While Enlightenment philosophy and Great Awakening Christianity were very different, both influenced the American colonies and American Revolution and both frame our thinking today.  The Enlightenment — so named by its own practitioners, who didn’t lack self-esteem — is best thought of as a continuation of the Renaissance we read about in Chapter 2, with a strong emphasis on the Scientific Revolution, reason, and progress.  Its scientific method tested hypotheses through rigorous, repeatable experimentation, debated in peer-reviewed journals and within refereed societies and organizations.  Ancient Greeks, inventors of the first organized sporting events (the Olympics), also promoted hard-nosed, constructive debate and organized competition in law, politics, philosophy, and science.  Greeks like Thales, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Heron, and Democritus took things in this analytical direction first, testing their ideas against each other, and Iraqi-Egyptian Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (aka Alhazen) honed the scientific method in the Middle Ages, applied in Europe by 13th-century Franciscan friar Roger Bacon.  Even in ancient Greece, though, thinkers were outnumbered: the democratic mob in Athens banished Anaxagoras for arguing that the Moon was a rock rather than a God.

The scientific method is really about both knowledge and ignorance — not just the purported ignorance of those you disagree with, but collective ignorance.  It proceeds from the humble assumption that we really don’t know much, and that all of our supposed knowledge is subject to ongoing reexamination, to the idea that we can learn more through careful observation combined with the application of reason, math, and science.  In Novum Organum (or New Instrument, 1620), Englishman Francis Bacon, no relation to his like-minded precursor Roger, beseeched scientists to “start from the bottom-most foundations — unless we prefer to go ’round in perpetual circles at a contemptibly slow rate.”  Good scientists have to know what they don’t know, in other words.  For instance, physicists don’t know why the Big Bang happened and Charles Darwin didn’t fill in gray area about inherited traits by pretending to know about what we now call DNA.  If you ask an astrophysicist why we don’t understand exactly how the universe inflated in its first second, she’ll just tell you the truth, that our science and math aren’t good enough yet.  Modern black hole research also exemplifies the scientific method.  First theoretical physicists led by Albert Einstein hypothesized their existence merely through math on a chalkboard, then a century later the Event Horizon Telescope photographed one in 2019 (right), and now honest physicists acknowledge being baffled by their internal dynamics.  Yet research rarely plays out in a vacuum, instead being enmeshed in politics, ideology, and economics.  In the Renaissance, Florentine Medici bankers patronized weapons research by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, leading to advances in optics and physics, and alchemists jumpstarted modern chemistry by trying to make synthetic gold.  Then, like now, war and money spurred science.  In the 20th century, we learned a lot about the Sun researching hydrogen bombs, and we revolutionized computers (and, in turn, phones) by making microprocessors small and light enough to fit on a warhead.  New instruments enhanced observation.  In 1665, Robert Hooke described telescopes and microscopes as having “added artificial organs to the natural [our eyes].”  Artificial intelligence has even greater potential, as it can replicate experiments at scale with less bias.

By the late 17th and 18th centuries, the Renaissance application of reason to the natural and political world morphed into various strands known collectively as the Age of Enlightenment.  Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that, for its practitioners, the Enlightenment was “not an historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development, unbound to time or place.”  No one seems to agree exactly on what it was, and the Enlightenment cut a wide enough swath for some historians to blame it for slavery’s justification while others credit its emphasis on equality and justice as contributing to slavery’s abolition.  And it did sustain both things.  Likewise, Enlightenment science enabled overseas expansion and conquest, but some of its thinkers took a sympathetic interest in the indigenous people Europeans conquered, critiquing Europe by comparison to idealized “noble savages” uncorrupted by “civilization” and seeding an outlook that later informed cultural anthropology and antiracism.  Similarly, you could blame/credit Enlightenment science for both pollution and environmentalism to combat pollution.  It led to artificial fertilizers that keep us fed, but fertilizers pollute the water and air.  Enlightenment science ultimately brought us nuclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them on.  Yet Enlightenment philosopher Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764) helped convince America’s Founders to add the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.  Critics began describing torture and the death penalty as “unenlightened.”  The Enlightenment ushered in an age of questioning, searching, comparing, and analyzing society objectively that led, ultimately, to scrutinizing practices like slavery and torture, even if change came gradually.  People opposed slavery and torture subjectively, too, but there was no big push against such practices prior to the Enlightenment.  America’s Founders are often criticized for failing to live up to the Enlightenment’s ideals, but that could only have been possible if the ideals existed in the first place.  Is partially unfulfilled idealism worse than no idealism at all?  Like the Renaissance and Dark Ages, the Enlightenment is one of those historical tags that lends itself to biased agenda-driven oversimplifications, highlighting some themes while concealing others.  Yet, people who lived through it were aware they were in a new age.  The French originally called the Enlightenment Lumières (translation: lights).

The Age of Exploration (Chapter 2) provided Europeans a global inventory of data, spurring the Enlightenment.  Running overseas colonies required knowledge of the world’s geography, weather, cultures, economies, etc.  Exploration also brought coffee to Europe, the signature drink of the Enlightenment.  Historian Tom Standage observed that coffee was the “drink of clear-headedness, the epitome of modernity and progress,” and one way that Enlightenment philosophers, aka philosophes, could improve on the ancient Greeks and Romans since they didn’t drink it.  Most java of the era was thick, gritty and, by the judgment of aficionados, downright nasty.  Still, instead of starting off the day clouding their minds with ale or wine, scientists, writers, politicians, merchants, and clerks imbibed the Ethiopian plant/Yemeni invention/Turkish-Ottoman import to “play good-fellows [with] this wakeful and civil drink,” to quote one Englishman from 1660.  Just as Europeans imported and modified gunpowder, paper, printing, shipbuilding, and math to their benefit during the Renaissance, they imported and modified the Arabic coffeehouse during the Enlightenment.  Standage calls these clubby establishments the “Internet of the Age of Reason,” serving as informal post offices, stock exchanges, and forums for ideas ranging from theories of gravity to political rebellion to poetry to commodity prices, along with news and gossip.  Dutch merchants who grew coffee in Java (Indonesia) imported beans to New York in 1660 and coffeehouses assumed a social and political role in colonial America similar to taverns, even though most Americans drank tea in the home.

