Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization: A Review Essay
Author(s)
Sheehan, Jonathan
Abstract
Jonathan Sheehan asserts that until recently scholars have assumed that the Enlightenment was a fundamentally secularizing force, one that sought nothing less than the speedy extinction of religion. But in the past ten years, he argues, religion has returned to the Enlightenment. While modern scholars have long listened carefully to the complaints of the devout, they have just rediscovered that religion in the eighteenth century was not only alive and well but indeed at the very heart of its intellectual life. This resurrection of religion has happened along a broad resurgence of historical interest in religious topics since 1989. But, Sheehan insists, the debut of religion on the stage of the Enlightenment has been one of the most dramatic moments in this shift. After all, he reminds us, the Enlightenment has traditionally been read as the very cradle of the secular world. Making religion into a cornerstone of the Enlightenment thus raises troubling questions about the precise nature of this secularizing vision. Sheehan maps this new enthusiasm for matters of the spirit onto what he sees as a communal discomfort with the history of the Enlightenment and modernity. The injection of religion into the Enlightenment, he maintains, is part of a revision of the history of secular society that has sent the very category of “the Enlightenment” – long defined as an anti-religious philosophical program – into great turmoil. In the end, though, Sheehan concludes, these difficulties are productive because they help historians develop more expansive and rigorous approaches to the Enlightenment, religion, and secular modernity. His essay suggests how this literature can also be used to address similar issues in other times and places.
