why dave bergman is neat

The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity: here is a review of s.j. barnett's recent book on the enlightenment and religion. here is the lead paragraph:

For a generation Peter Gay’s book on the Enlightenment (a text which perhaps tells us more about the 1960s than the 1760s) informed scholars that Enlightenment and Christianity were polarities and that the defeat of dogma and metaphysics were the harbingers of secular modernity. In the course of the last two decades the Gay perspective has been modified to the point of being discarded outright: the French experience of Enlightenment (the Gay paradigm) has been proclaimed the European exception rather than the rule and that, far from being its foe, Christianity was the midwife and sustainer of the siècle des lumières. S.J. Barnett’s vigorous and concise book builds on this current scholarly consensus and pushes it further: with examples drawn from England, France and Italy, Barnett’s Enlightenment is one that cannot be understood outside a Christian context in a century that witnessed no significant rise in unbelief. Furthermore, public opinion is deemed central to religious change (1) (as it had been well before the 1750s) and the significance of the philosophes and their writings is declared to be exaggerated, not least because there was no deist movement. Those churchmen who insisted that there was were deceiving themselves, but created ‘a very public antichristian bogey that did not have any substantial reality’ (p. 5).

and the final two:

There are a few slips that, taken cumulatively, detract from one’s confidence in Barnett’s handling of labels: Isaac Newton is referred to as a ‘dissenter’ (p. 122), David Hartley becomes an oxymoronic ‘dissenting Anglican’ (p. 123), Louis XVI’s accession year is predated by 20 years to 1754 (p. 154), there is an allusion to John Lindsey when Theophilus is intended (p. 97) (it further mutates into Lyndsey in the index) and there is a mysterious reference to Lady Drummond, the wife of the duke of York, having the last rites refused her in 1755 (p. 146). Barnett’s occasional resort to the few scholars ‘on his side’ in the debate on deism strikes a rather unfortunately self-conscious note and, as well as the reflectiveness one finds in The Enlightenment and Religion, there are a few too many assertions. Thus he tells us that the Sacheverell affair of 1710–11 was the ‘most serious challenge to the English Enlightenment’ (p. 111). He never tells us when the Enlightenment occurred in England (or anywhere else for that matter), or refers to its components stages in as much as they can be identified; it assumes a degree of intellectual direction (anti-Sacheverellians as an early counter-enlightenment party) to the case that it never possessed because it had nothing to sustain it beyond a nostalgia for the departed days of tight confessionalism in the 1680s. Barnett’s point is that public opinion was to the fore in the affair. The point may be admitted but doesn’t that leave the popular Jacobitism of the 1710s as far more worthy of attention as a challenge to the ‘English Enlightenment’? More generally, his insistence that public opinion was a significant force in the public life of England, France and Italy throughout this era is unexceptionable, but one could have wished for more discussion of changing perceptions of its composition in the course of the century. In an English context, Barnett (p. 94) is inclined to homogenise Protestant dissenters and underestimate the gap between the orthodox and liberal among them on doctrinal questions. The Calvinists might agree with some of the deists’ anticlerical views, but usually remained strictly Athanasian in their theology.

Throughout, Barnett assumes a ‘chronicle of Enlightenment’ in a rather old fashioned, no-nonsense way, endorsing the notion of ferment on a Hazard-like scale c.1680–1720. There is no recourse to ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ as a working concept, one that scholars such as Cadoc Leighton have recently found useful. (6) One can readily see why. Since Barnett’s Enlightenment is such a ‘big tent’, capable of containing a variety of contented opinions, he has no need to evaluate the possibility of emerging opposition to its emphases. From this book one gets very little sense of the cultural shift at mid century, in which both the ‘long Reformation’ and the ‘long Counter-Reformation’ were played out, and Church establishments in France and Italy, under unprecedented pressure from princes and philosophical opinion (both tinged with anticlericalism), dropped their pastoral guard. Confident that the rural masses were with the Church, religious propagandists (with unimpressive results) poured their efforts into denouncing the insidious effects of ‘philosophy’ as deleterious to the faith and encouraging no more than nominal belief in the wider culture. Of course defenders of the Church thought primarily in terms of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, but one finds very little reference to such categories in The Enlightenment and Religion. This is a surprising omission given Barnett’s persuasion that factions inside the Churches were the main vehicle of opposition to the ecclesiastical status quo in all three countries; he might have built on James Bradley’s studies which have shown that it was ecclesiology rather than theology that was the main arena of dispute between the orthodox and their adversaries in the eighteenth century. (7) If Barnett is anxious for historians to admit that interesting texts are not necessarily influential in their generation, and demands care and caution in measuring influence (what he calls the ‘holy grail’ of scholarship (p. 104)), the challenge in turn to him might be to concede that intellectual propagandists can occasionally be prodigiously and disproportionately influential in demarcating the culture of their time. He might also consider revisiting his assumption that the conflicts over deism (and the associated growth of religious liberalism) were primarily socio-political, and investigate the genuine theological issues involved. If much eighteenth-century religious conflict was about politics, the reverse was also true.