Enlightenment Era in America

[Music] this week a discussion on the 18th century Enlightenment movement including natural rights reason and self-improvement principles Messiah college professor John FIA explains checks and balances right why do you need checks and balances because if one if one branch of government their passions run wild they need to be controlled and checked by another branch of government right so here we're suggesting that reason needs needs to be check a reason needs to check the passions Professor F also explores the relationship between religion and the Enlightenment and how it differed in America and Europe more after this

all right welcome everyone uh like we were talking about last class we are now shifting a little bit into a conversation and discussion about some of these I would say these essential themes of 18th century America we've spent the last what couple months talking about you know these regions you know and how the colonies developed uh how those colonies became integrated into the mertile Empire right of the British Empire the cultural Empire uh today uh we want to start with our first major theme and that is we want to talk about a little bit about

intellectual history today and this movement in 18th century America really it begins in late 17th century America but this movement known as the enlight now when you think about the Enlightenment what kind of things come to mind yeah Lexis uh Benjamin Franklin okay why Benjamin Franklin with like the um kind of like the freedom Liberty like when we talk about like liberalism in that sense and John Lock as well with like the freedoms that come with all right so certainly and we'll talk about this actually in the next couple class periods right certainly the enlightenment

is about politics in some ways right natural rights right and again we'll get back to this good what else comes to mind the enlightenment this is by the way isn't this isn't this the class when you were in high school taking history you know like oh we're doing the enlightenment today I find you this when you your kind of eyes glaze over and you know there's nothing exciting here yeah Caleb reason okay good reason how many of you have heard of the Enlightenment used as or described as the Age of Reason right we'll come back

to reason again anyone else what figures do you think about when you think about the enlightenment in the 18th century we heard about Franklin we heard about lock uh any other names hit you Jefferson H Jefferson okay good Thomas Jefferson in America often known as a man of the Enlightenment Russo and Vol good so we have these Frenchmen right Russo voler uh there was this guy dero who who wrote the Encyclopedia media good anyone else those are the big ones all of those names we could add you know uh David Hume to the list uh

you know bunch of others we could add if we wanted to make a long list of the most important figures of the Enlightenment most of those figures that we learned about in school when we learned about the enlightenment are part of what historians call the high Enlightenment and when I I mean by the high Enlightenment is that these are kind of intellectuals that usually surround themselves with around power they're P they have patronage uh their their patrons are the Kings and the Queens the monarchs they tend to live uh very uh different lives from normal

people They are intellectuals they are thinkers and that's what they do that is their calling that is their vocation right to write to think and so forth their hands aren't dirty right in other words right these are the great kind of thinkers of the age so to speak right the high Enlightenment right and and usually it's associated with France uh the philosophes as they're called the philosophi in France there's an English Enlightenment a Scottish Enlightenment right but it's it's largely understood in its European context what I want to suggest today and over the course of

the next two classes is that the enlightenment in America in the American colonies in the 18th century looks very different from the high Enlightenment of the 18th century in Europe where you just have a bunch of people sitting around in coffee shops talking about ideas and sort of reading the oh did you read the latest piece by vote rouso today why yes you know pass me the decaf right um very different in uh America so let's think about the enlightenment in America this way and some of you have had me for the Us survey class

have have have been there when I've done this but not everybody has had me for that class raise your hand how many of you want to make a better life for yourself how many of you want to improve your life yeah I mean every hand in the room goes up right uh you're all the reason you're in college you know you're that's why you're sitting here right I'm guessing most of you want to get a college degree because you want to improve your life you want self-improvement you want to better your life you may even

want to you know some of you who if you're a first generation college student you know you may want to sort of pursue a life that your parents or your grandparents didn't have right uh college degree kind of thing um in some ways that if you raised your hand and all of you did I would I would SU suggest that you then have been more influenced by the fundamental ideas of the American Enlightenment than you realize now usually when I bring this up to students they will say or maybe some of you are assuming who

has you know everyone wants to improve themselves right you know I mean from the beginning of time right I mean if you're a human being you want to improve your life you want to strive you want to make something you want to rise right you want to be ambitious and become something get a you know good job or make more money that your than your parents did or something like that right um but what if I were to suggest to you that the idea of wanting to improve yourself is actually a relatively new thing in