But improving on Classical ignorance of coffee was the least of it.  Scholars during the Late Renaissance and Enlightenment started to question all dogma, be it philosophical, scientific, political, or religious, building on rather than just revering and reviving ancient Greek and Roman knowledge.  Meanwhile, they continued to import ideas along with coffee from Arabia and Persia.  A famous example is Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ reconceptualization of the universe (really just our solar system) along the heliocentric model suggested by Abu Raihan al-Biruni (973-1048 CE) and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274) instead of the geocentric version inherited from the ancient Greeks (Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy) and Catholic Church (St. Thomas Aquinas). Copernicus’s model bridged Arabs’ mathematical challenge to geocentrism and Galileo’s observational astronomy that supported heliocentrism. Biruni, who centuries ahead of his time hypothesized about the existence of the American continent, was in turn well-versed in Classical scholars like Aristotle and Ptolemy.  Enlightenment engineers also imported ideas from ancient Greece and medieval Iraq, building toy automatons that were really the first robots.

While we can safely say that the Enlightenment valued reason and logic, historians disagree on its timeframe and even what it was exactly.  The Great Awakening, on the other hand, generates less scholarly controversy.  This religious revival gave rise to a less exclusive, more user-friendly, but equally devout form of Protestant Christianity than that of “Old Light” (Puritan) New England Calvinism.  Like the Enlightenment, Christianity was used both to support and denounce slavery.  We’ll unpack the Enlightenment here in the second third of the chapter, then explore Quakers, the Great Awakening, and religious freedom in the last third.  Together, these ideologies laid the foundation for the American Revolution that we’ll examine in the next few chapters.

Enlightenment Politics
Enlightenment commitment to reexamining inherited wisdom and discovering natural systems through reason and logic carried over from science into politics.  The Declaration of Independence and Constitution are products of the Enlightenment, as the U.S. was created by politicians swept up in the movement when it was all the rage.  Paris was the epicenter of the Enlightenment, but its philosophes lived throughout Europe, the British Isles, and small but enthusiastic outposts in colonial America.  They rejected monarchs’ claim to the divine right of rule, turning the traditional political model upside down by arguing that power was a privilege bestowed by the people on their rulers.  They disagreed that God chose certain people to rule over others and instead promoted representative government — an idea that mostly dormant in Western history since Classical times that had been reviving in England and a few small pockets in continental Europe during the Renaissance (mainly city-states with trading economies).  England’s absolutist monarchy eroded in the 17th century in a pair of revolutions.  Politics is a vivid and important example of Enlightenment thinkers reexamining traditional wisdom.

Along with free trade, representative government was a cornerstone of Enlightenment-era Classical liberalism.  Liberalism is a confusing term because it has a narrower meaning in the modern U.S. (usually Democrats on the left) and a broader international and historical meaning referring to the whole package of free markets, democracy, and individual rights aimed for in western Europe, America, and elsewhere.  Coming on the heels of the fractious and violent Religious Wars (Chapter 4), Enlightenment liberals advocated tolerance and peaceful debate among people who disagree, taking government out of the thought-control business.

In England in the late 17th century, physician/philosopher John Locke wrote about the “natural right” to “life, liberty and estate” and helped draft the constitution for America’s Carolina colony, where “no slave” was “exempted from that civil dominion his Master has over him.”  If these rights and lack thereof sound familiar, they morphed a century later into life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and protection against government denial of life, liberty or property without due process of law in the U.S. Constitution’s 5th Amendment.  Locke, a major shareholder in the Royal African slave-trading company, saw it as part of government’s social contract to secure such natural rights among free men of means.  Other English Radical Whigs, including the anonymous author of Cato’s Letters, wrote of the “equality of all men.”

British Americans carried on this republican, Radical Whig tradition in the 18th century, most famously Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence.  Locke and Jefferson were concerned with the political representation of middle-class men and above, but future Americans applied democracy more broadly.  You can see why Enlightenment critics see its philosophy as merely a self-serving justification for white male hegemony; yet, you can also see how its ideas contained the seeds of a more universal revolution.  A modern progressive might dismiss the Enlightenment as merely dead white males (DWM) but, in the big scheme of things, inclusive progressive politics are rooted in the Enlightenment; they’re just a truer, expanded version.  With the republican genie out of the bottle, white male elites found it increasingly difficult to explain why they should run roughshod over everyone else.  That’s because, by the “pale male” philosophes‘ own standards of justice and equality, there isn’t a good reason.  The project of reconciling and improving on those Enlightenment ideals is a major through line in America’s history that continues to this day.

Enlightenment political theory was also concerned with balance, reflected in the U.S. Constitution’s emphasis on checks and balances and equality among its three main branches.  You could say that, via the Declaration, Constitution and civil rights movements, the Enlightenment is built into the fabric or DNA of American politics.  Politics, like science, was an Enlightenment vehicle for progress and making the world a better place.  Though often not religious in the traditional sense, especially with their commitment to questioning tradition, philosophes had an undying faith in progress.

