Did Christianity set the western world back a few centuries?

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

This is a ridiculous question, not least because it presumes Progress occurs in much the same way as a software update—the narrative arc of history guiding humanity from Barbarism to Enlightenment that climaxes at Modernity. Casting the advent of Christianity in the West as the beginning of a Dark Age that banished the achievements of Classical learning for a millennia is a story that worked well for Renaissance thinkers who wanted to imagine themselves as the saviors of civilization, but bears little relation to actual history, as others in this thread have already pointed out.