human history right and this idea of wanting to improve your life or improve Society suggests that number one it's possible in other words think about New England Puritans for a minute you are not so stained and depraved from your sin nature that you can't rise above it and make something of yourself you are not stuck in some type of a conservative cast system in which your bloodline determines whether or not you will be successful or not if you reject that idea you have drunk deeply from the well if you will uh of the Enlightenment so

imagine you know imagine like a medieval peasant okay a medieval peasant pretty how does a medieval peasant just take a guess how does a medieval peasant spend his or her day some of you study medieval history Jackson working in the fields working in the fields right uh Dylan you want to add to that I was goingon to say the same thing yeah PL he's usually on a plow right or behind a horse right plowing sewing reaping agricultural stuff right no medieval peasant say 18 to 22y Old medieval peasant is out there in the field saying

I may be on the field now right but one day my kids they're going to go to college you know they're going to become something no they're not even thinking that they're probably thinking I got to get the field done and if they're thinking about anything other than their work they're probably thinking like where am I going to go when I die right how do I how do I get right with God it's a completely different world view but the idea that now Improvement is possible that that one can actually change the world and this

gets to your point Caleb about exerc by exercising reason is a new thing it's not something that has been a defining marker of human history for tens of thousands and thousands of years it emerges right in this moment and again it's a transatlantic idea so it merges in you know the high Enlightenment in France and England and so forth but in the colonies this idea of improve this idea of the Enlightenment is always connected with this notion of improvement I want to talk about that here in a second so so what I want to do

today is I want to introduce some of the central tenants of the Enlightenment in America and then over the course of the next couple days we'll we'll we'll dig even deeper uh into that so today I want to really wrestle with this kind of more at a 30,000 foot level right what is the Enlightenment and how does the Enlighten what does the enlightenment look like in America in the colonies the British American colonies okay everyone clear where we're headed today so I want to leave you with four uh essential ideas today about the Enlightenment and

the first one we've kind of already covered but I want to I want to Riff on it a little bit more um first the enlightenment is about self-improvement uh progress if you believe in progress if you believe that you individually can improve yourself or that Society can progress you're in the enlightenment camp now again think about this in the context of the 18th century the idea that you can overcome the limits of the world what are some limits that are placed on people people's lives in the 18th century or even in the 17th century what

limits people wealth okay how does wealth limit you um I would think wealth would be something that would allow you to do all kinds of things most people can't do lack of wealth lack okay good lack of wealth right so so poverty or or not having money right could be a limit uh placed on you and and certainly there were many in what we call in colonial America the lower sort right who were limited by lack of money and lack of opportunity as a result of not having money good what else what other limits are

placed on your life Jackson um your the religion that you practice how does religion serve as a limit uh if you're living say in puritan New England and you are say a Catholic you have no real chance to do anything good luck yeah or you know I mean you know Messiah University is a Christian University uh many of you if not all of you are Christians right does your does your Christian faith place any limits on your life I mean if you're going to say I'm a Christian is that going to place any kind of

limits on you of course it will right now you might want to go like commit adultery right and you can do it you're free to do it but hopefully as a Christian you might say uh I don't think that's a good idea because scripture or church tradition or whatever says that that's wrong what do you mean what do you mean I can't commit adultery I'm free right yeah and you technically aren't going to go to jail for it but Christianity has placed a limit on you if you're serious about your faith right so so religion

becomes uh a kind of limit right the the whole very notion of the Puritan idea of total depravity the calvinist idea is a limit cuz it's suggest you are so depraved that you can't rise above that the only what for Calvinists what's the only way you can improve your life and rise above the limits well yes but while you're living you're right Nick dying is yeah but but while you're living go ahead Andrew oh like if God rescues you from yourself yeah if you're saved if you're if you're if you're a Christian God can lift

you above the sin but only God can do that you don't have the human potential to do that in puritan Calvinism right because your will is so broken and sinful that there's nothing you can do apart from God helping you that's what the Puritans believed the enlightenment will challenge that notion and say that your Sinful Nature has not broken you to such an extent that you can't rise above it through re exercise of Reason through hard work through individual effort right this is a new thing in the history of the world that we haven't seen

