In the Middle Ages the Franciscan and Dominican orders took the City of God and the soulful poverty of materialism to a new level by renouncing economic and material health and replacing it with simplicity and poverty. Van Doren argues that this monasticism increased in the thirteenth century as depraved piety took over and Europe's best and brightest of the Middle Ages consumed themselves in this cultural movement. Effectively removing themselves from secular life, and ultimately from society, innovation, and human advancement in general. Van Doren writes:

Such sacrifices and offerings cannot be judged as insignificant. We do not know enough about the way the world works to prove that prayers of holy men and women have not made a better world. Maybe they have even saved the world. But we also do not know that to be true.

What we do know is that the secular Middle Ages had to do without the intelligence, imagination, and creativity of a significant proportion of its bet human beings. We cannot measure the cost of that loss.

One of the big problems with complete removal is that humanity - for whatever reason - thrives on cultural edges. The Tasmanian Aborigines for instance, cut off from mainland Australia and interaction with other Aboriginal peoples, actually went backwards culturally and technologically; suffering cultural and technological loss without the interaction with other groups.

While monasticism still assumes the social interaction with other groups, the removal from society of any individual in that pious manner is potentially regressional for society and culture as a whole. Modern christianity and its secular inclusiveness is far more modern and positive in that respect. There will always be those that seek to return to a fundamentalist viewpoint, but for the most part secular and non-secular society have co-existed positively in a contradictory but ultimately beneficial manner.