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INTRODUCTION

On June 6, 1764, Sir James Macdonald, Eighth Baronet of Sleat (a peninsula on the Isle of Skye in the Scottish Highlands), penned a letter from Paris. His friend David Hume, in his role of secretary to the British ambassador, was also in Paris. Hume’s writings, particularly his History of the Stuarts and Natural History of Religion, were greatly admired in France, and statesmen, visiting dignitaries, and patrons of high-society literary salons exalted him as if he were an international luminary. In fact, the entire sojourn in France—Hume’s fourth, longest visit (twenty-six months)—was marked by adulation from the French reading public. This enlivened and energized Hume. He may also have been relieved by the sentiment expressed in Sir James’s correspondence to a friend in England: “poor Hume, who on your side of the water was thought to have too little religion, is here thought to have too much.”¹

What Sir James dubs Hume’s “too much” religion is the point of departure for this book. Hume’s contribution to religious thought is generally regarded as negative. He is widely read as an infidel, a critic of the Christian faith, and an attacker of popular forms of worship. His reputation as irreligious is well forged among his readers, and his argument against miracles perennially indoctrinates thousands of first-year philosophy students. The offhanded remark of Sir James, however, whose Oxford training and cosmopolitanism earned him the nickname “the Scottish Marcellus,” reminds us that our philosophical views are, ultimately, perspectival and that religion is an interpretive concept. To the French, Hume’s writings neither confirmed that he was an atheist in the mode of D’Holbach, nor made clear that he desired to destroy the church à la Voltaire. The iconoclastic French atheists therefore took Hume’s critique of religion to be relatively mild.

Perhaps Sir James’s comment reflected the philosophes’ inclination to see Hume’s work as open to the possibility that religion could be understood as a social convention and an artifact of culture that affirmed habits of moral excellence, aimed to moderate passion-inspired beliefs, and, as a result, buttressed the stability of the civic order. To them, even mild receptivity to this concept of religion would have been troubling, for religion required submission and thereby diminished human liberty. Hume actually shared most of the philosophes’ criticisms against religious belief: he thought popular religion, in its modern sense as a philosophically legitimate system of beliefs, was mostly dangerous, and he was deeply troubled by the conventional categories of dogmatic Christianity (miracles, a supernatural deity with human attributes, etc.).

Hume took history seriously. He acknowledged religion to be a historical activity of humans in community that sometimes had pernicious outcomes and other times had virtuous ones. He may have understood himself as occupying a watershed moment when the classical notion of religio, a set of socially beneficial celebrations of the gods, was being replaced by the modern notion of religion, a system of beliefs, practices, and rules warranted by abstract thought. Treating Hume as a transitional figure between the dying legacy of cultus deorum, pietas, and virtus and the emergence of the idea ‘religion’ as a set of epistemically true yet speculative claims repositions the relative weight of his antireligious sentiment. Instead of relying on personal animus, this move allows that both historical and discursive forces were central for his invective against religion. The distinction between modern conceptions of religion that sought philosophical legitimation and the classical idea of religio that was marked by the capacity to stabilize sociopolitical order was partially reflected in Hume’s bifurcated approach. As a modern thinker, he sometimes took religion to be a broad, neutral phenomenon eminently suited for cross-cultural and transhistorical study that had become corrupt in its contemporary popular manifestations. Yet the classical influence on his thought led him, at other times, to consider religion to be a particular virtue that could serve ethical formation in spite of its rampant distortions. This helps us understand why, on the one hand, Hume advanced a derisive critique of popular religious beliefs yet, on the other, he encouraged the virtue of moderate passions in our religious endeavors (as well as our philosophical and political ones). The dynamic oscillations of Hume’s thought project—his veritable attempt to expose the severe limitations of abstract thought and false philosophy and, at the same time, his quest to promote the possibilities of reflective imagination and true philosophy—are accentuated by paying close attention to his handling of religion, which follows from his interrogation of modern philosophy.