before progress so Enlightenment must always be understood when we talk about it in terms of self-improvement must always be understood in the context of what what it is challenging and it's challenging an older Christian Protestant and Catholic worldview of what is possible for human beings now let me illustrate this one more way in a Christian worldview say the Middle Ages right or the Puritans where is history moving where's history ultimately going to end what direction is it going where's the ultimate sort of you know we use this word teoss right what is the end of

history in a Christian worldview ASA the Rapture all right the Rapture let's be that's specific let's be more general what is it what is it Jesus yeah the return of Jesus right or the return of God will come and we will'll end it all right that's kind of the Christian what we call thology that's where history is moving that's what Christians of all Eastern Orthodox Catholic Protestant right they all believe that history is ultimately moving towards God wrapping it up we call this theological theologically we call this eschatology right the the the end times when

God will bring an end to his creation right the enlightenment has a completely different understanding of human history and the way history is moving right because if progress is the ultimate goal of human history history is ultimately moving towards the overcoming of all limits right if we just apply reason if we just apply our minds educate ourselves learn new things knowledge gain new knowledge right in the enlightenment knowledge is not fixed you see what I mean by fix fix knowledge if you live in the Middle Ages where do you find knowledge the Bible the Bible

or the church right so there's only a certain amount of knowledge and it's contained in a book or in official Church teachings but the enlightenment suggest that knowledge is Progressive it you can you can always apply reason and come up with new knowledge through experimentation through more thinking right so ultimately history in an Enlightenment perspective is moving towards the overcoming of all limits through the application of reason this is what we mean by Improvement like if you apply yourself and apply your education your rational ability you can rise above whatever weakness you have because you're

poor or because you were born a certain way or so forth right so in the enlightenment idea history is just you know there is kind of no end ultimately you know in its purest form I should say we're going to reach some kind of Utopia where all limits will be overcome all disease all uh you know unethical things um hey we we'll even cheat death right as long as we apply reason we'll figure out some way to cheat death that is the Tey of the Enlightenment that is the way history is moving so when you

hear people say you're on the right or the wrong side of History usually what they're saying is if you don't believe in progress you're on the wrong side of History right and we could you know we can get into that today but but I don't want to I don't want to delve we could get into that another time I don't want to delve into that so the enlightenment is about self-improvement one more point I want to make about this before I go to the next Slide the enlightenment is often described as a very individualistic effort

if you apply reason you will improve right you will if you get educated right if you get a degree or study something for a particular time you'll improve your life you'll gain knowledge and so forth and that's true but one of the things that's really interesting about the enlightenment uh we see some of this in Europe too but in America is The Enlightenment America is often cultivated in communities so have later on we'll talk about next class we'll talk about Benjamin Franklin's janto remember I mentioned that some of you were at my convocation address that

I gave uh months ago I talked about the jento right this this group of ordinary Tradesmen what was Ben Franklin's Trade Printing he was a printer right I mean you think of Ben Franklin as sitting in Continental you know the Continental Congress but when Ben Franklin came home from work every day he had ankle over his hands right you know he had to clean up he was a work he was a Tradesman he was a worker he would gather with a bunch of other Artisans like blacksmiths and carpenters and so forth they met once a

week in this club called the junto and they described the club as a as a club for Mutual Improvement there's no better Enlightenment definition than that right a club for Mutual Improvement they'd get together they'd read a text together and talk about it someone would like present a paper that they wrote and they would debate it and so forth but you see this over and over again that the enlightenment is both an individual effort but the enlightenment Improvement self-improvement always comes within some kind of community as well so there's my first premise of the Enlightenment

the enlightenment is about self-improvement second this one's a little more complex uh enlightened people right people who are enlightened were able Tolo employ reason as a necessary check to the individual passions when you think about check what do you what do you think about that word check like check and balance American government yeah good checks and balances right why do you need checks and balances because if one if one branch of government their passions run wild they need to be controlled and checked by another branch of government right so here we're suggesting that reason needs

to be check or Reason needs to check the passions now if you were in college in the 18th century if you were a student at one of the 18th century colleges and there weren't many you know Yale or Harvard Yale uh King's College which later becomes Columbia the College of Philadelphia which later becomes the University of Pennsylvania William and Mary was around then I'm probably missing I'm probably missing one or two here I can't remember um in your senior year you would take a class with the college President right and that usually a minister and

