Remapping Protestant Belief

This paper historicizes how scholars came to frame Protestantism as a disenchanted, modern religion focused on thinking about immaterial beliefs. It demonstrates that this view, although pervasive, is not inherent to Protestantism itself. This view is a modern definition of religion that took hold among freethinkers who practiced the “religion of secularism” from the 1890s onward. In cartoons, freethinkers criticized Protestantism as a material form of religion that focused too much on supernatural objects and beings. Freethinkers offered new interpretations of Enlightenment epistemologies that suggested secularism was a truly enlightened, modern religion because it focused on immaterial beliefs. Ironically, the religion of secularism informed the secular historical method, through which scholars studied Protestantism as a tradition of immaterial beliefs. This paper offers a way of remapping belief in Protestantism according to eighteenth-century Enlightenment epistemologies, which Protestants adapted to practice their enlightened, material form of religion well into the twentieth century.