Prof. Brad Gregory argues that the Protestant Reformation set off a chain of unintended consequences that helped produce the secular, fragmented modern world, ultimately showing why and how that history still shapes how we live, believe, and consume today.

This lecture was given on February 27th, 2025, at West Virginia University.

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About the Speaker:

Brad S. Gregory is Henkels Family College Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, where he has taught since 2003. From 1996-2003 he taught and received early tenure at Stanford University; prior to that he was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and earned his Ph.D. from Princeton as well as two degrees in philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. His first book, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Harvard, 1999) received six book awards, and he has won teaching awards at both Stanford and Notre Dame. In 2005, he was named the inaugural winner of the first annual Hiett Prize in the Humanities, a $50,000 award from the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture given to the outstanding mid-career humanities scholar in the United States. His book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Belknap, 2012) garnered over 100 reviews internationally and has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Arabic, with forthcoming translations into Chinese and Romanian. The working title of his current book project is The Way of the World: Power, Wealth, and Civilization from the Last Ice Age to the Anthropocene.

Keywords: Consumerism, Modernity, Pluralism, Protestant Reformation, Reformation, Religion And Politics, Secularism, Secularization, Western Christianity