Enlightenment Religion
The Enlightenment’s signature religion was Deism, though there were plenty of atheist and Christian Enlightenment philosophers as well.  Deists were religious, to be sure, but they rejected two central tenants of traditional religion.  First, in the name of progress, they disagreed that everything important to know was already known.  That notion is implicit in the very word enlightenment, along with future historical tags like Dark Ages to contrast the period behind them.  Second, they rejected Scriptural revelation and the sovereign, father-figure conception of the Judeo-Christian God in favor of a more impersonal force having created the universe.  Their revelation was nature itself rather than Scripture, so science provided the path to the divine.  While Deist ideas are still around today, they never formed into an organized church.  The nearest it came was the Cult of the Supreme Being or Festivals of Reason during the French Revolution in the 1790s, but they never gained traction.  Most Philosophes, after all, weren’t into “cults” and most French people were Catholics, not Deists.

While denying Scriptural revelation, Deists were nonetheless tapping into a strand of Christianity that revered nature, dating back at least to St. Augustine (354-430 CE).  Within Enlightenment Christianity, there was the liberal Unitarian branch (now UU) and a thread known as “natural religion” that overlapped with Deism.  Charles Darwin was a natural theologian as a young man, prior to his daughter Annie’s death, and nearly entered the Anglican ministry.  Science and rationality, even if combined with a dash of mysticism, gave mankind its best hope for future progress in the eyes of Deists and natural theologians.  Contrary to the way they’re often depicted in textbooks and dictionaries, most Deists didn’t believe that God was a mere “clockmaker” who wound up the universe only to vacate the premises.  Like Thomas Jefferson, many believed in what might better be termed pantheism: belief in a divinity infusing and animating all things.  Jefferson wasn’t the only Enlightenment figure difficult to categorize religiously.

Living after the split between evolutionary theory and Biblical fundamentalism, we often think of religion and science as at odds.  But to assume that Enlightenment scientists had a purely secular/materialist outlook is an anachronism whereby we’re projecting a modern framework onto historical actors (see Rear Defoggers #22 & 30).  Most philosophes were religious and the forenamed Roger Bacon, early purveyor of the scientific method, was a medieval Franciscan monk.  While not orthodox, the most famous and emblematic Enlightenment scientist, Englishman Isaac Newton, was a Biblical scholar and eschatologist, and had more than a passing interest in the occult.  His use of the term natural law for forces like gravity implied a lawgiver (God).  Newton and Locke believed in witchcraft, as did Robert Boyle, founder of modern chemistry and a pioneer of the scientific method.  Astronomer Galileo Galilei, telescope pioneer and early proponent of the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun, was motivated by a strong sense of wonder and mysticism.  He said that philosophy was “written in the grand book” of the universe, which “stands continually open to our gaze” and that “The Sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it has nothing else in the universe to do.”  You may have guessed from that last quote that Galileo enjoyed wine and you’d be right.  He described vino as “sunlight held together by water.”

Galileo’s Copernican predecessor, Giordano Bruno, might have leaned toward the heliocentric rather than geocentric view of astronomy not because he was a paragon of reason battling the irrational Catholic Church, but rather because he thought the Earth had a soul or “Holy Ghost” that powered its motion around the Sun.  Bruno, a Dominican friar, was first to see the big astronomical picture, including that other stars were like the Sun, likely with planets revolving around them, some perhaps with life (cosmic pluralism).  But Christianity and science collided, too.  The Catholic Church burned Bruno at the stake in 1600 for pantheism.  In the 20th century, another theologian-astronomer, Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaître, made a major contribution to astronomy by demonstrating that the universe was expanding, confirmed soon after by Edwin Hubble’s observations.  Lemaître proposed what we now call the Big Bang Theory but he called it the “hypothesis of the primeval atom” or “cosmic egg.”  As a believer in a static universe, Albert Einstein initially disagreed with Lemaître.  But, in the spirit of the scientific method, Einstein kept an open mind, encouraged Lemaître to investigate further, and endorsed the new theory when Hubble’s calculations proved him wrong.  The science mattered more to Einstein than his ego.

Enlightenment Science
Galileo’s claim in the Starry Messenger (1610) that moons orbited Jupiter (below) contradicted Catholic doctrine that Earth was the center of the universe.  It’s intuitive to think that we’re standing still and that we’re the purpose of existence, and unsettling to consider Earth’s insignificance in a larger cosmos (at the time, no one distinguished between our solar system, galaxy, and universe).  Nonetheless, the Catholic Church initially supported Copernican heliocentric theory until Galileo’s writings appeared to lampoon Pope Urban VIII and the Jesuits and he promoted heliocentrism publicly.  The Church sentenced Galileo to house arrest in 1633.  As he left the courtroom, he purportedly muttered “Eppur si muove” (nevertheless, it moves) and the Vatican overturned their verdict posthumously in 1992.  Protestant Christianity mainly encouraged science, indirectly by weakening the Catholic Church and directly by supporting education and literacy.  Protestant Reformer Philipp Melanchthon endorsed the Copernican, Sun-centered model of the cosmos.
Isaac Newton was most famous as a scientist, not a theologian.  He built on Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, and Kepler’s Renaissance theories of the heliocentric, Sun-centered universe (solar system) and developed the theory of gravity to explain the planets’ orbits, which Kepler figured out were slightly elliptical rather than circular.  Newton also invented the reflecting telescope and modified Arab calculus along with German Gottfried Leibniz.  Newton formulated the general laws of motion and mechanics that dominated physics for the next centuries in Principia Mathematica (1687).  His “cradle” of pendulums at the top of the chapter demonstrated conservation of momentum and energy.  His optical research led to prisms that dispersed white light into the colors of the rainbow.  Newton’s work was typical of how 17th and 18th-century scientists developed laws to codify nature’s order in the same way the Bible provided a code for Christianity.  Enlightenment philosophers had faith that scientific laws were discernible (or perceptible) and provided the foundation for laws that governed other fields like politics and economics.  Put another way, there was a rhyme and reason to nature that transcended science.  Politicians like Locke and Jefferson based their beliefs in concepts like natural rights on Newton’s scientific principles, as did Scottish economist Adam Smith. Applying basic laws of supply-and-demand in The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith argued that an “invisible hand” would allocate resources more efficiently via free trade than mercantilism, with its tariffs and regulations.

