on and marshaled the best of our rational, natural, and moral propensities.40
Tindal’s most well-known work, Christianity as Old as Creation (1730), is written in a quasi-dialogue form between himself and a questioner. Inspired by the work of Cicero, the naturalism of Grotius, and the humanism of Lord Herbert, it further deemphasized the importance of revelation for the true religion. Tindal claimed that revelation was anchored in the particulars of time and place and therefore was too restrictive to be universal. This led to the demotion of the role of revelation in his thought, a watershed move for discourse on religion. Tindal and his deistical cohort undermined revelation not only because they wanted to render a trenchant critique of revealed religion but also because they aimed to put forward a thoroughly universal religious vision that venerated nature, tolerance, and happiness without a personal deity. With revelation—the final impediment to this universal true religion—out of the way, the full burden of human happiness would rest completely on the faculty of unaided human reason. This profound confidence in autonomous reason was derived from the observation of nature for, as Tindal wrote, “the Perfection and Happiness of all rational beings, Supreme as well as subordinate, consists in living up to the dictates of their nature.”41 The laws of nature and reason fully replaced God and revelation as the foundations for the true religion and the sources for human happiness.
Tindal’s recommendation for religion, having shed the baggage of revelation, is, in many ways, a practical, ethical project. Yet he expresses it in terms of religion, not morality, and thereby confirms his aim to be part of the discourse on religion. He writes, “‘true religion’ consist[s] in a constant disposition of mind to do all the Good that we can; and therefore render ourselves acceptable to God in answering the End of his Creation.” It is our duty to embrace the moral demands dictated to us by the “One true religion of mankind,” the “Religion of Nature and Reason written in the hearts of every one of us from the first Creation.”42 The detachment of ethics from religion was left undeveloped in Tindal’s work (as well as Morgan’s), but we can fairly state that Tindal was primarily invested in providing a religious prescription, not simply a moral one.
Following the example of Tindal, Thomas Morgan also saw God’s truth to be evident in the visible, natural world. He too made nature the ultimate standard for religion, deemphasized the role of divine grace, and undermined revelation. Building on the idea ‘true religion’ promoted by Tindal (particularly in Morgan’s most well-known book, The Moral Philosopher [1737], written in dialogue form), Morgan presented a historiography that confirmed true religion as the original religion of humankind that had been corrupted at various stages throughout history. I quote him at length here to show his historical thinking, how he used the idea of nature, and his veneration of the true religion:
The original, true religion, therefore, of God and Nature, consisted in the direct, immediate worship of the one true God, by an absolute resignation to, and dependence on him in the practice of all the duties and obligations of moral truth and righteousness. During this state of true religion, men look’d to and depended upon God, as the sole author of nature, of all the properties and power of subordinate beings and agents, and as the one only original, efficient cause of all Things. . . . Men, in this state of innocency and true religion, own’d God, not only as the author, contriver and former of nature, but as the preserver, supporter and director of all nature by his continued agency and providential causality. They considered all events good and evil, as the ordination and appointment of God; the one, as the natural and just reward of wisdom and integrity, and the other, as either the necessary exercise and trial of virtue, or as the punishment and cure of folly or sin. This, as I take it, was the original state of philosophy and true religion, before the apostasy of angels and men.43
Tindal and Morgan connect religion to the theme of the true more than any other theme, including nature or “the natural.”44 Their discussion of true religion, however, has not generated as much attention in secondary scholarship as their handling of natural religion. Natural religion, the idea that the observation of nature suggests a deity, is the theistic feature of their true religion. Yet the true religion is not reducible to natural religion. Christianity, for example, if not polluted by the hierarchy of the priest craft or driven by revelation and superstition, can be dubbed true religion, not natural religion: its truth is eternal and immutable yet hidden from us by those who gain from keeping people ignorant of it. True religion was deployed by Tindal and Morgan to represent the sum total of natural religion and the virtuous acts it inspired.45
Both Tindal and Morgan were obsessed with reason and convinced that God left an indelible and immutable imprint on every living organism in the world. That imprint was visible in the uncorrupted and full expression of the nature of the organism. The nature of humans was expressed through the uninterrupted freedom of reason. It follows that reason was natural to human beings: it was the visible stamp of God, and it helped determine what was true. Unaided reason was necessary and sufficient for human happiness as well as the development of the “universal practice of moral truth and righteousness,” or the true religion.46
In addition to the thinkers I have mentioned here, a myriad of responses to the conversational shifts and changes in discourse on religion appeared. All, however, were ensconced in a larger discursive project that, in the modern West, leaned toward establishing the beliefs of religion as philosophically valid. While the themes of reason, authority, and universalizability were instructive in a discourse that aimed for a true religion, my analysis of it here is partial and limited; simply put, I hope to invite more detailed discussion on the theme of the true in discourse on religion. The intention of my heuristic account is not only to rehearse the larger context for our Humean true religion but also to provide a loose sense of the terms and trends in the discursive territory Hume inherited. As J. B. Schneewind states, “we need to understand the map of religious options on which Hume’s readers would have located him. Whether he accepted the common options or not, he would have known them and taken them into account in the presentation of his views.”47 In the face of these options Hume confronted a dual challenge: to stay within the discursive boundaries of philosophical thinking about religion so that he might remain a relevant interlocutor and, at the same time, to help push the discourse on religion past its limits. How might he justify a form of religion distinct from inherited conceptions of the false and the true? How could he compellingly articulate his unconventional sense of religion’s proper office?
The English Enlightenment provided the context for Hume’s distinctive intervention in religious discourse. While its notions of epistemic truth and its ideas of subjectivity have been radically challenged by structuralists and postmodernists, and religious discourse has become more porous in our late modern era due to the insights of pragmatism and existentialism, I have tried to show that Hume worked in a moment when the true was venerated. His work challenged religious discourse, but it did not escape the framework of the discourse, which had become inseparable from the theme of the true. Even the argumentatively dexterous and intellectually nimble Hume could not abscond from his own philosophical heritage: he worked within the limits of the modern categories available to him, that is—he used the terms “true” and “false” when it came to religion. Yet Hume subverted the conventional use of these terms. To him, our true ideas and beliefs were not those that could be verified by abstruse thought; they were the ideas and beliefs that reflected the general orientations confirmed by habits and reflective common life. These were our most stable ideas. Like Cicero, Hume’s intervention for religion was practical, but only on the discursive level: his argument aimed to moderate a discourse on religion that had gotten carried away by abstract philosophy and metaphysics. That is, Hume was discomfited by the modern view that made religion justifiable on the terms of abstract philosophy. He claimed this was an unintelligible and therefore false standard of legitimation that supported vulgar and superstitious forms of religion. True philosophy, he suggested, would put abstruse philosophy and metaphysics in its place, and the rare true religion would shift the grounds of religion back to the reflective traditions of common life. These strategic features of his work reflected its larger aims: to decrease religious factionalism and expose
