Review-Essay: Religion and Enlightenment

Resistance to modernization narratives that associate the Enlightenment with religion’s demise continues unabated. One approach, exemplified in recent books by David Sorkin, Jeffrey Burson, and Ulrich Lehner, has been to defend religion’s place in the Enlightenment, and by extension religion’s modernity, by associating enlightened religion with, and defending the modernizing tendencies of, the “moderate Enlightenment” influentially described and critiqued by Jonathan Israel. For all the difficulties faced by this approach, these books — like that of Thomas Ahnert, also reviewed here — reveal the long-underestimated benefits that historians of eighteenth-century Europe can reap from knowledge of theology and church history.