on extreme passions, and he declared that vulgar religion had a corrupting influence on moral character. These vituperative positions constituted his direct response to the religious wars of his time and place, problems that deeply troubled him and ones that he prioritized in his work. Given his strategic choice to make more of a critical intervention against popular religion instead of a constructive one, he did not describe religion’s proper office with systematic detail. Still, it is fair to presume from his near obsession with religion, his Presbyterian background, his reading of Cicero, his commitment to moderation and the reflective, true philosophy, as well as his investment in social stability, that the question of the most effective form of religion remained near to his thinking. Further, Hume’s attitude toward religion was never simply a critical one. He offered (indirect) insights for true religion. We may extract from these (indirect) reflections—and cobble together substance for his undeveloped idea ‘true religion’—by reading between the multiple overlapping strands of his writings, assessing what is underneath his sometimes tacit intentions and closely attending to the fertile oppositions he implies between true and false religion. This sanctions our appraisal of what he may have taken, what he did not explicitly state that might be implicitly present in his work. Beginning with two productive premises—that Hume’s powerful work left us some positive resources for religion and that we can build a Humean-inspired true religion from these resources—the following argument posits three Humean commitments that, when combined, might serve as the foundation for a speculative true religion.
The riddle of both true and false religion in Hume is, ultimately—as he says in the last paragraph of his most important work on religion, the Natural History of Religion—“an enigma.” We can, however, holding the earlier-stated objectives in mind, give some provisional content to both forms of religion. Doing so is not to make a claim about Hume’s personal religious beliefs or the content of his spiritual life; it is simply to emphasize Hume’s positive attitude and the generative aspects of his contribution to religious discourse. This can resuscitate Hume’s work as a resource for scholars in the field. Philosophers of religion trained in philosophy have comfortably appropriated Hume’s writings for analytic approaches to philosophy, Kantian-influenced thinkers have seized on his work for its critical “errors” in relation to instrumental reason (most often regarding moral judgment), and skeptics have used him as their flag-bearer. Yet philosophers of religion trained in religious studies tend to avoid Hume, deploy him as an archcritic of religion, or treat him solely as a moralist. The irony here is that philosophers in religious studies generally approach the world of ideas in a Humean fashion: they take history seriously; tackle their work with a broad, philosophical temperament; and remain open to the relative insolubility of religious questions even as they seriously reflect on them. To bring these contemporary thinkers closer to their intellectual inheritance, I gesture, in this chapter, toward some possible historical foundations to foreground the larger argument I aim to develop: that we might construct a Humean-inspired true religion with a genuine theism, a moderation of the passions, and a practical morality.
Critics of Hume, in his day and in ours, have largely dismissed the idea ‘true religion’ in Hume as a “useless rump” with no religious value and little practical significance.4 I have two replies to this brush-off. First, to insist that Hume’s undescribed true religion has no religious value is to construe religious value in narrow, reductionist terms (that is, as false religion). The study of history, which Hume took to be enjoyable, intellectually edifying, and morally enriching (EMPL, 6.565), taught him that religion could be more than an amalgamation of ritualistic practices, ecstatic worship of deity, and a set of unyielding moral rules handed down from above. Second, the claim that Hume’s true religion has little practical significance obscures more than it clarifies. The connotation here is that practical significance is a function of direct moral precepts, explicit worship practices, or other formal influences. Hume detested this way of both describing and being religious. Thus, reducing religion to the conventional ideas of religious value and practical significance do not comport with his full perspective on the matter.
Hume considered religion, in its various forms, to be historically potent. And history, according to Hume, was unequivocal: it confirmed that religion was a consistent feature of human experience and that its popular manifestations had terrifying effects in the world.5 Given this, one might expect that Hume would want humans to be completely against the idea of religion and aim to abolish it. In fact, he took the opposite position. He never contended that humans should destroy all forms of religion, for religious sentiment never could be done away with fully. Instead, Hume actually suggested a state religion to counteract religious enthusiasm and ecclesiastical malfeasance (HE, 3.134–35). He wrote, “Look out for a people, entirely destitute of religion: if you find them at all, be assured, that they are but a few degrees removed from brutes” (NHR, 15.9). These sorts of claims illuminate the value of religion for civil society. They are found throughout Hume’s corpus and confirm a mild commitment to religion, sometimes for no other reason but to enhance social stability and augment common morality. Hume believed that religion, in its “proper office,” served a socioethical function. He stated that his “philosophy” (presumably, also his “philosophy of religion”) “if just, can present us only with mild and moderate sentiments” (T, 1.4.7.13) and suggested that true religion should reflectively affirm the stable, humanizing beliefs of common life (NHR, 12.13).6 His work also affirmed a basic sense of theism: “The universal propensity to believe in invisible, intelligent power, if not an original instinct is at least a general attendant of human nature” (15.5). Our speculative Humean true religion replaces the supernaturalism of popular religion with the fundamental belief in an Author of Nature. It supplants the “monstrous,” “Priestly inventions,” and “monkish virtues” of vulgar religion (T, 3.2.5.14) with the emphasis on virtuous character. And it displaces the enthusiastic, direct-passion hopes of false religion with a modest hope.
Hume’s work persuades us that useful suggestions for theism, morality, and passions do not, by any means, require religion. Yet if we consider religion, as I think Hume does, as a disposition that quietly connects us more deeply to one another and to that which is greater than us while inspiring excellence of character and steady passions that cultivate happiness and social stability, then we can say that this general theism, moderation of the passions, and practical morality, taken cumulatively, might be religious in effect. Our conjecture ‘true religion’ jettisons enthusiastic beliefs, divine behavioral codes, sacred rituals and texts, and ecstatic worship. In this way it expands the very idea of what it means to be religious. It advances gentle hopes for how religion might quietly contribute to the development of virtuous character and the moderation of the passions, and it holds a fundamental belief in a sense of general providence that neither creates factions nor aspires to universals. Naming these as provisional elements of a Humean true religion allows us to raise questions about the category ‘religion’ itself, something usually given scant attention in discussions of Hume.
If it is to be usable, a sound constructive project cannot simply materialize out of thin air: it must rely on historical evidence and corroborate with discursive trends. Locating the seeds for our proposal to build a provisional notion ‘true religion’ from Hume’s thought in efforts that precede his work could be helpful. In this regard, Cicero’s approach to religion and the discourse after it is of some use. Hume relied on the conventions of religious discourse post-Cicero by deploying the framework ‘true’ versus ‘false’ concerning religion and assuming that religion was a unique feature of human nature. At the same time, he challenged some of the inherited binaries (religious and secular, God and nature, self and world, metaphysical and empirical) and questioned the epistemological aspirations of the category ‘religion’ in modern discourse. Constructing a Humean true religion from the generative fragments of his work illuminates two crucial insights for our larger concern with this discourse that sometimes remain opaque in secondary scholarship of Hume: that he treats ‘religion’ as a category without a fixed meaning and that he uses the category ‘religion’ as part and parcel of a strategic enterprise. Hume approaches use of the term ‘religion’ as a question of cultural politics: he understands that discourse on religion invents and reifies domains (the religious
