I'm struck by the "unintended consequences" of a drive for purity. Something about the perfect being the enemy of the good. Charlotte Allen reviews Alister McGrath's book about atheism:
The roots of atheism, McGrath suggests, lay paradoxically in that primal phenomenon of Western modernity, the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers' efforts to purify the institutional church in order to make it more concordant with their vision of Jesus' authentic teachings generated a loss of trust in institutional religion in general. Furthermore, McGrath argues that the Reformers, by focusing upon the Bible as the sole source of God's revelation, effectively desacralized both the natural world and the secular human world, which in the integralist medieval Catholic view had been equally saturated with God's sacred presence. With the Reformation, "God became an absence in the world," writes McGrath.
Secular rulers' efforts to mediate the inevitable conflicts that developed between Catholicism and Protestantism and between different strains of Protestantism by mandating religious tolerance and limiting the influence of religion in public life led many to deem religion irrelevant and religious differences risible, like the squabbles between the Big-Enders and the Little-Enders in Gulliver's Travels.
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