3
well as his private Common Place Books. It was the eighteenth-century Scottish
enquiries into human manners and religious progress, I suggest, that directly inspired his
lifelong ambition to use religion as a tool to reform manners, and create the educated
public opinion he believed was indispensable to the enactment of his democratic and
utilitarian program.
In Part 1, I examine the intellectual background in which Mill’s early views on religion
were formed, focusing on Scottish discussions of the dynamic links that connect
manners, religion and progress. In Part 2, I show how Mill’s Scottish background
informed his discussion of religious and societal progress in his first major publication,
an annotated translation of Charles Villers’ Essay on the Spirit and Influence of the Reformation
of Luther published in1805. In Part 3, I discuss the impact of Bentham on Mill’s views of
religion and religious establishments in the 1810s and 1820s. In Part 4, I show that the
essay “The Church, and its Reform” (1835) was entirely consistent with Mill’s lifelong
concerns and represented the culmination of his argument that religion could and should
be used as a tool to reform manners and accelerate societal progress.
I.
No doubt Mill was anticlerical, and he may even have been an atheist (the question will
be addressed later on). But,
this article argues, his well-known anticlericalism and
religious skepticism have tended to obscure his otherwise dispassionate assessment of
religion as a social phenomenon. In this regard Mill differed from Bentham, who never
gave sustained attention to religion as a historical or psychological phenomenon,
preferring instead to focus on the irrationality of religious belief and its destructive
effects on human happiness. Rather, Mill understood religion as an intrinsic part of the
natural history of mankind. He viewed both religious beliefs and religious institutions as
reflecting the state of societal progress. Conversely, he also envisioned religion as a tool
that could inflect the development of society, and could potentially have as great an
influence upon society as governmental and legislative systems. These were views directly
inherited from his education in the Scottish Enlightenment of 1790s Edinburgh.
It was Montesquieu’s enquiry into the “spirit” of modern nations that had provided the
impetus for the Scottish Enlightenment writers’ interest in analyzing religion as a social
phenomenon with psychological causes, and social and political consequences. The Spirit
of the Laws (1748) inscribed a natural history of religion within a secularized analysis of
4
societal progress, and offered an evolutionary and naturalistic account of the emergence
of religious sentiments.
In addition, it openly claimed its ambition to discuss religion
from a solely utilitarian perspective.
6
Religion, Montesquieu concluded, was a “useful”
thing, because it civilized and softened human manners – and this was particularly true of
Christianity.
7
In a comparative study developed over several years, from the Persian Letters
(1721) to the
Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu demonstrated that Christianity had civilizing
effects that Islam, as the religion of despotism, lacked. Therefore, Montesquieu
concluded that Christianity could usefully serve as a civil religion that would attach
citizens to the laws and their country.
8
In contrast to their English contemporaries, who retained a broadly Christian
interpretation of history, Scottish writers followed Montesquieu in inscribing natural
histories of religion within a secularized analysis of societal progress.
9
Ten years after
Spirit of the Laws, Hume offered a naturalistic account of the emergence of religious
sentiments in the essay “The Natural History of Religion” (1757).
10
In spite of
Montesquieu’s earlier attempts to sketch the premises of a natural history of religion, it
was Hume who effected a clear break with previous conceptions of “natural religion” as
universal agreement over a handful of basic natural and necessary beliefs, in order to
present religious sentiments as originating in the passions, and to argue for the necessity
to ground the history of religion in the observation of human nature.
11
In his ambition to
formulate a natural history of religion, Hume was moving away from an approach
framed in terms of truth and rationality which saw “natural religion” as the common
kernel of truth shared by all existing religions, towards a genealogical approach based
upon the psychological origins of supernatural belief, which was less interested in the
truth than in the social function of religious faith.
12
In “The Natural History of Religion”, Hume laid out the mechanisms that gave rise to
religious sentiments, and found the origin of religion in universal human nature. In his
account, religion first arose in all rude societies as “polytheism, the primitive religion of
6
Charles Louis Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), ed. Anne Cohler, Basia
Miller and Harold Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 459. Bk 24, Ch. 1.
7
Ibid, 460. Bk 24, Ch. 2.
8
Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion: A Dialogue in the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge, 2010), 193.
9
For English accounts of religious progress, see David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century
Britain (New Haven, 1990), 370.
10
David Hume, “The Natural History of Religion,” in Four Dissertations (London, 1757), 1–117.
11
For a detailed account of Montesquieu’s attempts to formulate a natural history of religion, see Céline
Spector, “Naturalisation des croyances, religion naturelle et histoire naturelle de la religion: le statut du fait
religieux dans l’Esprit des Lois,” in Montesquieu, l’Etat et La Religion, ed. J. Ehrard (Sofia, 2007), 40-109, at
48–70.
12
Here I paraphrase Ibid, 47-48.