religion: faith in the age of reason

Religion: Faith in the Age of Reasonjecs_440 435..444

J E R E M Y G R E G O RY

Abstract: This essay reviews some of the key developments in research intoreligion since JECS was founded in 1978. In the late 1970s the dominantparadigm was to view the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason, whoseprincipal characteristic was a secularising Enlightenment. Since then theEnlightenment itself has been reconceptualised, and scholars are more aliveto the positive relationship between the Enlightenment and religion.Moreover, religion is now viewed as being crucial to politics, questions ofnational identity and cultural matters – in short, as being more vital to theeighteenth century in 2011 than it was in 1978.

Keywords: religion, enlightenment, reason, secularisation, church

A useful way of assessing the current state of research into religion in thelong eighteenth century is to compare the situation now with that in 1978,when this journal was founded. In the late 1970s religion, if thought about atall, was generally viewed as being increasingly marginal to the period. Afterall, in the most commonly used epithets for the eighteenth century, this was‘The Age of Reason’ or ‘The Enlightenment’, where reason was deemed tohave been on the wining offensive against religion. One of the most influentialmodels of the century current in 1978 had been established by Peter Gay’stwo-volume blockbuster The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, whose twoindividual volume titles, The Birth of Modern Paganism (1967) and The Scienceof Freedom (1970), captured what were conventionally regarded as thedominant developments of the age. In this scenario the Enlightenmentwas viewed as a modernising attack on religion tout court (seeing all formsof religion as no better than backward-looking superstition) and oninstitutionalised churches and clergy more particularly, where Voltaire’s cry‘Écrasez l’Infâme’ could be taken as representing the spirit of the century. Inthis interpretation the salient characteristic of the period was the birth ofsecularisation, where in all walks of life – political, intellectual, social,cultural and economic – religious priorities were on the wane.1

This meant that in 1978 major eighteenth-century developments were seenin largely secular terms. The ‘Glorious’, American and French revolutions, forexample, were all understood as purely political, economic or social eventsand as representing the (inevitable) triumph of secular concerns over what

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 34 No. 4 (2011)

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were regarded as the outmoded religious considerations of the past. Scholarsemphasised the ‘modern’ constitutional and even quasi-democratic nature ofthese occurrences and all but ignored any religious motivations, justificationsor consequences. Culturally too, developments such as the rise of the novel,the growing interest in realist and landscape painting, and musicalinnovations were viewed as marking a shift from an obsession with religiousmatters to a growing preoccupation with this-worldly themes and thehere-and-now.

The neglect of religious topics by mainstream eighteenth-centuryhistorians and cultural critics in 1978 could be explained by two separate butinterrelated factors. Not only was the overarching model of the century one ofsecularisation (and even historians of religion tended to subscribe to this), butalso state churches throughout eighteenth-century Europe (Catholic andProtestant alike) and their clergy were often regarded as lethargic, if notcorrupt, and distanced from the bulk of their parishioners, or at best as justworldly and lacking any ‘real’ sense of religion, despite the efforts of insiderhistorians to rehabilitate their reputations. Repeating some of the strictures ofVoltaire and other Enlightenment figures, clergy of all denominations werefrequently criticised for being pastorally somnolent and preoccupied withlining their own pockets, and censured for falling short of the ideals of variousreligious reform movements founded in both the seventeenth and thenineteenth centuries.

Even studies of religion tended to echo the secularising interpretationand were more concerned with questions of religious attendance thanwith questions of belief, or at least tended to posit a rather simplisticcorrelation between the former and the latter. French historians, forexample, were busy producing mammoth statistical and sociologicalanalyses of religious adherence almost always fixated on demonstratingthe de-christianisation and secularisation associated with the FrenchRevolution, charting how quickly this took place, how far it may havepre-dated the events of 1789 and how far it was a popular movementor imposed from above.2 Rather ironically, it was an Englishman, JohnMcManners, whose French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime:A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century (1960) had brought to life theplace of the Church in French society, and who would soon publish Deathand the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians andUnbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (1981), who would help bring thestudy of religious mentalities to the eighteenth century. Perhaps the nearestEnglish equivalent to the French obsession with measuring and countingreligion was Alan Gilbert’s chronologically wide-ranging Religion andIndustrial Society: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914 (1976), whichused a statistical approach to argue that eighteenth-century urbanisationand industrialisation provided the seedbed first for challenges to themonopoly of the Church of England and then for the secularisation ofsociety.3

