So, to say this quickly, I have always seen monotheistic religions as the bane of progress. It might just be the enlightenment ideals ingrained in me (many a teacher has said that to me), but I have always looked at history as this great work of art that was tainted by these "cults" and their institutions. That is not really what I am here to ask about, but it is rather similar.
I had to write an essay about what I learned in Western Civ. this year. Quite possibly the broadest topic question I have ever received. So I decided to re-look at history, and to try and find a way that religion (or the church and it's institutions) has not been the metallic cage that has imprisoned Europe for so long. The goal I had in mind was to try and prove Enlightenment thinkers wrong. I wanted to try and spin religion so that it is not this bane of progress, but has actually been the one constructive constant in Western intellectual development. In the process, I also wanted to try and find a way that (in the big picture) that the Enlightenment was actually just a continuation of the Church's (and the teachings of the bible) moral values, and that the search for rationality in the Scientific Rev. and the Enlightenment are just a product of centuries of Western intellectual tradition that happened to be focused around Christianity.
Much to my own chagrin, I couldn't do it. Now, this is no longer about the history essay. I changed course and found a much more manageable topic, and finished it two weeks ago. But, from pure intellectual curiosity, is there just something that I'm missing? Is there anyone here who can spin Christianity (and the Church) and The SR and Enlightenment to not be oppositional? Or, does it not even need to be spun at all, and is there just something very skewed about my perspective? Thanks!
Here's something I wrote in response to a similar question:
the comparative historical question posed here, in my opinion, seems too vast to be useful. I think that it's better to look at individual thinkers and their formations in relation to particular kinds of Christianity (there were so many and they were so different, again to make almost meaningless the notion of Christianity as a framework) for example the importance of Jesuit training, with its emphasis on certain kinds of inquiry, to so many key Enlightenment thinkers. […] Ultimately many Enlightenment thinkers were at war with Christianity and vice-versa--e.g. the Catholic Church banned De L'Esprit des lois, a key expression of several Enlightenment concepts that you cite, for starters.
Taking your proposition that "the Enlightenment was actually just a continuation of the Church's (and the teachings of the bible) moral values" one should ask, then, what exactly are the the bible and the Church's "moral values," when, where and according to whom? Are they, to chose a seemingly easy case, what Voltaire attacked? Further, Voltaire was a deist; does this make him a product of the Christian tradition? Well, sure, in the broadest possible sense, but that conclusion tells us nothing about Voltaire or the Enlightenment.
Perhaps it's my own taste as a historian, but I find this kind of question interesting yet ultimately not very helpful. The Enlightenment was never one thing, nor was Christianity, and drawing causal connections between the two is bound to be misleading and reductive. It's more productive to start on a smaller time-scale, cast a narrower net, and focus on context. The Western intellectual tradition and the Christian tradition certainly provided frameworks within which a Voltaire operated. But if we stop there we can argue that a Voltaire could have appeared at any time and place, or an Enlightenment could have appeared at any time and place within the history of Christianity. But they didn't. So why did Voltaire write the things he did when and where he did? Why did Montesquieu write L'Esprit des lois when and where he did? These are the questions that historians can begin to answer, on the basis of the study of specific historical contexts.