Western Christians have usually been careful to find ways to make Christianity palatable to secularists—never more so than at the turn of the 20th century. The assault on church dogma had perhaps never been more fierce. Darwinism, social engineering, abortion, women’s suffrage, temperance, and a host of other movements threatened the traditional stands of the old Western Christendom. It was becoming socially unacceptable to hold to the beliefs that had been commonly held for centuries. The Church had for centuries been told that its authority was limited to the supernatural realm. Liberty of conscience, the great modern idol, meant that everyone was allowed to believe what their conscience dictated so long as it did not harm anyone else. This liberty of conscience neutralized the Church under the pretense of protecting us all from the abusive power that the Catholic Church supposedly wielded in the late middle ages. This was a particularly convincing nightmare for Western Protestants, for whom confusing the spiritual and secular worlds summoned up the collective bad memories of the Inquisition, Jesuitical oppression, papal tyranny, and a host of other medieval outrages.

While the Enlightenment neutralized the Church’s authority for several hundred years, the end of the 19th century saw modernism begin an all-out assault against what remained of the old Christendom. The truce which had been tentatively held since Descartes and Hume was broken with great violence as traditional morality, authority, sexuality, and human identity were challenged. The radical Mikhail Bakunin made this very clear, writing in 1871: "The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth." The authority of the Church—its judgments, rituals, and its pulpit—is the great idol against which the priests of modernity utter their imprecations. A private religion might be tolerated, but one which claims the power to bind and loose cannot. Modernity, according to Bakunin, “is the revolt of the individual against all divine, collective, and individual authority.” The grand story that modernity tells itself is just this—no priest or divinity can pass judgment on an individual conscience.