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The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society Hardcover – January 31, 2012

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Brad S. Gregory (Author)
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4.2 out of 5 stars 51 customer reviews
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 592 pages
  • Publisher: Belknap Press; First Edition edition (January 1, 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0674045637
  • ISBN-13: 978-0674045637
  • Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #561,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Top Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsCaritas and Its Discontents
By Michael M on March 19, 2012
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This is an important book--and a dangerous one. It comes as no surprise, then, that the reviews are so harshly divided. Much is a stake.

In the book, Gregory argues two main points: 1) That the nearly absolute secularization of Western culture is an unintended result of the Protestant Reformation, and 2) that the current power-brokers of liberal democracy and the academy like it that way and wish to keep religion marginalized in what they desire to be a "post-religious" world. Central to his thesis--and it appears that some reviewers of the book have not read enough of it to discern this--is that the medieval ideal of caritas as the core of a healthy society was during the Reformation (and after) usurped by the notion of "faith" which eventually resulted in religious belief being rendered inert and forced into an allegedly "private" sphere and disallowed in public (and certainly in the academy) almost as a mark of shame. In short, the medieval ethos of caritas and the presence of what Emmanuel Levinas described as "metaphysical desire" (the insatiable desire for goodness, truth, and beauty) has been replaced by its antithesis: consumerism and the insatiable desire for more and more "stuff."

Gregory's "genealogical" methodology serves his subject (and his purposes) well. The book is very well-researched and draws some provocative conclusions. He draws on ideas found in Alasdair MacIntyre's work and much of what he writes bears resonance with the writing of Regina Schwartz, C. John Sommerville, and, particularly, Charles Taylor. Scholars and intellectuals invested in the secularization project will find Gregory's work troubling. That's a good thing.
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5.0 out of 5 starsA Landmark Book Explaining How We Got Our Present World
By Christian Smith on December 20, 2011
Format: Hardcover
This is a tremendously important and illuminating work that deftly discloses the deep historical roots of the character of our modern, secular world. Brad Gregory offers us here a massive scholarly achievement of great significance and insight, which deserves a very wide reading.

Modern people love to think that they are radically different from those who lived in the pre-modern age. Gregory clearly shows instead how powerfully governed are modern thinking, practices, and tendencies by assumptions and categories formed in the late Middle Ages, as mediated by the Protestant Reformation. Particularly impressive is Gregory's case for the secularizing and pluralizing logic that the Protestant Reformation set into historical motion.

Thoughtful moderns and postmoderns who want to understand the massive historical forces that have produced their own social worlds, and therefore their very lives, must read this book. Professional historians, whose work has grown ever more specialized and narrow, need to read this sweeping narrative, which pulls us all back to the big picture and the big questions. Protestant (and other) Christians today who are puzzled or distressed by the secularization of so much of the world have to confront, absorb, and digest the implications of Gregory's powerful argument.

The historical, sociological, and philosophical thought that Brad Gregory has put into this broad-ranging work is extraordinary; his historical scholarship is meticulous; his writing is lucid; and the payoff of insight for readers who take his argument seriously is huge. Gregory is to be much congratulated and thanked for producing this landmark book. I myself have already read it once, and have already started to read it again.
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5.0 out of 5 starsAn exceptional achievement
By Thomas W. Smith, Ph.D. on January 10, 2012
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
This book is a tour de force by a distinguished historian of the Reformation. The thesis is that many of the significant challenges we face today in terms of politics, culture, economics, and our ability deliberate together reasonably can be traced back to the unintended consequences of the Reformation. This fact is obscured by the assumption among many contemporary historians that we have moved beyond a pre-modern past in ways that mean we no longer need to understand the world of the Middle Ages and Reformation in order to understand ourselves. The book achieves that ambitious goal because the author has mastered an astonishing variety of different approaches to knowing -- history (of course), but also theology, moral and political philosophy, and metaphysics. The erudition and scope of the book is deeply impressive and inspiring. I hope that this work will become for a new generation of grad students what McIntyre's work was for me when I started grad school in the late eighties, or what Millbank's was to many grad students in the last decade -- a book that reorients students away from conventional grad school limitations on what they should learn and how they should learn it. I hope that it will become for everyone an occasion to reflect more deeply on the ways the past has influenced our current situation.
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5.0 out of 5 starsA real step forward
By Recordari volo on January 17, 2012
Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase
My comments here build on earlier reviews, especially Christian Smith's and Thomas Smith's.

This book is a great achievement. Here I'd like to focus on what it brings to professional historians.

I am in graduate school and my experience of this book is close to what Thomas Smith said he hoped would happen to readers who are entering the academy. It's premature but this book may end up being as important as MacIntyre's After Virtue. However, it is a work of a historian rather than a philosopher and it has the particular strengths of a historian that a philosopher lacks: a great sensitivity to the details of ritual, everyday life, economic changes, political decisions, etc. Gregory's great contribution is his keen sense of how practices and thought impact each other (and some philosophical training seems evident here).

Though obviously a longish book, it seems a short book to me for how much it accomplishes. Many of the theorists of the past century and a half (Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other philosophers but especially the profoundly influential Weber and Foucault) are engaged well. My profession is dominated by these thinkers and their intellectual offspring. Gregory, engaged in a critique, briefly acknowledges the good that they have contributed (naive objectivity or positivism of some 19th century historians is no longer possible) but is more concerned to describe the negative effects of their thought and to argue against them- usually it is a question of the premises of their thought rather than mistakes in reasoning. Gregory has argued for a new space in the academy. I hope that he treats these questions in greater detail, or that some other author will develop Gregory's insights here.Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 starsToward the Goods Life

Brad Gregory presents a sizzling and extremely scholarly (very challenging vocabulary!) insight into the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, splintering and diaspora of... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 starsGet out your thesaurus!

Mr. Gregory went a little overboard in his unnecessary and excessive uße of vocabulary words. He could have made this much more comprehensive and therefore accessible to more... Read more

Published 3 months ago by Mike Hanna
5.0 out of 5 starsIn Depth and Insightful

Very interesting and in depth look into the historical and philosophical roots of our modern secular society.

Published 6 months ago by Eric Rewa
2.0 out of 5 starsOne would be much better off reading Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault,...

Wow! I don't even know where to start. The author argues that we need to understand what happened during the reformation in order to understand our social and political situation... Read more

Published 7 months ago by Obiwanky
5.0 out of 5 starsGood book.

Focuses on some overlooked aspects of origins of modernity. Good book.

Published 14 months ago by Femerepi
5.0 out of 5 starsuntangling the paradoxial nature of western free society enforce by...

Review by Rev Dr Robert Brennan.

I have finally finished reading this worthy tome by Brad Gregory. Read more

Published 14 months ago by Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 starsFive Stars

ok

Published 19 months ago by Mary K.
5.0 out of 5 starsFantastic Read

Outstanding

Published 19 months ago by Joanne Biscorner
2.0 out of 5 starsTwo Stars

Written in difficult language for the lay person. A definite tome

Published 24 months ago by John and Betti Glynn
3.0 out of 5 starsAmazing! Kindle formatting

I bought the Kindle version of this. The hyper links to notes and footnotes do not work. The amount of scholarship that went into the book practically requires an immense amount of... Read more

Published on July 6, 2014 by Easy 2 please

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