the class would be titled um moral philosophy which essentially would be ethics right moral philosophy and there'd be a unit in that class on the discipline of Faculty psychology faculty psychology and basically in that unit you would study the human faculties now one of the things you would learn in that class if you were taking it you know your senior at a college you're getting educated right which we' be a very small minority of the population right is you would learn that there are two dominant passion two dominant faculties anyone know what they are take

a guess from looking at the screen what are the two dominant faculties that all humans possess according to this 18th century faculty psychology Dylan reason and passion reason and passion uh you are born with one of these faculties and you have to cultivate the other one which one are you born with passion right you know think about a baby you know a baby doesn't like you know the baby has to go to the bathroom and needs its diaper change or needs food right the baby is not making a kind of rational Choice like oh Mom's

busy now I'll come back to her later you know or something like there's no reason involved right the baby starts to cry because its rational faculty has not been cultivated yet right so what you would learn in this class is that the point of being an educated person is to make sure that you train your rational faculty so that it's strong enough to put down usually they're described as the unruly passions so in some ways the ra your reason your rational faculty is like a muscle think about lifting weights right you want to build that

muscle and make it stronger and stronger so when passions arise that are going to get you into trouble unruly Passions you can rationally think this through and and temper them control them right you ever you ever like uh I often use this illustration you ever uh ever talk to someone who's like they're dating someone or something that they know it's just a bad relationship you know and then they're like but I love them you know I'm in love you know what do you mean this is just a terrible relationship for you if you were thinking

clearly right you would know this is a bad abusive whatever relationship but but we're so you know oh but we've been together so long one is the passions right your friend is exercising reason and he's telling you to exercise reason right that this is bad if you're an educated person you're always your reason your reason your rational capacity your rational faculty is going to be strong enough to suppress those urges that's why we need educated people the founding fathers and the 18th century colonial Enlightenment people that that's why they believed we need education people we

need somebody to tell the people who are storming the capital on January 6 that that's a bad idea control your passions if the if they were here today that's what they would say right control yourself so the whole idea was you want to be an enlightened person and thus you have to educate yourself to do that you have to train that muscle there's always this war going on in the human psyche the enlightenment teachers would say this this professor would say to you in the 18th century and one and remember these are all religious colleges

too at this point at least so the passions where are they going to lead you religiously if you're Christian say where are the passions going to take you if they get to out of control toward sin toward sin right so there's even something Christian about training your rational faculty because you can realize like this is not a good idea what I'm doing right now but of course if you you know if you never were educated if you don't if your rational faculty is not built up the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers would say this professor would

say in your class you're just going to do stupid things you're going to go off and and and uh you know be followed by your passions and they're going to lead you into bad places so there's a kind of moral component to this that's why you're studying this by the way in moral philosophy in an ethics class if you're living in the 18th century and you're part of one of these colleges right questions on that everybody clear on the second point so self-improvement and they're all they all build off each other right self-improvement also has

everything to do with reason educating oneself controlling the passions because that's what true Improvement is third they're getting even more more wordy now to be enlightened one needs to direct their passions right we've defined what those are away from parochial concerns and toward a universal love of the human race what do we mean by what do what do what do I mean when I say parochial concerns here what do you think about when you think about parochial concerns what does the word parochial mean test your uh kind of SAT vocabulary knowledge yeah ASA kind of

like more individualized like your individual like things that pertain to you okay yeah so so parochial people who are parochial tend to be you know naturally kind of selfish or narcissistic right this is my world and I don't want to see anything beyond it right parochial good anyone else want to take a stab at that parochial just simply like narrow their understanding yeah kind of narrow like limited you know you're not seeing the bigger picture you're just kind of focused on your own kind of kind of identity or your own issues right you don't see

yourself as part of something bigger than yourself right is the idea so so when we think about you know one of the things I failed to say earlier when we think about the enlightenment we're we're really thinking about the philosophy of Mo of Modern Life right modernity as we often describe it right Modern Life and it's this idea that you always Enlightenment people always appeal when they're making an appeal whether it be a political appeal a religious appeal whatever it might be cultural something cultural they're always appealing to Universal principles that all human beings share

