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Many people from earlier times attacked the Enlightenment for undermining religion and the social and political order. It later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution, it appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes in the decades prior to 1789.
Enlightenment era religious commentary was a response to the preceding century of religious conflict in Europe, especially the Thirty Years' War. [76] Theologians of the Enlightenment wanted to reform their faith to its generally non-confrontational roots and to limit the capacity for religious controversy to spill over into politics and ...
In the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras, Europe was a "persecuting society" which did not tolerate religious minorities or atheism. [4] Even in France, where the Edict of Nantes had been issued in 1598, then revoked in 1685, there was very little support for religious toleration at the beginning of the eighteenth century. [5]
Enlightened absolutists held that royal power emanated not from divine right but from a social contract whereby a despot was entrusted with the power to govern through a social contract in lieu of any other governments. The monarchs of enlightened absolutism strengthened their authority by improving the lives of their subjects.
French thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment is considered to have been permeated with anti-religious views that began as deism in the sixteenth century by Pierre Viret and culminated as atheism in the eighteenth century by Voltaire and Rousseau. French Deism was anti-religious and shaded into atheism, pantheism, and skepticism.
According to Joxe Azurmendi this anti-Judaism has a relative importance in Voltaire's philosophy of history. However, Voltaire's anti-Judaism influenced later authors like Ernest Renan. [165] Voltaire did have a Jewish friend, Daniel de Fonseca, whom he esteemed highly, and proclaimed him as "the only philosopher, perhaps, among the Jews of his ...
Enlightenment writers did not necessarily oppose organized religion, but they strenuously objected to religious intolerance. They believed that a society based around reason instead of religious fanaticism would improve the way people think and culminate in a more critical, scientific outlook on social issues and problems.
The intellectual progress of the Enlightenment, which questioned old traditions about societies and governments, eventually coalesced into powerful revolutionary movements that toppled what the French called the Ancien Régime, the belief in absolute monarchy and established religion, especially in Europe, Latin America and North America.