Hume challenged false philosophy as abstruse thought by showing that its foundational claims for truth were, on its own standards, unjustifiable. He called, instead, for a reflective turn toward nature and common life—what he named “true philosophy”—to gain a clearer sense of the sources of our ideas and beliefs. Hume’s acute sense of the bidirectional historical tendencies (both classical and modern) tugging at his philosophical consciousness along with his temperament as a thinker coalesced in ways that made his thought project unique. His notion ‘true philosophy’ was as illuminating an ideal as its appearance was elusive. Its sources were uncommon, and its content—humility, greatness of mind, and benevolence—unusual. More exceptionally, true philosophy might, on rare occasion, invite religion to its “proper office,” which Hume named “true religion,” following the discursive parameters of his day. Hume did not detail what he meant by true religion. We may reasonably presume, however, based on the overall emphasis of his project, that a Humean true religion might preserve the best of classical religion updated, without the epistemic insecurities of modern philosophy summoned by commitments to rational certainty and moral realism. Too thin for converts and too mild for most religious believers, Hume’s true religion manifested only rarely and was mostly an ideal form. Perhaps he took true religion to be something like a (classical) virtue warranted by the (modern) conventions of common life. He may have thought of it as true not because it reflected epistemic certainty but because the outcome of its beliefs could marshal Europe into an age of peace and (true) Enlightenment. That this was very unlikely (as Hume admitted) does not nullify the possibility that a constructive project based on Hume’s grappling with religion might be of contemporary use for the philosophy of religion.

Most philosophers of religion hold the view that when it came to religion, Hume was simply a devastating critic. Scholars who take this position, however, cannot deny the warm references to true religion in his thought. Is true religion a throw-away category in Hume—empty or insincere—a mere fig leaf hiding his irreligion? Or is it a bit more—an inchoate suggestion about how we might properly conceive religion? The following argument assesses Hume’s philosophy of religion with an eye toward its generative value for contemporary religious thought. I am neither agnostic on the question of Hume’s sincerity in his endorsement of true religion nor silent on whether he uses it as a fig leaf. On my reading, it seems that the category ‘true religion’ fits neatly into Hume’s philosophical schema and is a requirement of his bifurcated approach to religion. Further, I demonstrate that it was crucially deployed in the discursive tradition of which Hume was a part. If we can support the idea that true religion is a sincere, genuine category of Hume’s thought that signified a nonconventional form of religion, then reconceiving this idea in Hume’s work might support generative work in the contemporary study of religion. In other words, to the question, “Can the rarely interrogated constructive components of Hume’s philosophy of religion, his sense of religion properly conceived, be of any use for contemporary discourse in religious studies?,” this book answers “Yes.”

Since Hume’s lush writing offers little explicit positive content for his notion of ‘true religion,’ the reader must decode his suggestions for insights regarding religion’s ‘proper office.’ To make some provisional claims about what a rare form of religion might look like if it reflected a Humean attitude, we might cobble together disparate aspects of his work. Relieved of its claims for metaphysical legitimacy, released from morality derived from fear of divine authority, and unrestricted by a fixed set of worship practices, religion appears quite bare in Hume’s work. Yet in this very austerity we might find a way to reconceive of religion as a socially beneficial convention thoroughly grounded in history and community with little interest in competing with science in the quest for epistemic truth. Broadly speaking, this approach correlates with contemporary work in religious studies that refuses to treat religion as a system of beliefs or a transhistorical essence. The speculative argument that follows submits that based on the broad contours of his project, this fertile conception of religion might be constituted by a genuine theism, calm passions, and a practical morality. And, thought of this way, it could be of some use to contemporary theories of religion.

Hume’s early philosophical writings and his works on religion are, of course, central for any constructive endeavor based on his work. It behooves us, however, to look beyond these formal writings for a more complete sense of what Hume may have meant when he referred to the “proper office” of religion.² Hume’s numerous letters provide an important angle into his more private, inner thoughts and give us a key to the Humean attitude; they display his congenial and broad intentions as a thinker. Both his fundamental respect for certain forms and practices of religion as well as his critical disposition toward other forms and elements is evident in the letters.³ Hume’s historical writings reflect this same approach: they attack examples of “modern” religion and its empty rituals yet affirm religion when it facilitates the development of virtuous character and practical morality.⁴ Hume’s overall account of religion might be summed up in this famous statement from one of his essays: “That the corruption of the best things produces the worst, is grown into a maxim, and is commonly proved, among other instances, by the pernicious effects of superstition and enthusiasm, the corruptions of true religion” (EMPL, 10.73). To some degree, all genres of his work take on this bifurcated attitude regarding religion. They reflect that Hume conceived of religion in two basic ways: as both a destructive force in human society (vulgar religion) and a constructive force for human society (true religion).