this gets to your point earlier Alexis about about lock and rights right a person if if a person is consistent and you know we we haven't even touched the idea about how consistent people are about these Enlightenment ideals right because they're really consistent we might you know we might have a very different world in the 18th century particularly when it comes to things like slavery and and Injustice and you know so forth right so they took the we're talking in we're talking up here right we're we're going to next couple classes we're going to break

this down to see if how this actually looks on the ground right if they're consist if these Enlightenment thinkers are consistent if modern the modern project is consistent but Lo said right we are all endowed with natural rights out by our creator with natural there's Jefferson right with natural rights so we all have them by the virtue of the fact that we're human beings we all have rights so when you make an appeal you appeal to things that everybody holds in common not the things that make people different right so you know someone who is

embracing a kind of Enlightenment brand of politics Sayan today would appeal not to a particular identity group right a particular racial group or a particular um you know uh religious group or you know something else a particular class right they would appeal to say we need to come together as a human race and thus we're going to have differences but we need to build a society around what makes us the same right right so that's what I mean by uh we need to move away the enlightenment says right we need to move away from these

parochial local concerns sometimes they're described as local attachments right the things that make us unique from other people they're fine but in order to advance society and improve Society we all have to come on board with the things that make us the same so these are un Universal appeals to rights right would be an Enlightenment approach right we all have rights and to the degree that you're not respecting everybody's rights in your society that is a degree to which your Enlightenment principles are failing like if you believe in the enlightenment but you don't give rights

to a certain group of people in your Society don't talk to me about the enlightenment because you're not consistently applying it is what the 18th century thinkers would say right so so I think the enlightenment would reject again we're not here to judge it or we're just trying to understand it right the enlightenment would reject kind of a kind of identity kind of politics right or an ident a way you know in which people understand themselves based on a particular race or gender or class or religion and they would want to think about everything that

everybody has in common Universal love of the human race right not Universal love of one particular part of the human race but you know this is why this is why Tom Payne in the American Revolution if you remember reading common sense in another class right this is why he talks about himself as a citizen of the world I'm not a citizen of a Nation a town a community some local parochial place I'm a citizen of the world right because I align myself with the with the human cause now again next couple days we'll we'll we'll

think about some of the crit critiques of this right we'll think about the way in which 18th century people uh maybe disagreed with the Enlightenment and so forth but this is this is the idea questions on that so again by this point we got one more to go here a couple more to go one one more I think but but at this point you know we're we're starting to see uh the enlightenment hopefully is a little more relevant to your life it gives you something to think about a little bit more than just you know

bunch of kind of elite white guys sitting around in a coffee shop in Paris you know I mean who are who are being controlled by you know being funded by the King right it it doesn't seem as distant because all of these are issues reason over passion self-improvement whether or not our identity should be rooted in a particular parochial kind of understanding of who we are or some kind of universal these are all these are all ideas that Modern Life in Modern Life we're debating today right these are the this is this is the you

know suddenly Enlightenment the modernity becomes much more relevant uh to us I'm not saying you have to agree or disagree with it but realize how much these ideas have perhaps influenced influenced you and how the ideas again are relatively new last point I want to talk about here and that is The Enlightenment in America always existed in conversation and in compromise with the deeply held Christian faith of the American people now we've talked about three different Colonial societies so far British Colonial regions right um it's probably proba you know it's probably not the best exercise

to do but it might be helpful right now try to rank them in terms of uh you know the role that religion played in the development of these societies what would be the least religious of the three Colonial societies we've looked at so far Jackson Virginia Virginia what like make an argument Jackson um I mean they were Anglican but there was n really any established like churches nobody really practiced the faith important I mean that's somewhat stereotypical but I see where you're going right I mean There Was An established church the Anglican Church um people

did go they pra you know so whatever you're defining practice at the same time though you're right right the the you want to add to that Nolan said they're more focused on Commerce and making money for yeah the the larger ethos you Jackson I think you're exactly right is not religion so your answer is is correct right I think the Virginia the Chesapeake is one of the kind of you know religion is there but it's not you know absolutely kind of essential to the kind of uh ethos and the culture of the colony good what

