Brad S. Gregory’s research while affiliated with University of Notre Dame and other places

Secularization in the Western world is not a contrived combination of disconnected phenomena. It is a complex, long-term, multi-faceted process in which the central place of Christianity has greatly diminished in all areas of life since the sixteenth century, and which derives from the enduring doctrinal disagreements and recurrent religio-political conflicts of the Reformation era. Because late medieval Christianity was embedded in and intended to influence all areas of human life, including buying and selling, the exercise of power, and higher education, all areas of human life were powerfully affected by the Reformation’s rejection of Roman Catholicism. By problematizing religion, the disagreements and conflicts inspired new ideas and institutional means to address them, and thus inadvertently contributed to secularization. The two principal accounts of long-term Western secularization – Enlightenment-liberationist and Catholic-disembedding – diverge not in their descriptions of what happened, but rather in their overall assessments of the process as respectively positive or not.

Laurie Maffly-Kipp's insightful address about the perils and promise of church history concludes with an invitation to begin a conversation about how the 'church history' of this new century can be both creatively forward-looking and respectful of the lineages that have brought us here. I offer here some brief remarks on her address as a small contribution to that conversation.