they threaten the ideology of unfettered economic growth). Science? The 
fact that, on Gregory’s account, the natural sciences have capitulated to the belief that 
specifically religious assertions are out of bounds as postulates for answering what Gregory calls 
“Life Questions” (broad, existential matters of ultimate importance to human life as such) means 
that sciences are now incapable of addressing reality as it is actually lived by the majority of the 
Earth’s population. Ethics and morals? With a nod to the work of Alasdair MacIntyre3, Gregory 
contends that the lack of any shared societal vision as to what an “ethical” life might look like 
has fragmented the guild of professional moral philosophers to the point where their work is 
utterly incapable of addressing any serious word to what Gregory calls the regnant and 
relativistic “culture of Whatever.”  

The corrosive effects of hyperpluralism upon these discourses are, on Gregory’s account, 
rooted in more fundamental failures at the level of religion: “Scientific inquiry, economists’ 
claims, philosophical reflection, and the study of human cultures and traditions augment further 
the open-ended religious and secular pluralism that prevails in Western society at large with 
respect to the Life Questions” (81). In order to link hyperpluralism (what Reinhard Hütter, 
channeling Jürgen Habermas, has called “unintelligible profusion”4) with Western cultural 
decay, Gregory asserts a more fundamental connection between hyperpluralism and 
secularization, with the latter construed as the loss of religion as both a metaphysical orientation 



43  Saler 
 

and as a unified, pervasive broker of culture and intellectual discourse. In other words, the engine 
that drives the most pernicious effects of hyperpluralism into Western society is secularization. 
That is the essence of the story that The Unintended Reformation wishes to tell.  

According to this narrative, the onset of the Reformation was not simply an inter-ecclesial 
dispute with implications for the practice of the faith; rather, it was a fundamental rupture of a 
previous state of cultural equilibrium as transmitted through the Western Catholic church. At 
various points throughout his book, Gregory insists that this relative harmony saturated virtually 
every aspect of medieval culture in the West: “Western Christianity on the eve of the 
Reformation comprised an institutionalized worldview, a many-layered combination of beliefs, 
practices, and institutions […] Deeply embedded in social life, political relationships, and the 
wider culture, Christianity has as its ostensible, principle raison d’être the sanctification of the 
baptized through the practice of the Christian faith, such that they might be saved when judged 
eternally by God after death” (83). To his credit, Gregory acknowledges and describes the ways 
in which the actual behavior of medieval Christians – particularly those in the upper echelons of 
political and ecclesial hierarchy – often fell far short of Christendom’s professed theological 
ideals, to the point where the reformers had ample reason to lose faith in the moral and teaching 
authority of the Roman church. He also gives some attention (although less than one might hope 
for a historian of his caliber) to the numerous disputes and contestations within medieval 
Catholic theology and practice.  

Indeed, the fact that the Reformation was to a certain degree justified is central to Gregory’s 
argument. It is apparent to even the most casual reader of nascent Protestant texts that the 
reformers shared their Roman interlocutors’ assumptions concerning the centrality of faith to life 
and of the church to faith; the dispute was centered on whether medieval Catholicism embodied 
or betrayed that ideal. There can be little doubt the late medieval church suffered from what 
Gregory calls “failures of charity” (on fronts both political and theological). Gregory’s relatively 
sympathetic treatment of the intentions of Luther, Calvin, et al. distinguishes his account from 
the trope employed by Catholic opponents in the first few centuries following the Reformation 
break, namely, that of ascribing intellectual or moral defects to the Reformers.5 

However, the overarching narrative of the book does fit into another well-established, if more 
generous and modern, category of counter-Reformation critique: the notion that Protestant 
valorization of private judgment (as regards matters of scriptural interpretation and church 
doctrine) and predilection towards schism would extend past the inner-ecclesial intentions 
(however noble) of the reformers, and would in fact come to undermine the common structures 
of society as a whole. For Gregory, the cumulative effect of this divisiveness is nothing less than 
the single most important factor linking hyperpluralism to secularity; thus, he insists that our 
modern inability to handle the Life Questions with any sustained clarity is the unintended but 
inevitable outcome of the Reformation legacy. Thus, “the most important, distant historical 
source of Western hyperpluralism pertaining to the Life Questions is the Reformation insistence 
on scripture as the sole source for Christian faith and life, combined with the vast range of 
countervailing ways in which the Bible was interpreted and applied” because “the sort of 



The Unintended Reformation  44 
 

disagreements about answers to the Life Questions characteristic of the early Reformation have 
never gone away – they have only been transformed, modified, and expanded in terms of content 
even as efforts have been made to contain and manage their unintended and undeniably 
enormous effects” (92-3).  

