The so-called Dark Ages are usually referred to as the gap between the fall of Rome and beginning of the Renaissance. This is about a 1000 year period between around 500 and 1500 AD. The dating is very rough because the term (like all historical terms) are man made and imperfect.
The "Dark Ages", for example, was coined by Plutarch who was referring more to the decline of literature and advanced arts when he first used the term. Since then the term has been badly used to describe a wretched existence of the European people. This use is highly debated, and historians today (generally) agree that the Middle Ages were not really all that "Dark" anyways.
Most historians center the beginning of the Dark Ages on the collapse of order in Western Europe that occurred when the western Roman Empire collapsed and its institutions ceased to exist. In this power vacuum entered an extremely chaotic and violent power struggle.
In the eastern Roman Empire, which held out until 1453, the Dark Ages never happened. They were ravaged by the same diseases, fought wars just as violent, were Christians, etc, and yet did not enter a "Dark Age" in their own history.
So, what caused the Roman Empire in the west to fall? Sir Edward Gibbon wrote his famous work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776. He does state that he blames Christianity for the fall of the empire as a primary cause. Unfortunately, his work has been examined and largely discredited in the last 200+ years. It is widely known that Gibbon was an extreme anti-Catholic in his own lifetime and was most likely heavily biased when he blamed the Christian Church for the fall of Rome. Today, Gibbon is usually acknowledged as a father in the historiography for his work (which was extremely original at the time), but I am unaware of any graduate program in classical studies today that puts Gibbon on their reading list other than to pay him his hat honor. His work, simply, is unusable as a source in any academic work due to the major inaccuracies he assumed for fact in the 18th century.
While I am aware that Christianity is often blamed for the fall of the Roman Empire in popular culture, I have never seen any credible source that argues the assertion with even a small amount of believability. There are just far too many other reasons why the western Roman Empire fell that have nothing to do with Christianity.
Its also important to remember that the Catholic Church was weak at the beginning of the "Dark Ages." It was only after several hundred years after the Romans fell in the West that the Church emerged as a powerful political institution. For most of the time period that the Church held control of Europe during the Middle Ages (the High Middle Ages) there was prosperity: the quality of life increased for the peasants/serfs, the life expectancy increased due to good nutrition, population boomed for the first time since the fall of Rome.
The Crisis at the end of the Middle Ages (the Late Middle Ages) was certainly, in part, due to the corruption of the Catholic Church. It was also due to global cooling, famine, black plague, and warfare. The corruption of the Church, however, mostly occurred at its highest levels and clergy and laypeople at the bottom remained true to their faiths. The Conciliar movement, for example, was a challenge to the corruption of the papacy but was lead by priests and laypeople from within the Church.
In any case, I find it hard to understand why Christianity would be the cause of the Dark Ages---which, really, weren't that dark to begin with.
**goes back to sleep**
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