The best definition of "modernity" is the following, from one of my intellectual heroes, Alain de Benoist:
*Modernity designates the political and philosophical movement of the last three centuries of Western history. It is characterised primarily by five converging processes:
Modern political life itself is founded on secularised theological concepts. Reduced to an opinion among others, today Christianity has unwittingly become the victim of the movement it started. In the history of the West, it became the religion of the way out of religion."
The free market is rational? Is it rational for people to starve under the free market?
And how come European modernity was ushered in by the colonial slavery that enabled such modernity? No free market there!
And the dispossesstion of European peasants from their land in order to create cheap labor for capitalists in the cities? This dispossesstion that enabled the industrial revolution -was that the rational free market at work? What's so free about losing your ability to produce your own living and having to work for slave wages for someone else?
And is it also part of the free market when the Western countries invade your country or overthrows it's democratic government in order to get access to your resources for their capitalists enterprises? Is such loss of freedoms as in Chile, Bolivia, Africa, et cetera part of the free market? Is this part of your supposed rational process?
Really? Christianity spawned the Enlightenment that started destroying it? Proof?
@Krish55 Allow me, if you would, to take a stab at it, as a layman. Early Christianity (long before the conversion of emperor Constantine) contained a number of ideas which were poison pills to empire. Paul talks about the priesthood of each believer, and opened up the early Christian church to Gentiles, thus making the world flatter, more potentially interconnected and religion less hierarchical. The New Testament speaks of the first convert being a man from Ethiopia, which opens the church up to all ethnicities.
Because the early Christian church was an underground religion, converts met in small groups and were not given to public displays of their faith. In fact, early Christianity created a division between church and secular life. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s…’”
And the earliest Christian churches were much less classist, as both slave and slave holder, Government official and common citizen, as well as peasant and publican could be “saved” and could worship in the same space.
Finally, the elevation of Mary (the follower, not the mother of Christ) opened philosophical if not physical doors for women.
Unfortunately for the world, these novel ideas were lost for millennia, due to the establishment of patriarchal Christian theologians and clergy, and the adoption of Christianity as the state religion by Rome. Only later after Gutenberg and expanded literacy enabled all to read the so-called sacred texts would these ideas return on a broader scale.
Remove all the bad parts about Christianity: its emphasis on damnation and hell, its male dominant hierarchies, its insistence on paying offerings and tithe, and its damned swagger in militancy, and there’s some downright humanist concepts that just took some time to percolate to the top.