would you say a second ASA M okay why make a case I think uh like there the fact that there was more religious freedom made it so that like religion was less like a universally shared part of everyone's culture it was more like your own religion was more of like an individual thing rather than like a shared cultural experience that everyone had and also I think there was similarly to Virginia a bigger focus on Commerce and trade yeah I think I think you know this gets the the motivations for why William Penn founded it right

there is this economic kind of motivation right this kind of economic liberal motivation to make money and as well as to to you know celebrate religion but in all its diversity right not one dominant uh kind of church good and then that leaves us with what new New England in which you have a state Church which you have puritanism right you know it is a it is a deeply deeply calvinist religious Society um but I think in all three regions I think we find um you know deeply embedded in the mindset of the settlers is

some kind of religious Sensibility right even in Virginia you have people going to church right the Anglican Church is important uh to them right they give their money to the Anglican Church right because it's a state Church uh you know in the Mid-Atlantic you know religion becomes important because of the way it's it can be freely practiced right um and of course New England where it sort of saturates the the landscape uh the point is there is naturally going to be in in kind of the way we think about the Enlightenment and the high Enlightenment

right there's naturally going to be a tension between religion and and the Enlightenment and the reason right so if you were to take the enlightenment to its logical conclusion in terms of religious belief right forget about just forget about the colonies for a second but if you were to take the enlightenment to its logical conclusion where would you be religiously Dylan well you probably be landing on that people can like improve themselves and be like morally good without without Christ okay so where would you end up like how would I categorize that kind of religion

so Dylan said if you didn't hear him he said he said you could you could improve your life without any kind of Christian faith right or Christ or God or right so so if you took that idea to its logical conclusion where would you end up like humanism yeah humanism or what atheism right you know if everything's reason and everything can only explain be explained by reason you know I guess you could try to apply reason to kind of prove the existence of God but ultimately Christianity and all religions do have a certain dimension of

Faith to them right believe right which is tends to be a very irrational idea right I mean Miracles Miracles are an irrational idea you realize that like the idea that a supernatural being can come into your life come into your town or whatever and and do something that violates the laws of reason and science that's irrational that's not an Enlightenment thing right but I'm guessing you know there I'm not guessing there are millions and millions of people all around the world especially in the United States today but also there were thousands and tens of thousands

of people in colonial America who believed they could improve themselves they wanted to get educated they wanted to control their passions they wanted to be citizens of the world and they believed in Miracles right and they belied God answered prayer and they believe God interjected and they believed in God period right so one of the things that I want to do next class is I want to break this down even further I want to sort of think about the way the you know the degrees to which uh these religious sensibilities either accept or reject um

you know the the idea of the Enlightenment so so let's take an example here let's just say you're living in Massachusetts and in the 18th century there's an earthquake right and if you were living in a pre-enlightenment world we've talked about this I think at some point this semester if you were living in a pre-enlightenment world how would you interpret that earthquake what would be your response God's like displeased with you or your Society okay God has done something here that's to punish us God is displeased we're not fulfilling the Covenant we're not sustaining the

city on a hill people aren't becoming visible Saints right God is punishing Us by making the ground quake right and destroying buildings is that a very Enlightenment way of understanding an earthquake no now after the enlightenment how much you understand that earthquake say in let's say the earthquake happens in like 1700 in 1750 when the enlightenment has had a more profound effect on New England culture how much you understand the earthquake or how might an Enlightenment thinker scientist understand the earthquake what would they need to to do to make sense of why this earthquake happened

I mean none none of you are geologists that's why you're being so quiet but take a stab at it like what would you have to figure out Dylan go to the scene afterwards and try to examine the ground they I don't know if they had any idea of like seismic activity at that point but yeah you would I don't know put whatever the 18th century equivalent of the RoR scale was right you pull that out you know you you you you measure the ground you you do scientific experiments and you say you know you'd say

well this earthquake happened because of these geological reasons right very Enlightenment rational way of thinking about an earthquake now does that mean that the earthquake didn't happen because God again we're thinking as an 18th century Puritan here right does that mean the earthquake didn't happen because God is is punishing us could be both right in other words you have this idea that still God brings natural disasters to punish us and you're going to try to understand the earthquake in terms of science this is what I mean when I say you can't pull the enlightenment this

