The Christian Revolution

What did Christianity represent for the history of humanity? Were the Middle Ages truly "Dark Ages"? Did the Age of Reason bring only good things? What myths about religion were created by the Enlightenment and reinforced by contemporary thinkers?

The new faith that emerged in late antiquity was a radical shift in thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spirituality from pagan Rome: it proposed liberation from fatalism, cosmic despair, and terror of occult entities; it conferred dignity on all people; it embraced women; it subverted the cruelest aspects of society; it demystified, at least in part, political power; it created a moral community that had never existed; and it exalted the practice of charity above all virtues.

The Christian Revolution shows how Christianity revolutionized Western thought in ways never before seen. Theologian David Bentley Hart confronts the ideas of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other critical atheist thinkers on religion, offering a historical review of Christianity's role in different periods of humanity. Initially, he critiques the narrative the modern era has constructed for itself: an idea of the triumph of critical reason over irrational faith, of progress, and of a supposed tolerance of the secular state. But was the "age of reason" truly as rational and less oppressive than the medieval period?

While acknowledging the remarkable achievements of modernity in various fields—such as medicine, philosophy, social ideology, and political thought—David Bentley Hart questions the freedom and rationality of the “age of reason,” which established inflexible dogmas in various fields of knowledge and generated secular regimes that were not necessarily less oppressive than those of the previous period.

The Christian Revolution proposes a reinterpretation of the history of Christianity, from its emergence through the Middle Ages to the rewriting of the Christian past by modernity and contemporary critics. With provocative statements and broad and complex analyses of Christianity's role in periods considered both darkest and most enlightened in the West, this work leads us to rethink some of the historical narratives constructed in modernity and recall how revolutionary Christianity was for the community of the time, with ethical values that remain fundamental to Western culture, especially in the promotion of charity and respect for human dignity.