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This chapter offers a sweeping historical overview of misotheism. The major stopping points along this compelling history of ideas are: the Book of Job, Epicurus, Ovid, St. Augustine, Thomas Paine, James Mill, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Storm Jameson, Naomi Goldenberg, Rosemary Ruether, Sigmund Freud, Albert Camus, William Empson, and Gore Vidal. The author documents the genealogy of God-hatred from the trial-of-God theme in the Book of Job, to Epicureanism, deism, utilitarianism, anarchism, feminism, and secular humanism.

Contrasting Swinburne’s carefree misotheistic candor, Zora Neal Hurston remained cryptic about her conflicted relationship with God. Partly because she was black and female, readers tend to overlook indications of misotheism, even when they seem plain. Few, if any, critics have taken the words “all gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason” in Their Eyes Were Watching God as potentially targeting Yahweh as well as any other gods. Instead, critics have either ignored such passages in her work or tried to explain them away. This chapter offers fresh readings of Hurston’s acclaimed works, and it draws on private writings, letters, and memoirs to fill in the picture of Hurston’s latent misotheism. Finally, the author reveals a surprising web of concealed references to writers ranging from Epicurus to Proudhon and Nietzsche, to bolster his claim that Hurston was indeed as hostile to God as the thinkers who influenced her.

This chapter considers the idea that the whole business of pagan oracles was a sham, perpetrated for money or political gain. It discusses the so-called “imposture thesis”—that pagan religions were built on an edifice of priestly fraud, maintained by the laity's fear of divine authority. This thesis has been widely studied as an element of the Enlightenment and its immediate precursors, especially French libertinism eérudit and English Deism. Many thinkers associated with these movements applied the imposture thesis to the pagan oracles, and indeed, the oracles slotted into their narratives as neatly as they had into those of Catholic theologians.

This chapter discusses British Deism, the rejection of republican radicalism, and the French anglicisme in the mid-18th century. Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Maupertuis, the giants among the French philosophes in the mid 1740s, were, in various ways, all ardent protagonists of the ‘British Enlightenment’. Around 1745, the movement which d’Alembert dubbed anglicisme was indeed at its zenith, with d’Alembert himself frequently extolling Newton and Locke in these years while the young Diderot joined in with his part translation and part reworking of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1699), published in 1745.

This chapter provides foundation and context for the Calvinist thinkers analyzed in later chapters. Calvinism and the Reformed Tradition are defined, and the relative merits of the terms assessed, acknowledging “Reformed” as the more accurate term, but “Calvinism” the more recognizable. Scholastic method, “Federal Theology,” and emphasis on piety were aspects of English Calvinism during this period. Calvinist piety and theology were shaped in the context of disputes among the Church of England, the dissenting Presbyterians and Independents (Congregationalists), and such radicals as the Antinomians in the generations before and after the Toleration Act of 1688. These Calvinist thinkers also responded to the changing intellectual currents of the early Enlightenment such as Cartesian rationalism, a new natural science, Anti-Trinitarianism, Socinianism, Deism, awareness of other religions, and atheism. Discussion of atheism shifted from viewing it as godless scoffing to denial of immortality and the existence of God.

The last Calvinist discussed in this book is John Edwards, whose father Thomas Edwards had been a Puritan heresiographer. Nonetheless he conformed to the Church of England in 1660, picturing himself as embattled in that church as he defended Calvin against detractors, argued that the Church of England's theology was properly Calvinist, and continued the struggle against Arminianism within it. Unlike others in this book, he proudly claimed the term “Calvinist” for himself. He confronted the challenges discussed in other chapters—the new science, Deism, scoffing, atheism, Socinianism, Anti-Trinitarianism—opposing them in numerous writings that dealt with epistemology, the role and definition of reason, natural theology, and the authority of scripture. Like others in the Church of England at that time he was deeply interested in the Church Fathers.

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century reception of Thomas Hobbes, and in particular the question of how he was understood as being both a funny (and dangerous) kind of Stoic and later as a funny (and dangerous) kind of Epicurean. It discusses how Hobbes came to be characterized as an Epicurean and how his critics responded to the political theory he had presented in Leviathan — particularly his arguments on natural law. The chapter focuses in particular on Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, whose philosophical sympathies led him to become an opponent of Hobbes and a supporter of the latitude-men or latitudinarians and their particular engagements with Stoicism.

