How Did The Enlightenment Approach To Religious Tolerance Rise To Prominence In America?

he Enlightenment was a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century international movement in ideas and sensibilities, emphasizing the exercise of critical reason as opposed to religious dogmatism or unthinking faith. It developed along with the rise of scientific thinking independent of religious thought and stressed the importance of nature and the natural order as a source of knowledge. In reaction to the religious wars of Europe, Enlightenment thinkers defended religious tolerance and religious freedom. Their emphasis on intellectual freedom and human rights led to a conflict between the advocates of these new ideas and the political and religious establishments in Europe, most dramatically in France.

The Enlightenment in America, more moderate than in Europe, influenced both religious and political thought throughout the colonies. Many would argue that its approach to religious tolerance rose to prominence in America in large part because no single religious group could garner the necessary votes to impose themselves upon the fledgling republic. Leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were considered paragons of Enlightenment thought, and the freedom-loving religious rationalism of their ideas helped to lay the foundations of the Declaration of Independence and

Many of its advocates, many of whom were themselves Christian, often dismissed the new revivalist religion of the Great Awakening as emotionally excessive. Evangelical Protestants, on the other hand, often viewed rationalism, religious tolerance, and other enlightenment ideals as dangerous to piety and national solidarity in the budding republic. Historians have usually cast this controversy in terms of a conflict between those who favored rational religion and those who opposed them by defending an emotional religion of the heart. But the Enlightenment was so pervasive in the colonies that few Americans remained wholly untouched by its