Religion and the Scottish Enlightenment, c. 1690 - c. 1790: Virtue, Providence, and History

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The Enlightenment has often been associated with the secularization of Western European thought and a long-term decline in religious belief. Even if complete unbelief was extremely rare in the eighteenth century, the general tendency, it has been argued, was towards reducing the influence religion, and especially its Christian varieties, had on secular affairs. This interpretation, however, has begun to be questioned more recently. Historians, increasingly, have been directing their attention to the persistence of religion in eighteenth-century intellectual culture and to the degree to which different religious, even Christian beliefs were often an important and integral part of enlightened culture. These connections, however, between religion and the European Enlightenments have not been fully explored, yet, and the central aim of my project is to enhance our understanding of the significance of religious arguments for Enlightenment thought.The proposed book will focus on the case of eighteenth-century Scotland, which was widely praised as one of the most remarkable examples of Enlightenment culture. The book will be based mainly on texts written in Scotland or by Scots. But it will consider this material as part of European (including British and Irish), rather than specifically Scottish, debates, because eighteenth-century Scots regularly engaged with and drew on contemporary intellectual currents in the European Republic of Letters. The emphasis will be on writings produced within a university milieu or by university-educated philosophers, historians, theologians, and literary figures. I will refer to the ideas of the main thinkers in the Scottish Enlightenment, such as David Hume and Adam Smith, but I shall also examine the writings of a wide range of other eighteenth-century authors. Some of these are now largely forgotten outside specialist circles and have received little attention, compared to personalities like Hume or Smith. Historically, however, they are often very significant, because they were widely read and influential in their own period. The proposed book will therefore largely, though not exclusively, draw on the 'mainstream' of the Enlightenment, those figures, who were more typical of enlightened culture in eighteenth-century Scotland than Hume or Smith. One important group I shall devote considerable attention to were the so-called 'Moderate' clergymen, such as William Robertson, Hugh Blair, or Adam Ferguson, who achieved considerable fame through their philosophical, historical, and literary publications, but who were also active members of the established Presbyterian church.The particular question I will address is how arguments about religion in the eighteenth century are important for explaining key intellectual concerns of the Scottish Enlightenment. Debates over the nature, the status, and the usefulness of religious belief are prominent in many texts of this period. To what extent did these debates affect concerns we would describe as secular? How far, for example, was religious belief considered essential to virtue and sociability? Is it possible to see certain philosophical arguments as secularized versions of earlier theological doctrines? Were Enlightenment Scots' views of the historical evolution of societies informed by a belief in divine providential purposes? These and similar questions have been examined before, in a few particular cases, but a broader, more comprehensive intellectual history of the interaction between religion and the Scottish Enlightenment, still remains to be written. The book will cover a period beginning with the effects of the dramatic political and religious changes of the 1690s and ending with the early 1790s, when Britons, including Scots, were deeply alarmed by the perceived irreligion of the French Revolution and the threat it appeared to pose to publicmorality and political stability.