Enlightenment scientists’ passion for categorizing, collecting, and cataloging knowledge found its extreme expression in British and French modifications of the encyclopedia.  Ephraim Chambers Cylopaedia (or Universal Dictionary of Arts & Sciences, 1728) and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751) exceeded ancient and medieval compilations in their breadth and sophistication.  Contributors included luminaries such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.  Because of its secular emphasis and denunciations of ecclesiastical power, the Catholic Church banned its 28 volumes, but they delivered to subscribers in secret.  The Wikipedia entries linked to terms in these chapters are modern-day manifestations of the Enlightenment as are many of the courses one takes in school, and the way those courses are divided up into various topics and “ologies,” from the Greek logos, for study of.

Carl Linnaeus’ biological taxonomy is a good Enlightenment example of an attempt at all-encompassing knowledge.  The Swedish botanist took it upon himself to catalog all life forms under categories of family, genus, species, etc.  Linnaeus also exemplified the Enlightenment’s racist underbelly by helping to launch the pseudo-science of Scientific Racism later applied to justify slavery and eugenics.  While modern biologists have re-arranged Linnaeus’ categories and don’t traffic in families of species, his conceptualization of life forms as being related on a Tree of Life was the basis for Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection later in the 19th century.  Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, a contemporary of Linnaeus, was an early evolutionist.

Another example of Enlightenment categorizing was the study of elements at the University of Heidelberg, in Germany.  Among the students was Russian Dmitri Mendeleev, who is credited with developing the Periodic Table of Elements familiar to anyone who’s been in a lab or science classroom.  The table not only lists known elements, it predicts and explains their qualities based on its particular arrangement.  Like Linnaeus’ taxonomy, Mendeleev’s 19th-century original was arranged differently than today’s Periodic Table.  Enlightenment scientists didn’t just dig deeper into biology, chemistry, and physics, they cataloged their findings so that others could challenge and build on their theories as part of a worldwide effort.  If the Enlightenment had a modern creed, it might be that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  Einstein was confident that the universe was static, but he conceded defeat to a Catholic priest when the evidence proved otherwise.

Penn’s Woods & Quakerism
The Enlightenment’s main American satellite was Philadelphia, port and capital of Pennsylvania, the most religiously tolerant and scientifically oriented colony.  “Penn’s Woods” was a relative latecomer among the colonies, but the region north of Maryland and west of the Delaware River made up for lost time by becoming one of the most important.  William Penn, who had been arrested in England for practicing Quakerism with the Society of Friends, but whose father was a creditor of King Charles II, founded the colony after the English Civil War.  Because of his family connection, Penn went from being imprisoned to being awarded a tract of land in America larger than all of England — quite a reversal of fortune.  Given Penn’s noisy advocacy of religious freedom in England, it’s possible that Charles II gave him land in America just to get rid of him.  That way he could pay off his debt and get an agitator out of his hair (or powdered wig) at the same time.

Penn wasn’t typical of early Quakers, or “Children of Light,” insofar as he was born into the upper class.  The denomination’s founders were from remote parts of northern England — so remote that not only were they illiterate themselves, they weren’t even within range of trained ministers.  Consequently, they argued that Christianity could not only do without an established church, be it Catholic or Anglican, but that one didn’t need Scripture either to be blessed with the inner light caused by Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection.  This was a bare bones form of Protestantism that Martin Luther never imagined, needing neither church nor Bible.  Classic Quaker meetings have no ministers or planned sermons; Friends meditate and rise when moved to speak.  Outsiders called the Society of Friends “Quakers” because their bodies would sometimes convulse or shake when enraptured.

Penn impacted history even before he left England.  One of his trial juries refused to convict him when the Lord Mayor of London charged him with violating the Conventicle Acts dictating conformity to the Church of England.  The judge then went after the jury but an ensuing trial and counter-suit resulted in English judges losing their right to imprison juries for awarding what judges deemed to be incorrect verdicts.  Penn thus indirectly caused a major change in western legal history even before founding an important American colony.  Imagine how different trials would be if juries had to worry about being imprisoned by judges.

In America, Penn turned the New England Puritan model of homogeneity inside out by inviting anyone interested to enjoy a “Holy Experiment” in religious pluralism, with no official religious establishment.  Pennsylvania was diverse ethnically as well as religiously.  Philadelphia was Greek for “city of brotherly love.”  The Middle Colonies were the first to attract large numbers of non-British European settlers, including Dutch who founded New York, Swedes who founded Delaware and parts of New Jersey, and Germans and Moravians who came to Pennsylvania.  Initially, wealthy Quakers enslaved Africans, but, in the 18th century, a small and militant handful became the first Christian abolitionists in America.

Foremost among them was a diminutive, cave-dwelling, bee-keeping, vegan named Benjamin Lay, whose theatrical public protests against slavery (and tobacco and capital punishment) earned him fame as the “Quaker Comet” but dismissal from the Society of Friends.  Lay, who’d seen an enslaved worker commit suicide in Barbados to avoid torture, called “man-stealers” the “literal spawn of Satan” bearing the “mark of the Beast.”  Mainstream Quakers were starting to vindicate his radical abolitionist ideas when he died in 1759.  Quakers founded the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society in April 1775, the same month as the famous rebel battles against British redcoats at Lexington and Concord (next chapter).

