The Enlightenment and Christianity

The movement that is known in English as “the Enlightenment” is generally understood to refer to the cultural and intellectual movement that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe and North America, which placed an emphasis on human reason as a means of overcoming the particularism of religious belief. It is widely regarded as having shaped some of the defining features of the modern world, especially through its confidence in the power of human reason, its commitment to individual freedom of expression against ecclesiastical or royal tyranny, and its assumption that these values would improve the human condition everywhere. The movement is often considered to have inspired and justified the fundamental nineteenth- and twentieth-century achievements of industriali- zation, liberalism, and democracy.

Religious life and thought were both affected by this change in cultural mood. Western Christianity has been deeply shaped by the ideas of the Enlightenment – both its positive emphasis upon the competency of reason and the possibility of objectivity of judgment, and its negative critiques of the concept of supernatural revelation, and the capacity of the Bible or any religious tradition to disclose truths that allegedly lay beyond reason.

The use of the singular term “Enlightenment” needs comment. Recent scholarship has suggested that this movement is better understood as a “family of Enlightenments,” sharing a common commitment to a core of ideas and values, yet demonstrating diversity at other points. The English, German, and French Enlightenments took quite distinct forms, and emphasized different ideas. The idea that the Enlightenment was characterized by a definite single set of ideas has proved very difficult to sustain historically. It is perhaps better to think of the movement as “an attitude of mind” rather than as a “coherent set of beliefs.”