 Prima facie, such a domino-effect view of ecclesial schism is nothing new. From the outset 
of the Reformation controversies, Catholic opponents of the so-called “magisterial” reformers 
argued that belief in the clarity of Scripture to the individual reader and the ability of individual 
believers to rightly interpret the gospel that Luther and his contemporaries were espousing was 
naïve, and would open a Pandora’s Box of divisiveness via a host of incompatible 
interpretations. Those warnings were quickly validated by Luther’s vexation at how quickly the 
relative stability of the initial Reformation settlements fragmented into a host of spiritual and 
political contestations, from the so-called “enthusiasts” or “Radical Refomers” whom Luther 
derided as Schwärmerei to the provocation of the Peasant uprising. In the centuries following the 
Reformation, the accusation that ecclesial fissiparity and reliance on private judgment breeds 
social decline would be taken up in more a more sophisticated fashion by such thinkers as Jaime 
Balmes and John Henry Newman (and in less sophisticated fashion by others, including 
Massimo Salani, who recently made headlines for claiming that the global growth of fast food 
reflects a degradation of communal sensibilities – and thus is traceable to Protestantism).  

While, as stated above, Gregory is sympathetic to the reformers’ religious impulses in their 
loss of confidence in the medieval church, he also accuses them of naiveté for thinking that their 
principles of sola scriptura and the ability of individual believers to rightly interpret scripture 
would be enough to allow the Protestant communions to adjudicate religious truth. Because the 
Reformation dissolved into a host of irreconcilable religious options (many of them augmented 
by a spiritualist turn away from the text of the Bible itself and towards a kind of neo-Gnostic 
reliance upon direct dispensations from the Holy Spirit), and because those religious disputes 
quickly became violent, various engines of “toleration” through secularization became 
increasingly attractive (most prominently in the Enlightenment’s confidence in rationality as a 
tool for moderating religious passions). Where religion failed, reason, scientism, and (especially) 
the market stepped in.  

This last piece of the puzzle – the analysis of how secularization through hyperpluralism 
mapped historically onto the emergence of modern capitalism – is where Gregory’s book 
improves upon previous influential accounts of “secularization via toleration” (most notably, 
Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis6). As a historian, Gregory is at his best when detailing how 
ecclesial and market discourses converged at crucial points to advance the “management” of 
toleration and pluralism in ways that would facilitate the emergence of modern habits of 
production and consumption (e.g., the retooling of avarice as material success). Theologians and 
sociologists who today cast hyperpluralism as a symptom of the dominance of the late capitalist 
“market” – and there are many – will find Gregory’s narrative a useful ally on that front.  

Unfortunately, such application of grittier historical data on Gregory’s part is inconsistent 
throughout the book; indeed, at times, his overarching narrative (once more: Protestantism leads 



45  Saler 
 

to pluralism, which leads to secularization, which leads to hyperpluralism, which leads to the 
decline of the West) depends upon significant oversimplification, if not outright cliché. At 
moments where it would be crucial for Gregory to trace evidence of ideas manifesting 
themselves “on the ground” rather than solely in the space of theological discourse, he resorts 
instead to bare assertion (for instance, his reliance on the faddish notion that the 
“disenchantment” of the world characteristic of secularism is traceable to the advent of 
nominalism and “univocal” metaphysics7). These tenuous maneuvers coincide with his strange 
lack of engagement with art and cultural production during and after the Reformation, which is 
all the more odd given that there is ample evidence to suggest that, for many Christians in 
Europe and England, the site of the Reformation’s most disruptive effects were aesthetic (related 
to art and liturgy) rather than doctrinal.8 