Quakers also tried to respect Indigenous Americans within Penn’s borders.  They reciprocated by not killing “Broad Brims,” a reference to Quaker’s distinct hats. Though Pennsylvanians ultimately succumbed to disputes among themselves and their non-Quaker Native American relations deteriorated (e.g. the Paxton Boys), they built a prosperous colony on the strength of Delaware Valley wheat and Philadelphia’s inland deep water harbor.  As we saw in Chapter 3, the French & Indian War began in Western Pennsylvania, near what became Pittsburgh.  Quakers thrived in England, as well, founding Barclay’s and Lloyd’s banks and Cadbury chocolates, and were influential enough politically that some historians suspect their rise motivated the aristocracy after the English Civil War to overthrow Cromwell’s republican Commonwealth of England and restore the crown to Charles II because they were troubled by too much religious diversity.

Historian Barry Levy described how, despite their small numbers — no more than 1% of Christians for most of their history — Quakers had a disproportionate impact in England and America.  They were pacifists, which got them in trouble during times of war but helped spark the modern ideal that war, even if sometimes necessary, should be avoided if possible (modern hawks now talk about using war to maintain or restore peace).  They advocated progressive child-rearing and equality for women ahead of their time, when contemporary European men joked at taverns and in popular culture about beating their wives and children.  Quakers argued that children should be cultivated, persuaded, and talked to rather than just having their “wills broken” like draft animals with intimidation and physical punishment.  Despite exceptions, that’s the general direction parenting has gone in modern times, when it’s not only out-of-date to beat one’s children but also illegal.  Quakers helped define motherhood as the “ethical center of American socialization,” yet also believed that women had an equal role to play in the public realm.  Future reformers Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, and Jane Addams were all born Quakers.  After enslaving workers themselves through the mid-18th century, Quakers spearheaded abolitionism well into the 19th century and emphasized egalitarianism.  They believed in simple, unpretentious clothing and architecture.  Quakers called everyone Mr. and Mrs. regardless of wealth and shook hands rather than bowing or doffing caps to superiors.  They didn’t believe in rank to start with among mortals, but they shook hands to feel the pulsing “Light” in others.  To this day, Americans use Mr. and Mrs. for rich and poor alike and people of all economic classes commonly greet with some variety of shaking hands.  Quakers also believed that, since humans could carry the Light and “radiate God’s word,” they should never lie or engage in any uncouth or ungodly behavior, including haggling for prices.  Thus, this small Protestant denomination invented set prices for goods and egalitarian handshakes, helped to abolish slavery, and launched the women’s movement and widely accepted, modern ideas of raising children.  If we’re really more “enlightened” today than medieval Europeans, it might owe as much to Quakers as philosophes.

Benjamin Franklin
Pennsylvania was also home to Benjamin Franklin, who exemplified the Enlightenment spirit as well as any American.  On his Park Row statue in New York City, it reads: “printer, patriot, philosopher, statesman.”  Franklin fled Puritan Boston as a teenager, finding refuge in comparatively cosmopolitan Philadelphia.  In that way, he bridged Puritanism and the Enlightenment. He was a printer by trade — most famous for his own fact- and wisdom-filled annual Poor Richard’s Almanack — and a true polymath with multiple interests and a strong curiosity despite no formal schooling past age 10.  Like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain after him, Franklin started as a “printer’s devil” (apprentice), fetching type and mixing ink (Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass then wrote positive reviews under pseudonyms).  Printing required physical and mental strength, to handle heavy equipment, follow current events, and set type quickly upside down and backward.  As a sixteen-year-old, Franklin anonymously contributed to his brother James’ New England Courant under the name “Mrs. Silence Dogood,” boosting circulation with opinionated witticisms (some without James’ knowledge), promoting women’s rights, and lampooning local figures while still typesetting and selling papers on the street.  The Courant criticized Cotton Mather, the most famous theologian in Boston.  His almanac, along with practical facts to help farmers, also familiarized Americans with phrases like: “haste makes waste,” “lost time is never found again,” “God helps them that help themselves,” and “three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”  Franklin’s Autobiography helped popularize that genre, and Davey Crockett even died at the Alamo in 1836 with a copy in his jacket.  Franklin also published Quaker Benjamin Lay’s All Slave-Keepers That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates (1738), that historian Marcus Rediker called a “founding text of Atlantic antislavery.”

As an adult, Franklin became a serious scientist.  He rejected as lazy and superstitious the traditional interpretation of lightning being a manifestation of God’s anger, instead investigating the real cause using science.  He arrived at the theory of lightning being caused by electricity and even developed a tool to control its destructive force through his modification of the lightning rod.  Lightning strikes were a common cause of fires and, without pressurized water hoses, towns had no effective means to douse fires.  Franklin laid the groundwork for batteries by storing electricity in a Leyden jar, developed concepts of positive and negative charges, coined the terms conductor and electrician, and hoped humans would someday be able to harness electrical energy for their own purposes.  That, too, was in the Enlightenment spirit, along with dismissing superstitious explanations.  German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that Franklin had “stolen the fire of heaven.”  An incident on a ship off of England’s rocky west coast captured his practical orientation and that of the Enlightenment.  After nearly capsizing, Franklin wrote his wife: “Were I a Roman Catholic perhaps I should, on this occasion, vow to build a chapel to a saint. But, as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a lighthouse.”

