Luther had kicked off when he posted his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg , Germany , on October 31 , 1517 .
While some scholars put the end of the Dark Ages at the time of Columbus ’ 1492 voyage to the Americas , most others pinpoint Luther ’ s 1517 challenge to Church authority .
Regardless of the date , the point is that as the power of a single religious authority over the nations of Europe began to slip , that event ended roughly a thousand years of stagnation in the arts , sciences , literature , religious exploration , human rights , and philosophy .
Today ’ s Christian Nationalist movement wants to reverse more than a half-millennium of progress and reinvent America in the mold of Iran , with religious fanatics determining whose rights are protected , who can marry whom , who can have sex with whom and when and how , the role of women in society , and what “ truths ” are taught in public schools .
Our nation ’ s Founders would be apoplectic were they to see what the GOP is up to .
In 1765 , a decade before the American Revolution , our second president , John Adams ( who was himself an observant Christian ), famously wrote an entire treatise on the oppression of the Church during the Dark Ages titled A Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law . In it he was blunt :
“ Since the promulgation of Christianity , the two greatest systems of tyranny that have sprung from this original , are the canon and
80 x The Trial Lawyer