Gospel or State

The long history of Christendom is astonishingly plentiful in magnificent moral, intellectual, and cultural achievements... But it has also been the history of a constant struggle between the power of a the gospel to alter and shape society and the power of the state to absorb every useful institution into itself.

David Bentley Hart, a historian of ideas, in Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.