These are contentious claims (particularly as they affect England), though at all times Barnett acknowledges his indebtedness to other historians who have, as it were, paved the way for him.
Those churchmen who insisted that there was were deceiving themselves, but created ‘a very public antichristian bogey that did not have any substantial reality’ (p. Furthermore, public opinion is deemed central to religious change (1) (as it had been well before the 1750s) and the significance of the philosophes and their writings is declared to be exaggerated, not least because there was no deist movement. Barnett’s vigorous and concise book builds on this current scholarly consensus and pushes it further: with examples drawn from England, France and Italy, Barnett’s Enlightenment is one that cannot be understood outside a Christian context in a century that witnessed no significant rise in unbelief. In the course of the last two decades the Gay perspective has been modified to the point of being discarded outright: the French experience of Enlightenment (the Gay paradigm) has been proclaimed the European exception rather than the rule and that, far from being its foe, Christianity was the midwife and sustainer of the siècle des lumières.
For a generation Peter Gay’s book on the Enlightenment (a text which perhaps tells us more about the 1960s than the 1760s) informed scholars that Enlightenment and Christianity were polarities and that the defeat of dogma and metaphysics were the harbingers of secular modernity.
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