Modern Believing

Abstract

This paper discusses the contribution of Christian spirituality to the emergence of modern ‘selfhood’ in a period typically associated with secular reasoning and loss of faith – the Enlightenment. It argues that radical theology and heterodox piety served to inspire and empower a psychology of resistance to established authority, secular and religious. The ‘aggressive virtue’ of figures such as Baruch Spinoza and Mary Wollstonecraft thus emerges as an expression of faith, not doubt. Such findings can contribute to a richer and more historical understanding of modernity as a war of religious ideas, not a war on religion.