More egregious are the distortions brought about by Gregory’s stubbornly pessimistic 
reductions of modernity to a condition of thoroughgoing and degenerate relativism. While he 
acknowledges at several points that modernity’s relocation of ethical discourse away from 
ecclesial traditions and towards more abstract language of human rights has brought about 
advancements in the latter that are “incomparably preferable to the appalling brutalization of 
men, women, and children in modern dictatorships” (233), his drive to show that such appeals to 
human rights no longer rest upon an agreed-upon metaphysical foundation leads him away from 
any substantive analysis as to how passion for social justice has in fact sustained many moderns, 
secular and religious alike. Meanwhile, given his fascination with how the medieval church was 
able to balance the catholicity of orthodoxy with a generous variety of local traditions, his silence 
about the vitality of the global Christian church and its increasing influence upon Western 
Christians casts his pessimism about the fate of religion in the West in a rather parochial light. If 
we are to believe that the experiment of modernity is a failure, then more of its variegated facets 
(cultural and religious) than what Gregory allows to surface must be given their day in court.  

But even if the forest of The Unintended Reformation’s broad narrative ultimately proves 
unconvincing, nevertheless the book does provide some valuable data for rethinking our 
perspective on certain historical trees. Like James Simpson’s recent (and equally polemical) 
Burning to Read9, Gregory makes a strong case for how the waning of Protestant confidence in 
scriptural perspicuity (as well as the failure of Protestant supplements to scripture, such as 
prefaces and commentaries, to ward off the onset of individualized spiritualism in subsequent 
hermeneutics) rendered many of the Reformation’s signal achievements unstable, and he 
demonstrates in vivid detail how that instability resulted in situations in which many Europeans 
experienced the Reformation chiefly through its “radical” offshoots – and through violence. 
Similarly, historians of the Reformation will benefit from wrestling with Gregory’s criticism of 
the contemporary tendency to marginalize study of the Radical Reformation in favor of the 
“magisterial” Reformers, despite the disproportionally higher impact of the former upon the lives 
of Christians in the sixteenth century.  

The definitive text relating the Reformation to modernity in its various permutations has yet to 
appear. When it does, it will tell a nuanced, diffuse story that does not lift up the (unquestionably 



The Unintended Reformation  46 
 

significant) impact of late medieval events upon our era at the expense of downgrading those 
aspects of the modern experience that do not conform neatly to a linear script. That said, 
whoever writes that book will benefit from the genuine flashes of insight available from 
Gregory’s work, both where it convinces and where it does not. 

  
       Robert Saler 

Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis 
 

Notes 
 

1. Taylor, Mark. After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).  
 

2. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of 
Harvard University Press, 2007).  

 
3. Cf. especially MacIntyre’s seminal discussion in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 

2nd ed. (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). At several points 
throughout his book Gregory indicates his debt to MacIntyre’s discussion; indeed, it’s 
probably no exaggeration to say that how one ultimately feels about the narrative put 
forth by The Unintended Reformation may depend a great deal on how one feels about 
the foundation established by MacIntyre’s work. Put simply, both MacIntyre and Gregory 
offer historical narratives by which an original synthetic harmony 
(Aristotelianism/Thomism for MacIntyre, medieval Catholicism for Gregory) undergoes 
rupture, either by the disaggregation of philosophy from teleology and tradition 
(MacIntyre) or a period of theological and political turmoil that corrodes the ability of the 
institutional church to shape common visions of the good and shared answers to Life 
Questions (Gregory). While such disruption initially feels like liberation and 
enlightenment, it eventuates in a sort of sort of emotivism that masquerades as relativistic 
freedom when in fact it enforces the interests of an increasingly dominant “marketplace” 
of ideas – pluralism as a material and ideological shopping mall.  

 
4. Hütter, Reinhard. Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice (Grand Rapids, 

MI: Eerdmans, 1999).  
 

5. Cf. David Steinmetz, “The Catholic Luther: A Critical Reappraisal” Theology Today July 
2004, 187-201: 61.  

 
6. Toulmin, Stephen. Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University 

of Chicago Press, 1992).  
 



47  Saler 
 

7. The notion that many of the ailments of modernity can be traced back to the rise of 
Scotus and metaphysical univocity is characteristic of such theological currents as 
“Radical Orthodoxy,” particularly in its various attempts at cultural analysis. Cf. 
especially Daniel M. Bell Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal 
to Cease Suffering (Oxford: Routledge, 2001).  

 
8. Cf. inter alia Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 

1400-1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).  
 

9. Simpson, James. Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation 
Opponents (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University 
Press, 2010). 


