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Its leaders—George Washington (1732–99), John Adams (1725–1826), Jefferson, and Franklin—experienced the revolution as a secular, pragmatic struggle against an imperial power.
The vast majority of the colonists could not relate to the Deism of their leaders and developed a form of revolutionary Calvinism that enabled them to join the struggle.
some believed that as a result of the revolution, Jesus would shortly establish the Kingdom of God in America.
In France, however, religion was part of the ancien régime that needed to be swept away.
Jean Meslier, an exemplary parish priest, died weary of life, leaving his few meager possessions to his parishioners. Among his papers, they discovered the manuscript of his Memoire in which he declared that Christianity was a hoax.
No more theological wars, no more soldiers of religion— such terrible soldiers! Nature infected with sacred poison would repair its rights and purity. Deaf to all other voices, tranquil mortals will follow only the spontaneous dictates of their own being, the only commands which can never be despised with impunity, and which alone can lead us to happiness through the pleasant paths of virtue.44
“I believe in God,” he wrote, “but I live very well with the atheists.”
For d’Holbach, religion was born of weakness, fear, and superstition; people had created gods to fill the gaps in their knowledge, so religious belief was an act of intellectual cowardice and despair.
How could you reconcile the goodness of an omnipotent God with human suffering?
Henceforth in Europe—though not in the United States—atheism would be indissolubly associated with the hope for a more just and equal world.
He once reassured his servant that he had “only destroyed dogma to make room for faith,”59 and yet he had no time for the rituals and symbols of religion that made faith viable.
in Blake’s poetry Newton, albeit unfairly, became a symbol of the oppression, aggressive capitalism, industrialization, and exploitation of the modern state.
The God of Newton must undergo a kenosis, return to earth, die a symbolic death in the person of Jesus,65 and become one with humanity.
Where the philosophes had been wary of the imagination, Keats saw it as a sacred faculty that brought new truth into the world: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love they are all in their Sublime creative of essential Beauty.”78
he argued that the religious quest should not begin with an analysis of the cosmos but in the depths of the psyche.
The essence of religion lay in the feeling of “absolute dependence” that was fundamental to human experience.
It was a mistake to imagine that God was outside our world, an addition to our experience. Spirit was inextricably involved with the natural and human worlds and could achieve fulfillment only in finite reality. This, Hegel believed, was the real meaning of the Christian doctrine of incarnation.
Hegel’s vision articulated the optimistic, forward-thrusting spirit of modernity.
Then the whole process begins again. The world was thus continuously re-creating itself.
In what with hindsight we can see to be a sinister move, Hegel identified the alienating religion that we had to reject with Judaism.
new version of Christianity had become central to the faith of America.1 Known as “Evangelicalism,” its objective was to convert the new nation to the “good news” of the Gospel.
religion of the heart rather than the head. Faith did not require learned philosophers and scientific experts; it was a simple matter of felt conviction and virtuous living.
Rooted in eighteenth-century Pietism, Evangelical Christianity led many Americans away from the cool ethos of the Age of Reason to the kind of populist democracy, anti-intellectualism, and rugged individualism that still characterizes American culture.
new genre of the gospel song transported the audience to ecstasy, so that they wept and shouted for joy. Like some of the fundamentalist movements today, these congregations gave people who felt disenfranchised and exploited a means of making their voices heard by the establishment.
America was the new Israel, insisted Timothy Dwight, president of Yale; its expanding frontier was a sign of the coming Kingdom, so to be worthy of their calling, Americans must become more religious.
God functioned in exactly the same way as any natural phenomenon; in the modern world, there was only one path to truth, so theology must conform to the scientific method.
They read the scriptures with an unprecedented literalism, because this seemed more rational than the older allegorical exegesis.
They wanted a rationalized God who shared their own moral standards and behaved like a good Evangelical.
Feuerbach had taken Hegel’s call for a God and religion of this world to its logical conclusion.
Feuerbach humanity should assume the predicates given to God.
“man’s belief in God is nothing other than his belief in himself.
Religious distress is at the same time an expression of real distress and a protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
Lyell, a liberal-minded Christian, refused to discuss the theological implications of his findings, because science “ought to be conducted as if the scriptures were not in existence.”
theology had more in common with poetry than with science.
Theopoetics - see John D. Caputo
In 1886, the revivalist preacher Dwight Lyman Moody (1837–99) founded the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago to combat the Higher Criticism, his aim to create a cadre to oppose the false ideas that, he argued, would bring the nation to destruction.
“I do not say that there is no God; and until you tell me what you mean by God I am not mad enough to say anything of the kind.”
Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–99), lawyer, orator, and state attorney general who became a leading spokesman of American agnosticism, humanity would soon outgrow God: one day everybody would recognize that religion was an extinct species.
“the loss of religious faith among the most civilized portions of the race is a step from childishness to maturity.”
Ingersoll protested with his usual bravura, “Banish me from Eden if you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!”
At this time, it was not the religious who were fueling the antagonism between the two disciplines but the advocates of science.
When the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) looked into the hearts of his contemporaries, he found that God had already died, there, but as yet very few people were aware of this.79 In The Gay Science (1882), he told the story of a madman who ran one morning into the marketplace, crying: “I seek God!” In mild amusement, the sophisticated bystanders asked him if God had run away or emigrated. “Where has God gone?” the madman demanded. “We have killed him—you and I! We are all his murderers!”80 The astonishing progress of science had made God quite irrelevant; it had caused human
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“some sun seems to have set and profound trust has been turned to doubt.”
making “God” a purely notional truth attainable by the rational and scientific intellect, without ritual, prayer, or ethical commitment, men and women had killed it for themselves.
Nietzsche believed, human beings could counter the danger of nihilism by making themselves divine.
But what would happen when human beings did indeed imagine that they were the highest reality and a law unto themselves? What if the ideal of kenosis was replaced by the naked lust for empowerment, backed by the immense capacity of scientific technology?
patients, Freud concluded that religion was a neurosis that bordered on insanity.
His definition of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927) is also reductive: religion is wish fulfillment of instinctual, unconscious desires, a fantasy that was once consoling but is now doomed to failure, because its myths and rituals belong to such a primitive stage of human evolution.
Freud’s critique was flawed by a rather unscientific view of the female as homme manqué: religion was a female activity, while atheism represented the postreligious, healthy masculine human being.
nature was “red in tooth and claw,”
Doubt was “the womb and cradle of progress.”
The war itself seemed a terrible parody of the mechanical ideal: once the intricate mechanism of conscription, troop transportation, and the manufacture of weapons had been switched on, it seemed to acquire its own momentum and proved almost impossible to stop.
