"Beginning under the Roman Empire, intellectual leadership in the West had been provided by Christianity. In the middle ages, who invented the first universities—in Paris, Oxford, Cambridge? The church. And in America, who valued the life of the mind so much that they founded its earliest universities—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth? Christian denominations.
To achieve cultural leadership, therefore, an emerging class of secular thinkers had to wrest it away from Christianity. This explains the hostility toward Christian influence expressed by so many who aspire to be intellectuals.
In Diderot’s unforgettable words, “Men will never be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.”"
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