thought was informed by the terms and conventions of the discourse on religion that he inherited, but it developed in the midst of a raging debate between religious liberals—the freethinkers, deists, Arians (as well as Socinians, Latitudinarians, and Unitarians)—against the orthodox Methodists, Presbyterians, and Puritans about the form and content of religious belief and practices.48 Though raised Presbyterian, Hume occupied an intellectual perch on the margins of Christianity. Still, he saw himself as something of a friend to both sides of this debate. His writings show him to be acutely aware of its terms and able to access its arguments, especially the role of nature and reason, the status of miracles, the possibility of religious certainty, religious authority, and the argument from design. Hume was also somewhat of a foe to each side: he despised the deity of false religion—an assumption of the “dissenters” as well as the believers—and he articulated a philosophical approach of true philosophy that proceeded easily without religion (and potentially replaced it). Still, instead of directly attacking either the liberals or the clergy (or arguing that all forms of religion should be destroyed at all times), Hume challenged the source of their arguments: abstract reason. This did not mean, however, that he never imagined the best form of religion. In fact, his argument against abstruse thought implied that religion was a natural disposition of humans that could be marshaled for larger purposes. Its source was our nature, an “inexplicable mystery” in the terms of philosophy (NHR, 15.12), and its proper office would highlight social order, virtuous conduct, and calm passions. Like Cicero, Hume was mostly concerned about the functional value of religion, not its epistemic ‘truth’ value. His modern version of the classical civic religion was subsidized by his critique of Enlightenment notions of autonomous reason, philosophical discomfort with the idea that the natural was the rational, and a deep historicism that worked against the very idea of a “universal.” For Hume, reason was not radically independent; it was intricately bound with hopes, fears, customs, and traditions, hallmarks of the imaginative process by which humans derive orientation and meaning in the world. Though his mitigated skepticism suggested it might be futile, he aimed to tweak customs, moderate passions, and shift our sense of moral authority. He never requested that humans should discard religion altogether.
Following Tindal and Morgan, Hume rejected revelation as an adequate source for religious belief; thus, he destroyed the grounds for revealed religion. Yet, unlike Tindal and Morgan, Hume argued that nature, or natural religion—the capacity to derive an understanding of God and the order of the world through rational consideration of the observable evidence in nature—neither honored the myriad inconsistencies experienced in nature nor respected the limits of reason and the reach of the mind. For Hume, the premise that natural religion could prove God’s existence or assert God’s attributes (i.e., infinite, wise, good) was unsustainable. It relied on a very narrow interpretation of nature as well as a defective theory of how the mind functioned. Hume’s version of religion’s proper office stood firmly against the notion of natural religion as articulated by the deists.
Hume similarly dismantled the idea of rational religion presented by the freethinkers of his day. The theory of the mind he articulated in his early philosophical works showed the importance of the passions, the imagination, and our habits, as they traced the genesis of our beliefs. Hume contended that philosophy—always generated by the passions (the sources of our beliefs and behaviors)—could lead us to skeptical dead ends if it was not balanced by the customs and conventions of common life. With the foundations of revealed, natural, and rational religion destroyed, on what could true religion rely? For Hume, and this marked a significant shift in the theme of the true in religious discourse, the true had little to do with the standards of philosophical reason, observation of the natural world, or a universal worldview. In fact, these were the foundations of false religion. True religion, described by Hume in a redacted footnote, was a disposition of the human heart that secured “obedience to the Laws & civil Magistrate.”49
Hume was never more explicit than this about the content of true religion. We can presume that Cicero’s discussion of theism, his articulation of the role of the passions, and his description of the development of virtuous character likely influenced Hume’s sense of the proper office of religion. These content areas comport with Hume’s larger philosophical commitments: they are moderately skeptical, they affirm the reflective natural beliefs of common life, they challenge abstruse reason of false philosophy, they moderate the passions, and they extol a public morality that produces a more stable political order.50 They also cohere with the three-part division of Hume’s Treatise (the understanding, the passions, and morality), which I turn to in chapter 2. Hume—like Cicero—did not make hard distinctions between the social, the philosophic, the political, and the religious. For him, religion was natural, linked to the passions, and omnipresent in history. The disposition ‘true religion,’ however, was practically impossible to locate in history. As the discursive ideal that reflected the knowledge inherent in the stable beliefs of common life, it was to contrast vulgar religion, which operated under the illusion that it was in sync with the logical standards of metaphysics. One example of Hume’s explicit narration of this point occurs in an understudied essay, “Of Parties in General,” where he writes,
Most religions of the ancient world arose in the unknown ages of government, when men were as yet barbarous and uninstructed, and the prince, as well as peasant, was disposed to receive, with implicit faith, every pious tale or fiction, which was offered him. The magistrate embraced the religion of the people, and entering cordially into the care of sacred matters, naturally acquired an authority in them, and united the ecclesiastical with the civil power. But the Christian religion arising, while principles directly opposite to it were firmly established in the polite part of the world, who despised the nation that first broached this novelty; no wonder, that, in such circumstances, it was but little countenanced by the civil magistrate, and that the priesthood was allowed to engross all the authority in the new sect. . . . And the same principles of priestly government continuing, after Christianity became the established religion, they have engendered a spirit of persecution, which has ever since been the poison of human society, and the source of the most inveterate factions in every government. Such divisions, therefore, on the part of the people, may justly be esteemed factions of principle; but, on the part of the priests, who are the prime movers, they are really factions of interest. (EMPL, 8.13–14)
The following chapters attempt to support and develop the idea that content for a Humean true religion might be taken from the cumulative results of Hume’s project on the passions, his work on epistemology, and his contribution to moral thought. To some scholars, the rarefied status of true religion in Hume’s project and Hume’s ethical tilt raises questions about its value for religion. Others claim that his choice not to give explicit details to this category suggests irrelevance for his overall project. But David Hume took religious discourse—not just moral discourse—very seriously for intellectual and strategic reasons: he was committed to preventing the abuse of religion for political gain and invested in demonstrating the impossibility of grounding our religious beliefs in abstract thought. He valued religion for what it might do: moderate our passions, assist in the development of moral character, and enable loyalty to the state. He was also invested in preserving the reflexive traditions of common life.
This chapter had a twofold aim: to describe the possible Ciceronian links to Hume’s thinking about religion and to give a brief account of the development of the theme of the true in discourse on religion. I highlighted significant interventions in this discourse and showed Hume’s general response to the conversation he inherited. We now have some broad historical foundations for the argument of this book: that the cumulative achievements of Hume’s mild philosophical theism, the aim of his moral rationalism, and the conclusion of his project on the passions provide the best content for our speculative, Humean influenced notion of true religion.
