friedrich Nietzsche, that master of modern moral psychology, once observed that the disdain for the church common among refined moderns was, para- doxically, yet another sign of Christianity’s regrettable victory over Western consciousness. The reason had to do with a truly delicious irony: loathing of Christianity’s institutional forms often took place insepa- rably from a deeper addiction to its “slave morality.” “Apart from the church,” Nietzsche wrote, “we, too, love the poison.”1 Even the church’s despisers, Nietzsche surmised, were nothing but self- denying Christianity junkies.