is what it life is like on the ground you can't pull the enlightenment you can't pull science historically now you could do it right but in the 18th century people did not they did not pull the enlightenment out of their religious World Views now the enlightenment could criticize those religious world viws but ultimately most people access the enlightenment alongside of their religious worldviews so I'm guessing back to let's let's bring this to 21st C I'm guessing all of you are Christians right or some of you I'm not going to tell you to raise your hand

or anything but if you're Christians right and you probably are because you came to Messiah um you know you probably believe that God answers your prayers or God is present or God is providential or some you know you believe somehow God is active in the world right but when I asked you if you want to improve yourself you all raised your hand right it means like you believe you have the ability to improve yourself now some of you might say well the only reason I do is because God helps me right but the very fact

that you want to study something suggests that and you want to make something of yourself suggests that you believe you can do it and maybe you can even do it maybe you separate that part of your life from even you know Christianity your Christianity right you get educated and you're a Christian on Sundays or whatever this is what I mean when I talk about the way in which the enlightenment in the 18th century is always working alongside of the worldview it doesn't destroy the Christian worldview of the people it doesn't undermine it but it works

alongside of it now again you might say like you know you could critique that you could say well this is not you know rational like how could you believe that how could you believe in science and believe in God right that's not our goal here our goal is try to understand the 18th century world question would you say that this is kind of like the beginnings of like the foundation for the idea of separation of church and state because like these are two important aspects of life and they can coexist but they shouldn't necessarily intermingle

yeah and that's a great question so so is this the beginning of the separation of church and state I mean you know you don't normally think about it that way but you I think if you're a person of the Enlightenment you believe that the state is ultimately a secular a secular entity right because the state government is built not upon the divine right of kings right in other words you know God government is not built on God right it's not built on like you know God created America as a Christian Nation or something like that

right government is based on what Alexis what did you say at the beginning of class what is government based on like like fre like your own individual rights liberalism natural rights right if you read the Declaration of Independence there's nothing in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution about you know your you God maybe your rights come from God but ultimately you build your Society not upon theology or the teachings of the church you don't have a state church right you have a a society built on enlightenment principles John Lock's natural rights again now again

the founders believe that those rights came from God but you built your Society on these Universal back to the universalism right the Universal principles while religion then is a kind of ir in some ways an irrational category not completely but in some ways an irrational category that the two shouldn't mix right or that the Enlightenment and all its power of natural rights government uh should not limit the right of people to worship and and get in their face and tell them how they should conduct their spiritual Liv so so the separation of church and state

is in many ways is a kind of enlightenment idea because the United States is one of the first Nations that has anything like that the colonies even you know the colonies are not separation of church and state they have state churches right yeah other questions yeah no wasn't the idea of deism very popular during the 18th century yeah so the question is wasn't deism popular and that's what I want to start class on we're wrapping up here but that's what I want to start class on on uh Monday right I want to think about what

are then all the options one could have when you integrate the enlight this fourth point right when you integrate the Enlightenment and religion right what what do those options look like well if you're a deist and you believe that God doesn't God created but doesn't allow any kind of Supernatural activity after that that's pretty heavy leaning towards which side Enlightenment or yeah the enlightenment right if you are one of these people who say like yeah like I believe we need to check the RoR scale on that earthquake but it's really God you know yeah I

understand scientifically why the earthquake happened but it really happened because God's punishing us you might be on the other side of that Enlightenment religion Nexus right if you want to call it that but nevertheless you're still the enlightenment is still happening in conversation with spiritual religious things there's not much religion left with deism right there's still a lot of religion left with the with the earthquake example so again the goal here today is to get us started we're going to spend two more class periods on the Enlightenment and we're going to really dig in now

what this looks like on the ground right but these are the big principles that we're going to be operating on on at operating with as we start to think about the Enlightenment and uh as it develops in America and what that what that eventually looks like okay good see you Friday or I'm sorry Monday thanks for listening to cpan lectures in History Podcast have you checked out our booknotes plus podcast taking the concept from Brian Lamb's long-running booknotes TV program the podcast offers listeners more books and authors booknotes plus features a mix of new interviews

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