How did liberal democracy arise from illiberal soil? In other words, how did Europe in the 16th century, when religious adherence was enforced and heretics were persecuted, produce a world in which freedom of thought and religious affiliation are now guaranteed? Answers to this question fall into two broad categories. The more common one, since Herbert Butterfield's "The Whig Interpretation of History" (1931), goes something like this: For a century and a half, Catholic traditionalists and Protestant reformers clung to premodern views of revelation and politics and assaulted each other over obscurantist doctrines; but then in the latter part of the 17th century statesmen of saner tendencies began steering Western nations toward greater toleration and openness. A second explanation, expressed forcefully in Alister McGrath's "Christianity's Dangerous Idea" (2007), suggests that liberal democracy is not a break from Christianity but, in important respects, a natural outgrowth of it.
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