Christian Humanism - Enlightenment

Enlightenment

The Enlightenment of the mid-eighteenth century in Europe consolidated the separation of religious and secular institutions that has led to a false rift between Christianity and humanism. But while the Enlightenment crystallized humanism as a distinctly secular, liberal philosophy, it did have sectarian roots that reached back to early 18th century England. There rationalists known as ‘Deists’ rejected traditional theology and clericalism in favour of ‘natural religion’. Non conformists, they preferred to sidestep the churches and seek God personally by way of reason and innate moral intuition. These Deists triggered a scholarly quest for the historical Jesus which often cast him as a quasi-divine beacon of virtue dispensing homilies that accorded nicely with precepts of bourgeois liberalism. But despite their trite idealism, they gave new currency to Christ’s humanist ethics and spawned wave of social gospel liberalism. They effectively reasserted the Judeo-Christian ethic which would play an important role in animating the political and social reform movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of this liberal Christianity was the abolition of slavery.