“With all due respect to Prof. Lilla, I wonder if he read the same Himmelfarb book that I read. Himmelfarb’s argument that some British members of the Enlightenment were more sympathetic to religion than French members of the Enlightenment is questionable. How do David Hume, the author of the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and Edward Gibbon, the author of the vehemently anti-Christian Decline and Fall, become sympathetic to religion? Himmelfarb’s treatment of attitudes towards religion among English members of the Enlightenment is contradictory. She actually spends part of her book attacking sincerely religious English Radical members of the Enlightenment like Richard Price and Joseph Priestly, both of whom were Protestant clergymen. As for the French, while the popular image, shared by Himmelfarb and many intellectuals, of the French Revolution is the de-christianization campaign, people tend to forget that the initial and ultimately most damaging response of the Constituent Assembly was an effort to markedly reform the French Catholic Church on liberal, rationalistic, and democratic (elected priests and bishops) lines. The initial revolutionaries couldn’t imagine the state without the support of the Church and a liberal and republican society required a liberal and republican church. Their mistake was to try to impose this from above, in keeping with the long history of French monarchial control of the Church.
Lilla is also likely incorrect about the influence of German theologians on the second Great Awakening in the USA. This movement, with its Arminianism and emphasis on human perfectability, was well underway prior to the work of Schleiermacher. The latter’s work may have found a sympathetic reading in the USA but to regard it as a driving force is a mistake.
Finally, its an error to see us in the middle of another Great Awakening. While the USA is the most religious of all industrialized nations, religious participation by some important measures is actually falling in the USA and the number of atheists and agnostics has grown significantly in the past 2 generations. Open religious indifference has gone from a tiny to a significant minority. The anti-intellectual elements cited by Lilla have always been present and are nothing new. What is different is the commitment of the so-called religous right, with its spine of evangelical Protestants, to political action. This commitment, like the radical Islamic movements, is not the action of a confident and secure group. It reflects rather a response to an insecure position. The USA is no longer a Protestant country in its historic sense. Catholicism is now the largest Christian denomination in the USA. While Jews were once the only significant religious minority in this country, we now have significant numbers of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and other religious traditions. The number of people indifferent to religion in the USA is only going to grow and our liberal immigration policies guarantee increased religious diversity. The days of Protestant cultural dominance are over and what we are seeing is in large measure a reaction to this irrevocable change in American life.”
The Dish 