Assessing Hume’s dual sense of religion sanctions our keeping track of the extraordinary breadth of his work. To do this in a Humean way we should honor the emblems of Hume’s attitude: the direct challenge to abstruse and philosophical reason, the commitment to historicism and perspectivalism, and the investment in outcomes and utility over rational certainty and analytic clarity. Sifting Hume’s trenchant condemnation of ‘false religion’ through this Humean filter helps us comprehend his criticism and grasp his indirect suggestions for a true religion. Critics might wonder if the Humean approach is too loose to ferret out a consistent dual line of argument such as I have proposed and be worried that the Humean attitude, with its strident critique of reason, is actually a commitment to irrationalism. Neither of these concerns troubles me. Hume’s critique of rationality is not a mere rejection of reason; it is an assault on the furnishing of reason with metaphysical and normative authority. As a ‘true’ philosopher, Hume believed that abstract reason was useful in revealing “relations of ideas” (T, 1.2.5.20), not “matters of fact” (T, 1.3.7.3). He maintained that our behavior was grounded in habits of reflective common life and that these habits were derived from the passions and social conventions mitigated through the psychological concept “sympathy.” The Humean approach, then, undermines the content and temperament of those who dogmatically venerate philosophical reason. At the same time, it exhibits firm loyalty to reasonableness and rational scrutiny. The following argument sustains this commitment: it venerates the reasonable and the reflective as well as the social and the passional over the demands of abstract rational thought and dogmatic metaphysical reasoning. Additionally, it is largely sympathetic to Hume and evades persistent criticisms of his arguments and condemnations of his writings. My aim is to interpret Hume’s thought in a way that makes the best sense of it to see what we might learn anew. Philosophical subtlety and intellectual prestige, as Hume’s approach confirmed, should not be tied to the capacity to debunk arguments and expose gaps in logic. Following Hume’s example, we might consider what it means to operate from the idea that good interpretation is an act of compassion requiring intellectual courage and heroic insight, what he called “greatness of mind” (EPM, 7.4).

So as not to distort the author’s view, sound interpretative work must be based on the full spectrum of available evidence, honest about its intentions, and clear about its limitations. The standard interpretation regarding Hume and religion situates him as the Enlightenment secularist and atheist critic of religion. Although partially true, this is too narrow a view of the existing evidence and it reflects something of a general bias against religion. Most important, this reading of Hume renders his writing barren for generative work in religious studies. An interpretation that attends to the overall arc of his thought project and refuses to take a narrow focus positions us to see that Hume was not simply a detractor of popular religion, a moralist devoid of a sense of the use-value for religion, or a philosopher obsessed with causal logic. Again, Hume was certainly a critic of popular religion: it is undeniable that the experience of evangelical Presbyterianism soured him and that he was concerned that his native Scotland would be further embittered by the Kirk. He made unequivocally horrible and reductive statements about Catholicism, besmirched enthusiastic believers of false religion, and attacked all religious sects that increased factionalism in society. At the same time, however, he contended that religion was a persistent and inescapable fact of human history based on (but not original to) human nature; he showed awareness that, as a social convention, religion could be a potential source of happiness for human beings and a possible benefit to the social order; and he did not challenge that religion provided psycho-emotional support for the vast majority of human beings. These aspects of religion may have formed the basis for his mild suggestion ‘true religion.’

Toward a Humean True Religion attempts to demonstrate that if we take true religion to be constituted by the positive conclusions of Hume’s philosophy of understanding, his thoughts on the passions, and his notion of moral utility, then we might discover its worth for contemporary debates in religious studies. More specifically, the thesis here is that we might construct a true religion based on Hume’s work, particularly his ideas of basic theism, his sense of the calm passions, and his commitment to character development. I offer my argument as one possible, usable interpretation, not as a definitive conviction about Hume’s intentions. I am more strongly committed, however, to the negative claim: we must object to arguments that reduce Hume to simply an atheist or a skeptic. By providing some constituent yet provisional features of a Humean-inspired true religion, it is my hope that we might be able to bring Hume off of the sidelines of philosophical discourse of religion and fruitfully deploy his thought for current debates in theology, religion, and morality.

