Between Secularization and Reform: Religion in the Enlightenment provides a critical reappraisal of the idea that the Enlightenment is at the headwaters of secularization. Contributors analyze early modern religious controversies, the significance of faith in national contexts, clandestine philosophy, varieties of rational religion, and the intermingling of heterodoxy with unbelief in the writings of key thinkers and less famous figures.
The volume encourages revisiting descriptions of the âAge of Lightsâ that use such categories as âmoderate â radicalâ and âreligious â secular.â Picturing the deep transformation undergone by religion in the Enlightenment, it draws a thin line between religious reforms and attempts to eliminate religious faith from the public sphere and individualsâ lives.
Contributors: Jeffrey D. Burson, Dominic Erdozain, Hasse Hämäläinen, Wojciech Kozyra, Ian Leask, Diego Lucci, Gianni Paganini, Stephen R. Palmquist, Mathias Sonnleithner, Anna Tomaszewska, Damien Tricoire, and Wiep van Bunge.
Anna Tomaszewska, Ph.D. (2011), is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University. She has published articles, edited collections, and monographs on both Kant and the Enlightenment, including Kantâs Rational Religion and the Radical Enlightenment: From Spinoza to Contemporary Debates (Bloomsbury, 2022).
Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors
1 Between Secularization and Reform: An Introduction
âAnna Tomaszewska and Hasse Hämäläinen
Part 1: Enlightenment and Secularization
2 Theological Revolution and the Entangled Emergence of Enlightenment Secularization
âJeffrey D. Burson
3 If Men Were Angels: Reason and Passion in the Enlightenment
âDominic Erdozain
4 The Triumph of Theocracy: French Political Thought, God, and the Question of Secularization in the Age of Enlightenment
âDamien Tricoire
5 Secularization in the Dutch Enlightenment: The Irrelevance of Philosophy
âWiep van Bunge
Part 2: The Religion(s) of the Enlightenment
6 The Ways of Clandestinity: Radical Cartesianism and Deism in Robert Challe (1659â1721)
âGianni Paganini
7 More Voltaire than Rousseau? Deism in the Revolutionary Cults of Reason and the Supreme Being
âMathias Sonnleithner
8 DâHolbach and Deism
âHasse Hämäläinen
9 âA Matter of Dangerous Consequenceâ: Molyneux and Locke on Toland
âIan Leask
Part 3: Religious Enlighteners and Radical Reformers
10 Lockeâs Reasonable Christianity: A Religious Enlightenerâs Theology in Context
âDiego Lucci
11 Does Quakerism Qualify as Kantian Enlightened Religion?
âStephen R. Palmquist
12 Radical Critics and Religious Enlighteners: The Cases of Edelmann and Kant
âAnna Tomaszewska
13 The Gospel of the New Principle: The Marcionian Leitmotif in Kantâs Religious Thought in the Context of Thomas Morgan and the German Enlightenment
âWojciech Kozyra
Index
Intellectual historians studying the Enlightenment, scholars of early modern philosophy and philosophers of religion, and all interested in the developments of Western Christianity, preceding the onset of secularization. Keywords: atheism, baron dâHolbach, Baruch Spinoza, French Revolution, heterodoxy, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, John Toland, natural religion (deism), Quakers, rational religion, religious Enlightenment, Robert Challe, secular Enlightenment, Voltaire.