He invented the Franklin stove (a box insert into a hearth), the glass harmonica (for which both Mozart and Beethoven wrote music), daylight savings, the postal system, and properly theorized about how the Gulf Stream from the Caribbean warmed Europe and that Nor’easters actually originate in the south.  Franklin modified and popularized bifocals.  He researched the Earth’s rotation and proved that dark fabrics absorb more heat than light.  He pioneered demographics in his study of colonial Americans’ migration patterns.  Franklin asked questions and, when confronted with practical problems, furthered progress by inventing new solutions.  For instance, his brother’s catheter was uncomfortable, so he invented a more flexible one.  If that’s not practical, what is?  He was constantly researching and coming up with new medical ideas, some useful others less so, but always rejected patents as he thought inventors should share freely.  When he was eleven, he invented swim fins.  Franklin helped transform Philadelphia into the first true city in America, with a hospital, fire and police departments, libraries, and paved, numbered and lit streets.  Franklin established the colonies’ first volunteer fire department there in 1736.  Philadelphia’s grid street system influenced cities throughout America and it started the first medical colleges in the colonies, named for Penn and Jefferson.

Franklin’s Deism was typical of the Founders, as was his Enlightenment politics.  Since America was born at the height of the Enlightenment, its Revolution presented an opportunity to ensconce representative government in a country starting from scratch.  Through representative government, along with its endorsement of science and technology, the Enlightenment lives on in contemporary America.  While Thomas Jefferson was wrong that orthodox faiths would soon give way to Deism or Unitarianism, people of all faiths live in a technologically advancing world and share at least some subconscious belief in the scientific method.  Few among us would rush to a church instead of a hospital if injured or sick, and no one is advocating replacing First Responders with ministers on the other end of 911 calls.  We prefer that our “healers” be trained in First Aid.  We drive cars and trucks and live in homes and talk on phones all invented and improved on by application of the scientific method.  But long gone is the philosophes’ blind faith in progress as a uniformly good thing since people today realize that science will never solve all our problems and can even create new ones of its own like pollution, carcinogens, overpopulation, cyber-attacks, and weapons of mass destruction.

Freemasonry
While Deists never established a formal denomination or church of their own, some of their emphasis on Enlightenment progress made its way into the Freemasons, a fraternal society that traced its origins to stonemason guilds and the masons who built Solomon’s Temple to house the Ark of the Covenant.  It really emerged among the stonemasons’ guild rebuilding castles in Scotland under James VI, the future James I of England, but expanded to include non-stonemasons, Freemasons.  Freemason Sir Robert Moray incubated Enlightenment science by co-founding the Royal Society of London in 1660 that sponsored fellows Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Stephen Hawking, among many others.  The “G” in the Masonic Square & Compass symbol stands for “Grand Architect of the Universe,” a Deist way to describe God.  But Masons were, and are, an organization that includes people of many faiths, including Christianity bound together by monotheism and a commitment to community service.  Masonic lodges offered camaraderie and ritual in an era when the Protestant Reformation had shorn Christianity of some of its ritualistic appeal.  The Illuminati were purportedly the Mason’s atheist offshoot.  Many Americans were suspicious of the organization because of their secretive meetings, rituals, and codes, but their ranks included Founders like Franklin and George Washington and dozens of future prominent politicians, inventors, entertainers, and theologians.  A cursory glance at this list makes one wonder if there aren’t more famous American Masons than famous American non-Masons.  While not up to no good, as wrongly suspected, Masons were obviously networking long before LinkedIn® and their prominent ranks and secrecy combined to make them irresistible catnip for conspiracy theorists.
In addition, Masonic imagery worked its way onto American currency and iconic structures like the Washington Monument and Statue of Liberty, a gift from French Masons to America to celebrate the Union’s victory in the Civil War.  Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French-American military engineer who designed Washington, D.C., was a Mason, leading to fun if unsubstantiated theories about the city’s layout.  The political structure of Masonic lodges, with their system of checks-and-balances and one-man-one-vote, is similar to the U.S. Constitution.  That doesn’t mean that Masons necessarily influenced the Constitution so much as they are likely similar because both developed during the Enlightenment.
Contrary to conspiracy theories, the Eye of Providence on the back of the American one-dollar bill comes from the original Great Seal of the United States (1782) and dates to Christian iconography, adopted later by Masons.  Franklin Roosevelt, one of 14 Masons to have served as president, added it to the dollar in 1935.

The Great Awakening
While Enlightenment philosophers were disproportionately represented among the Founders and in Masonic Lodges, and Enlightenment politics is built into our Constitution, few Americans were attracted to Enlightenment religion.  Traditional religion and religious indifference were more common in the 18th century among farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, and enslaved workers, and Christianity experienced revolutions of its own known collectively as the Great Awakening.  Historians usually refer to the First and Second Great Awakenings in reference to big bursts in the 1730s-40s and 1790s-1850s, but there was no real break in between.  The First took place mostly within the old Congregational denominations of New England and in Philadelphia, while the Second was associated with tent revivals and missionaries around the country and launched new denominations.

The Puritans’ Elect of God predestination-oriented Calvinism wasn’t destined to survive the 18th century in its original form, at least not administered by ministers delivering erudite “Old Light” sermons to a passive audience.  If it was too stuffy and complicated even for New England, it wouldn’t gain traction on the frontier and rest of the country.  Many Americans couldn’t read, let alone dive into multiple volumes of John Calvin’s dense Commentaries.  Puritanism was too exclusive.  What was the attraction if you couldn’t prove to insiders that you, too, were among the Elect?  American Protestantism was in need of a reboot or rebranding after the first few generations of Puritans had served their purpose.  In New England, the key bridge between the older Calvinism and more emotional, less formal “New Light” variety was Jonathan Edwards.  Despite appealing to the masses, Edwards was an intellectual who embraced Enlightenment science and his books and sermons are still read today at colleges and divinity schools (Yale Collection).  Edwards was one of the most influential Christian theologians in American history.