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© 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Apart from these sociologically informed studies, the bulk of research doneon religion up to 1978 tended to be carried out by insiders, documenting thehistory of their own churches and religious denominations, and these wereeither heavily institutionally based or concentrated on religious leaders andprofessionals. But these were rarely integrated into the dominant narrativesof the period and did not impinge on the wider social, political and culturalhistory of the age. Instead, religion was seen by political, social, economicand intellectual historians as a discrete entity, held to be almost of onlyantiquarian interest, with no real purchase on the broader history of the age.As such, most felt, it could be safely left to denominational insiders. There wasin 1978 a long-standing interest in the history of John Wesley and earlyMethodism, but this was virtually always written by historians who werethemselves Methodists and directed towards an internal audience. In anycase, scholars were often uncertain about how to relate topics such as theEvangelical Revival to the general trajectory of the age. How far, for example,should it be regarded as a countercultural reaction to the general secularisingtrends of the age, or how far should it be linked to movements in the future,such as Romanticism? Moreover, in overviews of the period, religion waseither hardly mentioned or was relegated to a separate chapter, often taggedon to the end of the volume almost as an afterthought which readers andstudents could study as an add-on extra if they so wished, but only after theyhad covered the really important topics of mainstream political, social andcultural history. For English historians the one area where social and politicalhistorians did show some interest in religion was in the wake of thespellbinding Chapter 11 of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English WorkingClass (1963), on ‘The Transforming Power of the Cross’, after which ageneration of social historians of the late eighteenth century becameinterested in the political and social effects of Methodism. But this interest wasa back-handed compliment, since Thompson’s view of Methodism was that itwent against the progressive story he was wanting to tell and was, for him, achillingly repressive force, running counter to his agency-giving account ofthe rise of the working class.4

In 1978 eighteenth-century religion, reflecting the Western and Europeanbiases of academia, invariably meant Christianity. There were some studies ofJudaism (and these focused on personalities such as Moses Mendelssohn, whocould be credited with bringing the Enlightenment to the Jewish faith), butgenerally treatment of other religions was limited to perceptions of non-Christian faiths by eighteenth-century European writers or the interactionsof Christianity and other religions, as shown, for example, in the Chineserites controversy. Studies such as these would soon find fruit in twogroundbreaking books: The Great Map of Mankind (1982), by P. J. Marshall andGlwyndr Williams, and David A. Pailin’s Attitudes to other Religions (1984).5

Since the late 1970s there has been a remarkable transformation in the waythat scholars view the place of religion in the eighteenth century. One of themost significant historiographical developments during the past thirty years

Religion: Faith in the Age of Reason 437


has been the way in which what is meant by ‘the Enlightenment’ has becomebroader and more complicated. Rather than seeing it as a necessarilyanti-religious force, scholars have widened their understanding and, inparticular, have suggested that there were other models than the Frenchversion of the Enlightenment. In 1981 Roy Porter, whose vast number ofpublications often celebrated this conventional version of the Enlightenmentand who certainly played up the anti-religious and a-religious voices of theage, nevertheless, in a prescient essay on ‘The Enlightenment in England’,recognised the part played by clergy in the Enlightenment enterprise wherereason and piety could go hand in hand.6 Porter’s emphasis on the alliancebetween religion and the Enlightenment was mirrored and developed in anumber of studies, such as John Gascoigne’s Cambridge in the Age ofEnlightenment (1989), Knud Haakonssen’s edited collection Enlightenment andReligion (1996) and Brian Young’s Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (1998).7 More lately, scholars working on British history haveargued that the Enlightenment was not necessarily anti-religious at all, andthe relationship between ‘religious’ and ‘Enlightenment’ concerns is now oneof the most fruitful areas of research. Jane Shaw’s Miracles in EnlightenmentEngland (2006), for example, has demonstrated how a large range ofcommentators were able to balance ‘religious enthusiasm’ with ‘reason’, andher reading incorporates elements of the supernatural into an Enlightenmentworld-view that clearly challenges older models of an Enlightenment hostileto religious sensibilities. Moreover, Phyllis Mack’s stunning Heart Religion inthe British Enlightenment (2008) sees interesting and complex links betweenthe evangelical religion of the heart and the ideals of the Enlightenment,transcending older models which saw religion and Enlightenment as polaropposites.8 Likewise, scholars of European history now talk regularly of a‘Catholic Enlightenment’, a concept that once would have been deemedoxymoronic, exploring how sections of the Catholic Church engaged withenlightened thought and reform.9

