Enlightenment and Religion

Enlightenment has been fundamentally a humanistic movement, which proposed a new approach to basic matters of religion, faith and church. This paper aims to investigate some of the Enlightenment teachings about religion. I will use “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” by Emmanuel Kant and “A Letter concerning Toleration” by John Locke to demonstrate how philosophers of the Enlightenment treated religion.

In explaining what Enlightenment is Kant touched some questions of religion and church. For him religion was a personal choice of every individual.

In contrast, church under Kant is a part of a machinery, aimed to ruin critical thinking. As he observed: “The pastor says, "Do not argue, believe!" (Only one ruler in the World says, "Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!") In this we have examples of pervasive restrictions on freedom”. Moreover, Kant believed, that the Church uses to hide truth to keep the flock obeying.

In spite of encouraging people to apply to original sources of religious teachings the clergy merely retells the ideas as they consider fit.

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Thusly, personal consciousness becomes replaced by collective one, embodied in the person of a priest. To make it’s control even more strict the church watches it’s believers and bides them with collective oaths. The way out of such situation is, as Kant believed, a self-understanding of every individual and free thinking about religion without advise of a church. A person, who is free in religious questions, can be called enlightened.

Locke expressed similar views in his “Letter concerning Toleration”. His basic idea is that in making a religious choice a person should be free from official’s oppression. Civil authorities are to provide equal conditions to all believers and prevent conflicts on religious grounds, but not more than that. Each person has a right to care of personal salvation inside such established limits. Locke recognized, that religion makes people blindly accept a dogma and behave aggressively towards those, who do not recognize such a dogma.

As regards the church, Locke explained, that it is a voluntary association of believers. A person is born outside of any church, although usually brought to church by parents. An adult and free person, however, should have a free option to chose whether to belong to any church or not. Moreover, religious questions should not be used in a discriminatory manner not only by the church, but also by private individuals, in other words, a religious beliefs should be respected by all members of the society even in case they contradict to their personal beliefs.

Locke called such a state “Mutual toleration”. Authorities should not act favorably in respect of any church, although rulers are also usually adepts of a certain religious, but their laws are to be just for every religion. To ground such a thesis Locke explained, that civil freedoms do not depend upon personal views on eternal life and salvation, therefore, every person, independently of religion, has equal importance for the society.

Sources

1. Emmanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? Available at: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/kant.html, (last viewed: May 2, 2003)
2. John Locke, A Letter concerning Toleration Available at: http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_religions10.html (last viewed: May 2, 2003)