But the most popular and dynamic of the new ministers was George Whitefield, who preached throughout the colonies outside of churches, in the streets.  While Ben Franklin didn’t share Whitefield’s religious views, he appreciated the social role of religion in supporting society’s moral fabric and published Whitefield’s sermons, helping to trigger the First Great Awakening.  Others were less enamored, as suggested by the engraving below where two women named “hypocrisy” and two-faced “deceit” support Whitefield.  The jester’s staff and monkey in the bottom right corner indicate that this artist viewed Great Awakening “enthusiasm” ministers like showmen in a carnival.

But their theology was substantive.  John Wesley, the English founder of Methodism, argued against predestination in favor of Arminianism, the idea that salvation came through good works.  This contrasted with Calvin’s predestination and, for that matter, Luther’s sola scriptura.  With its emphasis on free will and salvation, Methodism was the most popular denomination in America by 1830.  Jonathan Edwards, though, downplayed Arminianism and promoted the Calvinist idea of salvation coming through inner reflection and God’s Grace in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: a Sermon” (1741).  The upshot for the Great Awakening was that the Fire-and-Brimstone aspect of Puritan Jeremiads lived on, but Protestant Christianity opened itself up to all comers in the 18th and 19th centuries, becoming more heartfelt and user-friendly.  In the upgraded Calvinism 2.0, converts could be saved and evangelicals carried that message to followers of German and Dutch Reformed churches, Scottish “New-Side” Presbyterians, and Anglo-American Baptists and Methodists.  The Greek root of the word evangelical means good news, or bearer of good news.

The new faiths had a democratic or egalitarian bent, with no respect for hierarchies like the Church of England, which they viewed as “Catholic Lite,” or even the formal organization of the Old Light Puritan Congregations or Old Side Presbyteries, with their insistence on college-educated ministers.  Their preference, especially at first, was for informal tent revival gatherings where swarms of people communed and shared born-again experiences similar to the Puritans’ regeneration.  Charles Finney, president of Presbyterian Oberlin College, described his conversion as “waves of waves of liquid love.”  Barton Stone’s camp meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky attracted tens of thousands of people, a significant number given the frontier’s sparse population.  The Methodists didn’t have any churches at first; their Circuit Riders rode around on horses and slept on the ground.

In the early 19th century, dozens more new denominations spun out of the Second Great Awakening, including charismatic Pentecostals, Shakers, Disciples of Christ (part of the Restoration Movement), Seventh-day Adventists, Cumberland Presbyterians, Millerites, Jehovah’s Witnesses (later in 1870s) and, most famously, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) – by far the most successful denomination invented in America and the fastest growing in the world today.  The Puritans’ old Congregational Church lives on today, too, mainly in the form of the post-1957 United Church of Christ.  The Second Great Awakening also reinvigorated the mainstream Protestant faiths (Baptist, Methodist, New Side Presbyterian) popularized in the First Great Awakening of the 18th century that we now think of as less fundamentalist, less evangelical Mainline Protestant.  Today, Christians who identify as evangelical are the largest single religious group in the United States and include celebrities such as Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber.

Religious Freedom
Denominational growth in the early U.S. reflects well on the religious freedom James Madison ensconced in the Constitution’s First Amendment, that forbids Congress from making any “law respecting a religious establishment or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  We’ve discussed some already how religious freedom originated in the pluralistic colonies, and we’ll unpack the Constitution in Chapter 10, but here we’ll briefly examine how religious freedom sustained the Second Great Awakening and denominational growth.  It’s worth considering since modern Americans often mistakenly associate church-state separation with being anti-religious.

Madison consulted with Jefferson on the First Amendment and Jefferson authored its forerunner at the state level: the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom.  That explains the unlikely allegiance between Baptists and the non-Christian Jefferson when he became president.  Politics “makes for strange bedfellows” as the saying goes and, in the case of the Mammoth Cheese, the Baptist congregation from Cheshire, Massachusetts so appreciated President Jefferson that they sent him a block of cheese weighing 1,230 lbs.  Nine hundred bovines contributed to the gigantic chunk of coagulated milk, with some drawn from the cows of every Republican in town but no Federalist farmers (more on parties in Chapter 11).

Why would Christians bestow so much cheese on an infidel (Deist)?  Because, in spite of his own unorthodox faith, Jefferson’s support for the First Amendment helped provide New England Baptists legal protection in a region where they were outlawed and persecuted by Congregationalists.  ACC draws students from every imaginable demographic, but every reader viewing this textbook, without exception, espouses religious beliefs that would’ve been outlawed somewhere by somebody at some point in time.  That’s why Jefferson and Madison thought that, far from hindering religion, separation of church and state would benefit religion in the long run.  History sheds light because today many people assume that supporters of church-state separation oppose religion when often they just oppose government involving itself in religion.  Those are two very different things.  A citizen can oppose having his son pray in the football locker room of a public high school without opposing religion itself; and might even oppose the practice out of respect for religion.  Jefferson and Madison’s viewpoint “flips the script,” suggesting that it’s advantageous for religion — all religions in the long run — to disassociate from politics (not issues, necessarily, but from legal political grounding or tax-supported activities).