If religion itself is now understood to be more central to eighteenth-centurylife and thought than it was in the late 1970s, then it is not surprising that itsrole in mainstream history and culture has been re-emphasised. In manyways J. C. D. Clark’s highly revisionist English Society, 1688-1832 (1985)remains the most overt and influential statement of why religion had to be putback on to the centre stage of English political and social history.10 Clark’smain argument is that, rather than seeing secularising change andmodernity as the hallmark of the century, we need to recognise the crucialrole that traditional forces such as religion, alongside the monarchy andaristocracy, played in the period, thereby emphasising what the eighteenthcentury had in common with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ratherthan, as is conventionally the case, highlighting its anticipation of modernity.Famously, he designated eighteenth-century England as a ‘confessional state’.In particular, Clark emphasised the role of political theology and the religi-ous implications of the ‘Glorious’, American and French revolutions,

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characterising the American struggle for independence as ‘a war ofreligion’.11 Similarly, although her overall interpretation of the period differedfrom Clark in that she was interested in what was novel about the period,Linda Colley emphasised the vital importance of Protestantism in creating anew ‘British’ identity after the 1707 Act of Union in her seminal book Britons(1992).12

The connection between religion and national identity has continued to bea fertile topic. A recent example is the thoughtful and wide-ranging study byGabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community (2009), which puts post-Revolutionary Catholicism and Jacobitism within an Enlightenment contextand examines the issues for national identity raised by an internationalreligious movement. In similar ways, in a major series of studies, DavidHempton has integrated Methodism into the broader political and socialhistory of the period and has explored the relationship between religion andnational and international identity, culminating in his Methodism: Empire ofthe Spirit (2005). Carla Pestana’s study Protestant Empire (2009) has stressedthe importance of religion in joining up the transatlantic world, and itscentrality to British colonial relations.13

Furthermore, where traditionally the eighteenth century had been seen asa nadir in the history of established churches throughout Europe, theirreputations have been reconsidered during the last twenty-five years or so.14

In particular, for the Church of England there has emerged what might becalled a revisionist school of historians whose detailed work, particularly onwhat the Church was doing at the local and diocesan level, has modified andin some cases reversed the more negative opinions of some of theirpredecessors.15 Rather than dwelling on the failures and shortcomings of theestablished Church, they have highlighted instead its successes and strengths,and have argued that in many respects the Church was more effective thanat any time since the Reformation. The Church is now seen as having beenmore pastorally dynamic than traditional interpretations allowed, which hasraised questions about the relationship between Methodism, Evangelicalismand ‘mainstream’ Anglicanism. Importantly, too, this revisionist viewis beginning to influence some historians writing outside the confines of‘Church history’. Carolyn Steedman’s groundbreaking Master and Servant(2007) is the first major study by a leading social historian to take seriouslythe revisionist approaches to the eighteenth-century Church, where the‘master’ of the title, the hero of the book, is a late eighteenth-century Churchof England cleric whose charitable attitude to his unmarried pregnantservant, and then her daughter, made him a model of the clericalprofessional.16 Since 1978 scholars have also begun to uncover much moreabout the religious views of the laity, although there is much still to do here.William Jacob’s study of lay piety (1996) was a landmark project, as in someways was the earlier publication of the diary of the Sussex shopkeeperThomas Turner, which gave a vivid portrayal of how religion and the Churchwere central to his life, and which has been much quoted.17