Modern historians write with some framework of history, and the context is influenced by the Jewish and Christian notion of Divine providence. Historians accept or reject this basic framework. Christianity works in a theological framework, and many modern secular historians still use aspects of this theological framework. Early Christian historians wrote as if they knew what God's plans were in granting success to some leaders and defeat to others. Augustine rejected this approach, since after the New Testament no sure guide for interpreting events exists. During the Enlightenment the historical approach to God was Deism: God got things started, but then he let things unfold on their own. Now at Catholic universities the Enlightenment approach, though formally rejected, still holds sway in many important ways. Rarely do Catholic historians display a Christian humility expressing doubt about what can be known. The progressive view of history is now dominant, but clashes between good and evil have disappeared because good always prevails. Catholic colleges can present a modern, critical Catholic history that explores both secularization and religion in culture. Following Augustine, until its end history is a dramatic story, with no clear vision of the eventual outcome. Scientific objectivity in history is impossible.

This chapter clarifies Edwards's intellectual context by debunking three false dichotomies often associated with the eighteenth century: faith versus reason, Catholic scholasticism versus Protestant biblicism, and British empiricism versus Continental rationalism. Contrary to such simplistic characterizations, Edwards's rapidly changing context was punctuated by the exchange and competition of ideas in the fields of religion, literature, and politics. The chapter further outlines the vast spectrum of heterodoxy, emphasizing the significant influence of Socinianism, Arianism, Deism, and Arminianism. Although living and writing in Colonial America, Edwards was not isolated from or unaware of the contemporary religious and intellectual trends.

This chapter focuses on George Whitefield's evangelical work in America during the eighteenth century and how his preaching changed the life of many evangelicals through conversion. It begins by looking at Whitefield's visit to Yale College in October 1740, followed by his travel to New York and the attacks launched against him, including Alexander Garden's The Querists. It then considers Whitefield's emphasis on the audience's reaction to his sermons, his focus on the threat of Deism and natural reason, and his views about the Moravians' theology. It also examines Whitefield's return voyage to England, where he found the Methodists having splintered into factions devoted to Calvinism, Arminianism, and Moravianism.

This chapter examines the state of Scottish Presbyterianism in the decades immediately following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – 89. The revolution had brought about the restoration of the Presbyterian church, but for many years its adherents regarded their situation as highly precarious. Orthodox Calvinists believed themselves to be under threat, from Episcopalians, Jacobites, deists, enthusiasts, and a range of heretics, such as the Glasgow professor John Simson, who was formally accused of heresy twice, in the 1710s and 1720s. Two late seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century authors, Henry Scougal and George Garden are also discussed. They were important because their writings are an example of seventeenth-century “Augustinianism” and they were influential among heterodox Presbyterians from the 1720s.

The dismissive characterization of Anglican divinity between 1688 and 1800 as defensive and rationalistic, made by Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, has proved more enduring than most other aspects of a Victorian critique of the eighteenth-century Church of England. By directly addressing the analytical narratives offered by Pattison and Stephen, this chapter offers a comprehensive re-evaluation of this neglected period in the history of English theology. The chapter explores the many contributions to patristic study, ecclesiastical history, and doctrinal controversy made by theologians with a once deservedly international reputation: William Cave, Richard Bentley, William Law, William Warburton, Joseph Butler, George Berkeley, and William Paley were vitalizing influences on Anglican theology, all of whom were systematically depreciated by their agnostic Victorian successors. This chapter offers a revisionist account of the many achievements in eighteenth-century Anglican divinity.

The image of the self-made man is one of the most enduring images of the ideal American, and no one gave this greater expression than did Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s Autobiography is a testimony to the Enlightenment’s belief in the power of education to bring about both individual and social progress. Franklin’s life was nothing if not a testimony to the ability to rise and achieve greatness through one’s own unaided efforts. Yet, it is argued, it is wrong to reduce Franklin’s life to a few simple clichés about the “gospel of wealth” or the dour Protestant work ethic. His was a life suffused with humor, a capacity for self-reflection, the love of conversation, and a vivid sense of our own imperfection. Franklin’s was the model of the American Enlightenment that combined both pragmatism and idealism as the best means of achieving progress.

This chapter surveys the history of the Church of England between the Hanoverian succession and the American Revolution. The religio-political questions that bedevilled the English nation during the 1530s remained live ones during the eighteenth century. What sort of Church should the Church of England be? What should the relation of Church to state be? What should constitute the Church’s doctrinal orthodoxy? Whom should the Church comprehend? What were the bounds of toleration? These questions had not been solved at the Glorious Revolution, so that the story of the eighteenth-century Church of England is the concluding chapter in the story of England’s long Reformation. What ultimately brought that particular story to a close was not Enlightenment secularism but the changes catalysed by war and the fear of relapse into seventeenth-century-like religious violence.