The governments of the West have, to varying degrees, constructed their own secular utopias, intentionally deaf to any reasoned defense of religious liberty.

St. Thomas More: 

From Renaissance Man to Christian Martyr

by John P. Bequette

When we consider the period in Western civilization known today as the Renaissance, we encounter a time of notable change in virtually every area of culture. 

Visual art was departing from the purely symbolic, representative forms of the Middle Ages and exhibiting a more earthly, mundane realism, and while it continued to concentrate on religious depictions, secular themes began to show themselves with more regularity. 

In intellectual life, rhetorical, literary and historical studies offered an alternative to the old scholastic methodology that had dominated the medieval university for so long, and many of the themes of this new prosaic humanism were unabashedly secular, reflecting the pre-Christian Greco-Roman culture from which they drew inspiration.

The first stirrings of modern science were making themselves felt, which would eventually challenge Aristotelian natural philosophy at its very foundations. 

In politics, the period witnessed the emergence of what became the modern secular state: a political order wherein legitimacy was not in any way derived from the Church.

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