A further development has been to place religion within the wider forces forchange in the period, pace Clark’s emphasis on religion as a vital aspect ofthe ancien régime. As evidence of religion’s engagement with the modern,scholars have cited: the individualism and inner reflection encouraged bymany of the newer versions of Christianity developed in the period, as well astheir ability to form new religious and social communities;18 the charitableand benevolent projects established in the name of religion, including thecrucial contribution made by religion to the abolition of the slave trade;19

the global push of eighteenth-century religion, which moved peoples aroundthe world;20 and the educational and publishing endeavours whereby religionharnessed, developed and even pioneered new forms of media.21 Moreover,cultural historians are beginning to explore some of the religious contexts ofeighteenth-century artistic and literary developments.22

All this work has added much more nuance to our understanding ofeighteenth-century religion, and certainly much of it would have surprisedreaders of this journal in 1978. An excellent distillation of the latest researchon eighteenth-century Christianity can be found in volume 7 of TheCambridge History of Christianity.23 This spans large parts of the world(testimony not only to the global aspirations of Christianity in the eighteenthcentury but also to the growing interest in non-European countries nowshown by Western historians) and places developments within Christianity inthe period firmly in their social, cultural, intellectual and political contexts.Naturally, the eighteenth century will also be covered in the forthcoming NewCambridge History of Islam, although The Cambridge History of Judaism has notyet progressed beyond the early Middle Ages. It is not clear whether it willactually reach our period, although if the eighteenth century is to beunderstood globally, it will, of course, need to do so. Interesting work is alsobeing done on religion in Asia in the eighteenth century as well as on NativeAmerican and African religions, moving beyond the views of Christianmissionaries to uncover, as far as we can, these differing world-views on theirown terms.24

The generally current buoyant state of the study of religion in theeighteenth century can also be indicated by its capacity to secure grants fromfunding bodies. During the last decade the UK’s Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council (AHRC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC),along with the Leverhulme Trust, have funded several major projects relatingat least in part to eighteenth-century religious topics. Notable examplesinclude the Church of England Clergy Database, the British State PrayersProject, the Dissenting Academies Project and a prosopographical study ofEnglish convents in exile, Who Were the Nuns?25 A hallmark of all theseprojects has been the exploitation of new computer technologies. Furtherevidence of the renewed centrality of eighteenth-century religion to a varietyof academic disciplines is provided by a number of UK centres recentlyestablished to foster research in the subject. One is the Centre for DissentingStudies, set up by Queen Mary University, London, in collaboration with Dr

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Williams’s Library. Another is the Centre for Methodism and Church Historyat Oxford Brookes University. Religious topics feature much more prominentlyin mainstream conferences now than they did in 1978, and in this regard the‘religious turn’ can be dated as long ago to the History Workshop conferencein 1983, which adopted religion as its theme and where a number ofeighteenth-century papers were given. Clearly the theme has by no meansbeen exhausted. The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies took‘Religions and Beliefs’ as the theme for its 2008 Annual Conference.26

In addition, and reflecting the still growing interest in eighteenth-centuryreligion, a journal devoted to the subject was established in 2009: Religion inthe Age of Enlightenment (AMS Press). In broad terms, key areas that wererarely considered in 1978 are now placed in the forefront of the latest researchon religion, such as the interest in lay religion and ‘lived religion’, and ongender and religion, including the until recently almost totally ignoredtopic of the relationship between religion and masculinity.27 All thesedevelopments have helped to make the study of religion more central to thosewho work outside the field of ‘Church history’ as traditionally conceived. In2011 the place of religion in the long eighteenth century looks far more vitalthan it did in 1978.

NOTES1. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,

1967, 1970).2. For example, Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle:

les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (Paris: Plon, 1973), and the sameauthor’s Religion et révolution: la déchristianisation de l’an II (Paris: Hachette, 1976).

3. John McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime: A Study of Angers inthe Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960), and Death and theEnlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-CenturyFrance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Industrial Society: Church,Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914 (London: Longman, 1976).

4. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rev. edn, Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1968).

5. P. J. Marshall and Glwyndr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worldsin the Age of Enlightenment (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1982), and David A. Pailin, Attitudes toOther Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester:Manchester University Press, 1984).

6. Roy Porter, ‘The Enlightenment in England’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), TheEnlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p.1-18.Contrast this nuanced view with the more usual secularising viewpoint found in his largerpublications: for example, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London:Allen Lane, 2000).

