(1) “Christendom itself could not indefinitely survive the corrosive power of the revelation that Christianity itself had introduced into Western culture. Christian culture’s often misunderstood but ultimately irrepressible consciousness of the judgment that was passed

(2) "upon civil violence at Easter, by God, was always the secret antagonist of Christendom as a political order. Certainly, reflective intellectual historians have often enough noted the ironic continuity between the early modern rise of principled unbelief

(3) "and the special 'apocalyptic vocation' of Western culture; there is even some considerable truth in the observations of Ernst Bloch and many others that the Christian message contains always within itself the possibility of an atheistic terminus.

(4) "Modern Western atheism is chiefly a Christian heresy and could not have arisen in a non-Christian setting. Ultimately, the historical force most destructive of the unity of the Christian culture in the West has never been some adventitious and hostile power

(5) "arriving from elsewhere; all the forces of laicism—materialism, capitalism, collectivism, individualism, libertarianism, or what have you—are merely secondary and mostly reactionary effects of the activity of Christendom’s most implacable enemy: Christianity.

(6) "Though perhaps it would be better to say not 'Christianity' but something essential to it that, as a result of the contradictions inherent in Christendom, has become alienated from its true rationality and ultimate meaning.”

—David Bentley Hart, Theological Territories