America is a product of the Christian Enlightenment.
The Age of Reason led to many awful things such as the French Revolution and (eventually) the modernist thinking behind Marxism, Progressivism and Fascism. The central premise of the Age of Reason is that there is an answer to the big questions of life.
The Christian Enlightenment indeed applied the ideas of the Enlightenment to Christian thinking. Nevertheless, these efforts retained core theological elements. I’ve come to think that the Christian Enlightenment has more in common with post-modern thinking than it does with Progressive Modernism. I would characterize the central premise of the Christian Enlightenment as being that reason is a gift given to man as a tool to facilitate his moral duties as given by God. In other words, reason is still subordinate to God’s ineffable purposes.
Like post-modernism, the Christian Enlightenment suggests that man must choose what meaning to give to life. Under Christian Enlightenment thinking, God created man and God created the world. Both the means to understand the world and the means to know God are given to man by God. However, the mechanism which gives man knowledge of God – spiritual intuition – is different than the mechanism which gives man knowledge of the world – reason.
In contrast, the pure Enlightenment says that meaning is derived from Reason itself, as if Reason was a God. Those who consider themselves to be more enlightened believe that they know better than everyone else. They believe themselves to be entitled to rule, and disregard the opinions of the less educated. Since all meaning can be determined by reason, then the less enlightened have no basis by which to assert self-determination. This is not the principle of the American revolution, which instead asserted that individuals are enabled by God to fulfill life’s purposes without the need for an enlightened authority.
A person doesn’t have to be religious to consider the importance of this nuance. Joseph Priestly is not discussed, as far as I remember, in any American high school history texts. If Jonathan Mayhew is discussed, I can’t recall any substantive review of his ideas. Yet, I recall detailed reviews of Tom Paine, also Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke specifically. My current understanding is that the former men, the ministers, played a much larger role in informing popular American opinion as it approached revolution than did Continental thinkers.
I think any rescue of American values for liberty’s sake needs to acknowledge this. There’s no need to return to the thinking of the Christian Enlightenment, but it should be understood as the forebear of what we value, and we should understand that the other products of the Age of Reason have caused tremendous harm. The answers which concern life’s meaning need to be left to the individual to determine. No amount of science or state power can serve as a substitute.