Today’s church-state debates are a key part of our culture wars, especially those regarding the proper place of Christianity in public schools.  “Separationists” argue that it has no place whatsoever and that any inclusion violates the First Amendment rights of non-Christians or Christians who don’t want the government in that part of their lives.  It’s simple: keep religion out of the public sphere and keep it a private affair.  As Jefferson put it, his neighbor’s religion neither “picked his pocket nor broke his leg.”  No one wants to override the First Amendment altogether, but some Christians want to partially break down the church-state barrier and argue that the Constitution doesn’t actually say anything about separating church and state; and the “free exercise thereof” part of 1A could include public schools privileging the local Christian majority.  They’re technically right about the former, if not the latter.  Contrary to a popular misconception, the phrase separation of church and state is not in the Constitution.  But it does come from the First Amendment’s virtual co-author, Jefferson.  Like the Cheshire cow farmers, another group of New England Baptists sent Jefferson a thank you letter for his role in establishing religious freedom.  In his response, the Letter to the Danbury [Ct.] Baptists, the new president explained how the framers intended to separate church and state.  What about the First Amendment’s primary author, James Madison?  In an 1819 letter, Madison wrote that even Virginia’s clergy had benefited from “total separation of church and state.”

While interpreting original intent of Constitutional framers is a suspect enterprise most of the time, future Supreme Court justices were confident in applying the separationist idea because Jefferson and Madison penned it themselves in letters.  Thus, you should think for yourself about the Texas State Board of Education’s decree in 2010 that the First Amendment “didn’t intend for separation of church and state.”  Here’s who thinks it did: its author (Madison), chief consultant (Jefferson), most trained judges, historians, and political scientists.

Finally, what’s most ironic about America’s church-state separation is that it inadvertently enabled religion to infuse politics more than in most countries.  Permit me to explain.  All denominations and ideas were free to thrive or die out in America’s open religious marketplace.  The national government, at least — and states after the Fourteenth Amendment — neither collected taxes for, favored, nor outlawed any denomination.  Diverse theologies flourished that could be widely interpreted, especially after the invention of steam-powered printing presses allowed for more sermons, pamphlets, and Bibles.  In that uncensored marketplace, religion was (and is) used to argue both sides of political debates.  For instance, Christianity was the primary ideological force behind both slavery and abolition.  Liberals and conservatives employed Christianity to argue for and against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s.  God rewards the rich in Prosperity Gospel while Jesus favors the poor through the Social Gospel.  Political scientist James Morone pointed out that today’s evangelicals warn their flocks that to cast a “blue” (Democratic) vote would be a sin against the Almighty, while black churches bus their mostly Democratic congregations to voting booths.  Yet, in the few Western countries even more religious than the U.S., such as Croatia and Ireland, virtually no one makes any connection whatsoever between religion and politics.  Perhaps that’s because, in the long run, moral principles don’t sit well alongside the realities of political power, amorality, compromise, and expediency.

Conclusion
While Christians and Enlightenment philosophers each had faith, the nature of their respective faiths differed.  Christians emphasized faith in Jesus while philosophes put their faith in science, nature’s God, and secular progress (natural theologians bridged the gap between them).  Evangelicals and Quakers mustered a more significant challenge to slavery than their Enlightenment counterparts despite attempts to abolish slavery during the French Revolution.  Yet, most Christians didn’t challenge slavery either, at least in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Nevertheless, Great Awakening Christians and philosophes both demanded religious liberty and they shared a disdain for political or religious leaders who claimed superiority over others by virtue of divine right.  As such, neither accepted the basic premise of why the British king, supported by the Church of England, had an inherent right to rule over the American colonies.

Historian Nathan Hatch referred to this period in religious history as the democratization of American Christianity, implying that the increasingly democratic politics of the time paved the way for the growth of denominations.  Still, it’s difficult to see which came first, the chicken or the egg, as far as democratic religion or democratic politics (having already discussed coffee, wine, and cheese in this chapter, I thought we’d toss in some chickens and eggs).  Despite their different takes on reason and faith, Great Awakening Protestantism and Enlightenment politics reinforced each other as twin streams that fed into the American Revolution.  Americans of both stripes understood what Jefferson and Franklin meant when they suggested that the motto for the new country’s Great Seal read: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”  It never caught on as the official motto but, in 1801, the Cheshire Baptists inscribed it in their Mammoth Cheese.

Optional Reading & Viewing:
Jefferson’s Religious Beliefs (Monticello)
Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Yale Univ.)
Exploring the Republic of Letters (National Endowment for the Humanities)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Enlightenment
Susan Jacoby, “Awakenings” (American Scholar, 12.7.15)
Susan Jacoby, “The New Birth of Reason” (American Scholar, 12.7.12)
Jamelle Bouie, “The Enlightenment’s Dark Side” (Slate, 6.5.18)
Art & Identity in the British North American Colonies (Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Lisa Gensel, “The Medical World of Benjamin Franklin” (Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine)
Jersey Devil: The Real Story (Center for Skeptical Inquiry) — An Interesting Side of Benjamin Franklin
Gary Nash, “The Tireless Abolitionist Nobody Ever Heard Of,” HNN (10.24.17)
Astra Lay, “Paradise For All: The Relentless Radicalism of Benjamin Lay” (Lapham’s Quarterly, Spring 23)
Marcus Rediker, “The ‘Quaker Comet’ Was the Greatest Abolitionist You’ve Never Heard Of,” Smithsonian, 9.17
Danielle Allen, “Prince Hall: A Forgotten Black Founding Father,” Atlantic (3.21)
Kwame Anthony Appia, From “Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason,” New York Review of Books (5.9.19)
Thomas Levenson, “Investors Have Been Making the Same Mistake For 300 Years,” Atlantic: Ideas (8.23.2020)