Day 12. September 27, 2006
Movement 1. Dei Filius
Lecture 6. Jesus and the Enlightenment (Part 1)
The First Great Awakening legitimated emotion and emotional expression in American religion. Ironically, the Enlightenment simultaneously revealed natural religion as a rational counterpoint to the emotional religion discovered in this great revival. Doubling the irony, rationalistic strains of Deism and Unitarianism dominated the religious outlook of the founders of American political and civil society. Men such as Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson cast American society in religious terms - e.g., the City on a Hill, the New Zion - but for them Jesus represented the new nation's ethical inspiration and guide rather than the object of its guiding affections. The Revolution represented not Jesus but Jehovah God at work in America.