Toward a Humean True Religion. Andre C. Willis

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 the “frailty of human reason” (NHR, 15.12).

      Hume’s 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