The Enlightenment and the church had a complicated and frequently hostile relationship. Read a variety of books about liberal theology or atheism versus Christianity, and you’ll hear people talk about how the Enlightenment has affected conversations about faith. If you didn’t study philosophy in college, you might be confused by this. Here’s a basic look at what the Enlightenment was and how it affected the church.
What Was the Enlightenment?
Sometimes also called the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment was a new movement of ideas that started in the last seventeenth century and continued until the early nineteenth century. Different scholars place different date ranges on it, which means sometimes the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation are considered part of the movement, sometimes not. Not only that, but the Enlightenment intersected a lot with political events and scientific discoveries at the time, informing each other. As a result, it’s hard to perfectly summarize the movement.
Broadly speaking though, the Enlightenment emphasized questioning religious authorities had described the Bible, preferring reason and science’s ability to prove things over traditional authorities. The Encyclopedia Britannica’s article on the history of the Enlightenment has an interesting quote about Isaac Newton, the man who discovered the laws of gravity. It says that Newton’s book Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy presented new theories for science that eventually led to “the great idea of the Enlightenment: that man, guided by the light of reason, could explain all natural phenomena and could embark on the study of his own place in a world that was no longer mysterious.”
Many scientists and thinkers who contributed to the Enlightenment were Christians (Newton for one). However, as a whole, the movement became about rejecting Christian ideas in favor of classical philosophy (ancient Greek, Roman, etc.) and the idea that one did not need faith in God to explain the world.
Brief Timeline of Enlightenment Events
As noted earlier, it’s hard to create a really definitive view of what the Enlightenment was, which makes it hard to summarize its key moments. Here are some of the seminal events, mostly limited to the philosophical works that define the era’s beliefs.
1687: Isaac Newton published “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.” This book showed mathematical principles that accurately showed and predicted how planets moved. This may not sound like much, but it was shocking at the time: it meant that the universe had strict laws which could be predicted. Enlightenment thinkers took up this idea and many reached the conclusion that people could describe the universe while leaving God out entirely. Math and reason were sufficient for explaining how things work.
1689: John Locke publishes “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” where he argued that there are no universally acknowledged truths and that humans are born without any innate knowledge. Among other things, this promoted empiricism, the belief that we know things only through what we can sense or experience. This rules out the idea that all humans have an innate idea that God must exist, and many thinkers used to reject the idea of knowledge coming from anywhere except what we can observe (i.e., no divine revelation).
1746: French geologist Jean-Étienne Guettard publishes “Mineralogical Memoir and Map on the Nature and Location of the Terrains That Traverse France and England.” Guettard’s research had many effects, but one of the main ones was it seemed to show the earth was older than Old Testament timelines suggested at the time. This led to much debate about whether the Bible was reliable.
1759: Voltaire publishes his fictional work, Candide. Voltaire wrote philosophy as well as fiction (and many other things), and his philosophy is probably more influential, but it’s hard to pick one most important philosophical book. Candide is notable because it was a controversial book that satirizes government and religious leaders, which summed the cynical view of authority that became so important to the Enlightenment.
1776: Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence. While Jefferson used many Judeo-Christian ideas in his writing, he also drew a lot on Enlightenment ideas that church and state should be separate and that humans have inalienable rights to liberty and happiness (wording that earlier Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke had used). Jefferson would later become notorious for disregarding supernatural elements in the four Gospels and produced The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (or “the Jefferson Bible”), which tells the Gospels with most of the supernatural elements removed.
1789: The French Revolution takes place. While both the American and French Revolutions were based on thinkers who used Enlightenment ideas, the French Revolution took a more secular approach. It was a revolution with God removed from the equation entirely and all the emphasis on reason. Writers such as Os Guinness have suggested that much of what we see today in modern secular liberalism owes more to the French Revolution’s ideas than anything else.
How the Enlightenment Negatively Affected the Church
Some of the most notable Enlightenment thinkers were Christians, and many of their ideas did benefit society. Scholars sometimes still debate whether certain Enlightenment ideas were anti-church or just applied incorrectly. This means that it wouldn’t be accurate to say the Enlightenment was totally negative. However, there were Enlightenment ideas that damaged the church in many ways, including the following:
Challenging divine revelation. The Enlightenment argued for basing knowledge on what we know and that we can’t be born with the knowledge of things (such as a sense of the divine or an objective moral code). This led to debates about whether God can communicate with people. As a result, notable Enlightenment thinkers like Jefferson and Thomas Paine were Deists, a philosophy that argued God existed but didn’t communicate with people. We can also see the emphasis today in arguments for moral relativism.
Challenging Christian societies. Because the Enlightenment favored classical civilizations and ways of viewing the world, it set up the idea that civilizations bound by Christian ideas had missed the boat. This led to the popular idea of religious societies as being primitive or dark, stereotyping the Christian medieval period as essentially foolish or unhealthy.
Challenging the Bible. While Charles Darwin would not release Origin of the Species until after the Enlightenment, the essential conflict of evolution versus creationism debates was set up in the Enlightenment. Geology research had shown the world was older than Old Testament scholars described it, which challenged the Bible’s view of history and how the universe developed. This “faith versus science” or “faith versus reason” debate has continued to frame many debates about evolution, Biblical history, and science.
Strangely, the “faith versus reason” debate has even affected fields fighting against “the Enlightenment effect,” such as Christian apologetics. It has become very popular to present arguments for Christianity using modern science, such as arguing that, based on current physics, the universe could only exist if it requires a creator. This kind of apologetics can help and it works when apologists are honest about what can be shown with science. However, many have gotten used to the pseudo-Enlightenment idea that science can’t be disputed. In fact, continuing research means scientists’ ideas are always changing as they get new information. This means in the same way that secular scientists can’t throw out the Bible entirely because it doesn’t fit their theories, apologists can’t add a little science to their arguments and flaunt their ideas as undisputed truths. We have to be honest about what science can (and cannot) show.
How Can Christians Respond to the Enlightenment's Impact Today?
While there are a number of things Christians should do about Enlightenment thinking, here are three things we can all do about its legacy:
Encourage reading history. It’s not until we go back to original sources, considering what people said and why they said it, that we really gain the information we need to fully challenge ideas. This is especially important with the Enlightenment, where we have some thinkers who were anti-Christian and others who had more nuanced views. We need to read about the Enlightenment before we can understand its mistakes and its benefits. This is especially true right now in America, where many people challenge America’s foundations and argue whether it has Christian ideas in its foundation. Understanding how the Founding Fathers’ ideas fit with the Enlightenment and with Judeo-Christian ideas (especially as compared to the French Revolution) allows us to understand whether America can be considered a “Christian nation” or not.
Promote a better understanding of science. While we can debate evolution and whether the Bible describes an exact historical timeline that doesn’t fit geology, science and faith don’t have to be seen as utter opponents. The more we understand science and its inherent limits, the more we find the idea that science serves as a substitute for religion doesn’t work. Many times scientific theories have nuance we don’t notice until we study them in-depth, and what seems to be opposed to Biblical ideas may complement them. The more we encourage people to look carefully at science, the more we can avoid easy “faith versus science” arguments that take things out of context and don’t go anywhere.
Point out what humans can and can’t know. One of the distinctly negative effects of the Enlightenment was it created the impression that humans could be all-knowing, figuring everything out themselves. As science has helped us to understand how much our view of the world is informed by environmental factors or things we don’t fully understand (such as quantum physics), we’re moving back to the understanding that human beings are fallible and there are many things we don’t (or can’t) know. Recognizing that truth will help us see science’s limits and that we aren’t smart enough to live without a space for God.
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