... to it). Clearly though, the majority of the philosophes were religious, which is significant - the Enlightenment did not attack God nor did it attack religion (as Nicolson puts it, "it was not faith that they attacked, but superstition: not religion but priesthood.") yet this was supposedly a movement that advocated rationalism, reason and knowledge, ideas which are not, to my mind, compatible with religion. It would seem therefore that the Enlightenment's stance on religion was social rather than theological. This then would explain the crusade that was waged against Christianity (the famous écrasez l'infâme). To the philosophes, Christianity was a social institution which was the antithesis of everything that they stood for. As Porter writes, for Diderot, Voltaire et al. "emancipation of mankind from religious tyranny had to be the first blow in a general politics of emancipation." The changing perspective of religion was undoubtedly influenced by the changing ...

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