One of my favorite books on the rise of Western liberty is Alan Macfarlane’s “The Riddle of the Modern World,” a study of Montesquieu, Smith, Tocqueville, and Gellner. Here’s more from Gellner, via Macfarlane, on the question of the nature of Christianity and its relation to the development of science and capitalism:

One condition of the exit from agrarian civilization, lies in the development of religion. Like Weber, Gellner did not suggest that Protestantism intentionally or directly caused capitalism. Firstly, the famous ascetic virtures of hard work, honesty and accumulation were an accidental by-product of the Reformation. Part of what Protestantism did was to push to one extreme a general tendency in much of western Christianity towards an attack on a magical and ritual embededness. Some of the explanation for the early growth of an unusual thought style in the West lies in Christianity, that is to say ‘the impact of a rationalistic, centralizing, monotheistic and exclusive religion. It is important that it was hostile to manipulation magic and insisted on salvation through compliance with rules, rather than a loyalty to a spirtual patronage network and payment of dues.’ Gellner outlined this great transition which occured over 2000 years ago with the development of Christianity out of Judaism.
Over time, this asceticism, the tension between the material and spiritual world, tended to become overlain in Catholicism with a world of miracles and magic. Protestantism was the extreme attempt to restore it to its original anti-magical cleanliness. This movement towards a ‘disenchanted’ world is an ideal background for orderly science and orderly capitalism.