7. John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics fromthe Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); KnudHaakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brian Young, Religion and Enlightenment inEighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

8. Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,2006); Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in EarlyMethodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

9. See Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (eds), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenmentin Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), Ulrich L. Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German



Benedictines, 1740-1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Michael Printy,Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2009).

10. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practiceduring the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), rev. as English Society,1660-1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2000).

11. J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamicsin the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

12. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1992).

13. Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community: Politics, Culture and Ideology, 1688-1745(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009); David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain andIreland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), The Religion of the People: Methodism andPopular Religion, c.1750-1900 (New York: Routledge, 1996), and Methodism: Empire of the Spirit(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Carla Pestana, Protestant Empire, Religion and theMaking of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

14. For France, see, John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 vols(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

15. Contributions to this re-assessment include: J. Walsh, C. Haydon and S. Taylor (eds), TheChurch of England, c.1689-c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993); Mark Smith, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth,1740-1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Judith Jago, Aspects of the Georgian Church:Visitation Studies of the Diocese of York, 1761-1776 (Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Presses,1996); Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation, and Reform, 1660-1828: Archbishops ofCanterbury and their Diocese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); J. Gregory and J. S.Chamberlain (eds), The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions,1660-1800 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003); W. M. Jacob, The Clerical Profession in the LongEighteenth Century, 1680-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Robert G. Ingram,Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007).

16. Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

17. W. M. Jacob, Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996); David Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754-1765 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1984).

18. Mack, Heart Religion; Hempton, Methodism. See also, for the end of the long eighteenthcentury, the important work done by scholars involved with the Oxford University ProphecyProject, notably Deborah Madden, The Paddington Prophet: Richard Brothers’s Journey to Jerusalem(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

19. For example, see Mark Goldie, ‘Voluntary Anglicans’, The Historical Journal 46 (2003),p.977-90.

20. For the example of the global push of Methodism, see Hempton, Methodism.21. For one example, see Barbara Prosser, ‘“An Arrow from a Quiver”: Written Instruction for

a Reading People. John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine (January 1778-February 1791)’, PhD thesis,University of Manchester, 2008.

22. For example, E. Derek Taylor, Reason and Religion in ‘Clarissa’: Samuel Richardson and ‘theFamous Mr Norris, of Bemerton’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), and Nigel Aston, Art and Religion inEighteenth-Century Europe (London: Reaktion, 2009). See also Kathryn Duncan (ed.), Religion inthe Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century, AMS Studies in theEighteenth Century, 53 (New York: AMS Press, 2009).

23. The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution,1660-1815, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2006).

24. Will Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism: ‘Hinduism’ and the Study of Indian Religions, 1600-1776(Halle: Franckesche Stiftungen zu Halle, 2003); Kwang-Chung Liu and Richard Shek (eds),Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004); Joel W. Martin,The Land Looks after Us: a History of Native American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press,2001).

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25. Church of England Clergy database: http://www.clergydatabase.org.uk; BritishState Prayers Project: http://www.dur.ac.uk/history/research/research_projects/british_state_prayers; Dissenting Academies Project: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cih/research/dissentingacademies/; Who Were the Nuns? A Prosopographical Study of the English Conventsin Exile, 1600-1800: http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/wwtn/index.html [accessed 6 May 2011].

26. Some of the contributions to the 1983 History Workshop conference were published inJim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper and Raphael Samuel (eds), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion,Politics and Patriarchy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). Papers from the 2008 BSECSconference were published in JECS, including my ‘Transforming “the Age of Reason” into “anAge of Faiths”; or, Putting Religions and Beliefs (Back) into the Eighteenth Century’, Journal forEighteenth-Century Studies 32:3 (2009), p.287-306.

27. William Van Reyk, ‘Christian Ideals of Manliness in the Eighteenth and Early NineteenthCenturies’, The Historical Journal 52 (2009), p.1053-73.

jeremy gregory is Professor of the History of Christianity and Head of the School of Arts,Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester. He has written widely on religious topicsin the long eighteenth century, particularly on the Church of England and on Methodism. He iscurrently researching the Church of England in Colonial British North America.



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