Alec Ryrie

British historian at Durham who wrote Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World and Unbelievers — arguing that Protestantism's inner dynamics (the individualism, the doubt, the anguish) generated the modern secular world through its own self-dissolution.

Argues that modernity emerged from Protestantism's inner logic rather than against it — the Protestant emphasis on individual conscience, direct Scripture access, and the anguish of conscience without priestly mediation created the conditions for both secularism and atheism as Protestant products.