Violent, sudden and calamitous revolutions are the ones that accomplish the least. While they may succeed at radically reordering societies, the usually cannot transform cultures. They may excel at destroying the past, but they are generally impotent to create a future. The revolutions that genuinely alter human reality at the deepest levels--the only real revolutions, that is to say--are those that first convert minds and wills, that reshape the imagination and reorient desire, that overthrow the tyrannies within the soul.
Christianity, in its first three centuries, was a revolution of the latter sort: gradual, subtle, exceedingly small and somewhat inchoate at first, slowly introducing its vision of divine, cosmic, and human reality into the culture around it, often by deeds rather than words, and simply enduring from one century to the next.
[David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: the Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p.183.]
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