Himmelfarb observes that Wesley was familiar with and even helped to publish secular works, and that he considered himself “enlightened.” But to equate considering oneself enlightened with genuine membership in an Enlightenment movement is to deprive Enlightenment of any meaning. The Puritans of New England, for example, who admired classical learning, established Harvard College, and abhorred witches, were enlightened without being part of an Enlightenment movement. Interestingly, Himmelfarb comes close to including the Puritan Cotton Mather in the American Enlightenment, noting that while he is “today remembered for his fiery sermons about witchcraft and satanic possession, which helped provoke the Salem witch trials,” he was “also an enthusiastic student of astronomy and of the Copernican system.” While one can only cheer Himmelfarb on when she denies that figures like Wesley and Mather were “stereotypically retrograde and repressive religious fanatic[s],” one should also resist the temptation to admit them into the Enlightenment merely because they were not stereotypical fanatics. To do so is to obscure differences that believers and skeptics have to have in mind, even as they forge the kind of practical and partial alliance that, on Himmelfarb’s own account, was more important in making an age of benevolence possible in Britain than any deep theoretical affinity.

 

To take another example, Himmelfarb observes that Adam Smith praised religious sects for promoting an austere morality, which promoted virtues that the poor needed to avoid ruin. She argues that Smith thought religious zeal dangerous only in societies with few sects, and that he observed with displeasure the inactivity of dissenting sects once legitimized, comparing them unfavorably to the “Methodists” who, “without half the learning of the dissenters, [were] much more in vogue.” But Smith also pointed out that the morals of such sects “could be rather disagreeably rigorous and unsocial” and that, indeed, those sects that carried austerity “to some degree of folly and extravagance” often won the people over precisely because of their “excessive rigor.” To cure this sectarian disease, Smith proposed that the state promote “the study of science and philosophy,” those “great antidotes to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition,” and “public diversions” to “dissipate… that melancholy and gloomy humor which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm.”

Even if Wesley took Smith’s comment about Methodism as praise, he presumably would have distrusted Smith’s proposal. Wesley regarded public diversions as, if not always blameworthy in themselves, distractions from the serious business of usefulness and piety. For those who wish to divert themselves indoors, there is useful history, pious poetry, and natural philosophy, but “above all” prayer. Since Smith had proposed that the state offer diversions to the pious with the explicit purpose of diminishing their “enthusiasm,” Wesley could not have helped regarding Smith as an adversary, however friendly.

Besides, Smith looked forward to the growth of “that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism.” While Wesley, as Himmelfarb reminds us, insisted that “religion and reason go hand in hand,” he also insisted that reason is incapable of producing faith, hope for eternal life, love of God, love of one’s neighbor, or happiness. Wesley took especially seriously the failure to acknowledge that love of one’s neighbor, or benevolence, is rooted in gratitude toward God, regarding this failure as amounting to “a decent and therefore more dangerous attack upon the whole of the Christian Revelation.” In acknowledging the decency of benevolence whatever its source, he acknowledged the alliance between Methodism and the British Enlightenment that Himmelfarb celebrates, but not without acknowledging that benevolence as taught by some of the leading figures in that Enlightenment was a potent danger to people of faith. Although on Wesley’s account Methodism was not inconsistent with reason, it could not be described as a “pure and rational religion,” either.

In inviting Wesley into the Enlightenment, Himmelfarb underplays the differences between religious and secular moralists, perhaps in the hopes of bringing them together. But her own account of the relationship between the moral philosophers and the Methodists suggests that there is no need for such a rhetorical move: “Whatever the differences between the moral philosophers and the Methodists—philosophical, theological, temperamental—in important practical matters, they tended to converge.” If the moral philosophers and the Methodists converged in spite of Wesley’s belief that separating benevolence from the love of God was “neither better nor worse than Atheism,” then there is no reason to suppose that the practical convergence Himmelfarb hopes for in our time requires us to forgo clarity about the differences between the Enlightenment and revealed religion. Because such differences have at times produced not only culture wars but also real wars, restraint about them is appropriate. But because in our time unclarity about principles may be every bit as dangerous as culture wars, it is also appropriate for the defenders of reason and the defenders of revelation to be wary of one another, even as they engage in common work.