Brad S. Gregory’s new book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, is very much in the tradition of and in conversation with Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. Both are large, sweeping books that change the way we understand modernity and the world in which we live. For Gregory, that new understanding comes from looking all the way back to the Protestant Reformation, and connecting all that’s come since in ways that scholars have thus far resisted.

He discussed the book with us in a recent episode of the Harvard Press Podcast, which you can hear or download via the player below.

During that conversation, he explained the ways in which he understands modern Western life as stemming from developments of the 16th and 17th centuries:

I don’t think anyone who’s self-reflective about it would deny the rather banal claim that the world that we’re living in today is the product of the past. The issue is what aspects of the past help us to understand and to explain the character of the situation in which we find ourselves. What’s unusual about my book is that it parts ways from the normal methods and the normal assumptions by which even professional historians tend to explain the present. That is, it tends to be assumed that we can account for the world in which we’re living today in the West—North America and Europe—this side, as it were, of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the French and American revolutions in the late eighteenth century. And, one of the central arguments I’m making in The Unintended Reformation is that that is not the case, and that all of those developments indeed are critical to understanding where we are today, but what we really need to understand are the religious disagreements of the Reformation era, and the unintended processes that they set in motion, without which we will not understand the character of the problems that we’re facing in the early twenty-first century.

It’s Gregory’s claim that the Western world today is “an extraordinarily complex, tangled product of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Western Christianity.” Our failure to understand that lineage, he argues, prevents us from fully recognizing the disaggregation that our society has experienced. From The Unintended Reformation: