Roy Porter on Rationalized Religion and Enlightenment

Key Enlightenment thinkers were pained and angered by the intellectual and institutional manifestations of religion they witnessed all around them. Many leading philosophes – above all those from France and England – made bitter and mocking onslaughts upon the absurdity of Christian theology, the power-crazed corruption of the churches (above all, the Vatian), and the pestilential power still exerted by blind credulity over people’s lives. Form some, notably Voltaire, Diderot,and d’Holbach, the emancipation of mankind from religious tyranny had to be the first blow struck in a general politics of emancipation, because the individual possessed by a false faith could not be in possession of himself.

“Voltaire was the anti-Christ of the Enlightenment, battling throughout his career against the demons of false religion.”

Pathbreaking in this respect was John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). Locke argued that the thinking man must be a believer, precisely because Christianity’s central doctrines – belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent Creator, the duty of obeying and worshipping Him, and so forth – were all perfectly consonant with reason and experience. Being a Christian was a rational commitment; but the reasonable Christian was not obliged to accept features of traditional faith at which his reasonbaulked. No irrational leaps of faith were required. In the guise of ‘rational religion’, Christianity was thus being pared down to the minimum which educated people found easy to credit.