Hume and True Religion

That Hume sparingly mentions the term “true religion” in his corpus should not derail our attempt to understand his notion, for Charles Taylor reminds us that Hume “was like the radical Aufklärer” in that issues “of significance were not acknowledged” directly in his texts. A caveat from Isabel Rivers is also instructive. She discloses that the overdeveloped critical frameworks of radical Enlightenment thinkers were unable to support the generative elements of their thought. Further, Donald Livingston argues that Hume valued the silent wisdom that inhered in customs and the tacit knowledge of common life.⁵ To fairly consider Hume’s suggestion for religion then, we must pay attention to what is explicit in his work as well as that which he states indirectly, all the while being responsible to his overall concerns.

In a preface to the second volume of his History of England (which he later excised) Hume stated that true religion was a “rare form” of religion that “regulates men’s hearts” and “humanizes their conduct” and that its “proper office” was to “reform Men’s lives, to purify their hearts, to inforce all moral duties, and to secure obedience to the laws and civil magistrate.”⁶ His historical investigations led him to conclude that the disposition for religion in general permeated humankind. In eighteenth-century Scotland most people practiced what Hume thought of as vulgar or false religion (mostly Presbyterian Calvinism). He acknowledged the importance of local customs and recorded the practical results of believers in his historical work. We might think of his approach as melioristic: he paid attention to the outcomes of religious beliefs and aimed to reduce barbaric ones. Accordingly, Hume quietly held that the best way for humans to be religious was through a rare true religion. Our quest to assign Humean content to this idea might begin by rehearsing the distinction between his notions of ‘true’ and ‘false’ religion, a bifurcation rooted in, as I mentioned earlier, the constitutive difference between his notions of true and false philosophy and the fact of his historical positioning between the Latin and modern notions of religion. On the first, constitutive point, for Hume, true religion parallels true philosophy. The word “true” here is not a reference to epistemic status, for the “truth” is well beyond the reach of the human mind. Hume had more of a pragmatic notion of the true: he believed the true was that which affirmed common traditions over abstruse reason and suggested a commitment to the moderation of our beliefs and behaviors for the effective functioning of the individual and society. False religion, implicit in false philosophy, was built on abstract metaphysics, contained superstition and enthusiasm, and posited a supernatural deity worthy of worship. It led to social division and political disharmony. These two religious worldviews, the true and the false, represent distinct approaches to balancing the role of custom with autonomous reason in relation to a deity, invest differently in the project of moderation of the passions, and forge distinct concerns in the regulation of our moral behavior. In other words, true religion and false religion differ in their attitudes toward reason, the passions, and morality.⁷

On the second historical point, in Hume’s time the modern notion of religion as a system of beliefs seeking epistemic confirmation through speculative reason stood against the fading classical idea of religio as a set of public, ritualized ceremonies that enhanced excellence of character in service of (the artificial virtue) justice. These two notions give a historical dimension to Hume’s repeated distinctions between false religion (also referred to as popular religion or vulgar religion) and the rare true religion. Cicero powerfully affirmed the social utility and the public customs of religio, the authority of the ancestors, and the interests of the state in religious matters. He took religio to be a virtue for civic society and its opposite, superstitio, to be a vice. In many ways, Hume extended this classical way of thinking about religion. Hume’s Ciceronian influence, combined with the few observations he made about religion’s proper office, allow us to postulate that the development of character and the stability of the social order would have been central for his true religion had he developed it further. His modern sensibilities endorsed a new philosophical approach and thus a more skeptical theism, deeper individual and protopsychological investment and thus calmer passions, and a morality that was functional for not just preservation of the state but the stability of conventions of everyday common life. Still, Hume neither lauded any conception of religion to the masses nor endorsed his idea ‘true religion’ as a mode of personal religious practice. True religion was a rare, quiet convention that, at its best, silently contributed to social harmony.

To foreground the distinction between true and false religion in Hume and to prioritize his self-described debt to Cicero is not to radically reread him; rather, it is to locate the foundations of the proper office of religion and reemphasize parts of his work that are often overlooked. This type of constructive interpretation extends Hume’s thought in ways that he may not have anticipated. Nevertheless, the fecundity of his work in religion should not be disregarded. If nothing else, Hume’s distinctive handling of religion makes it clear that religion is neither reducible to a set of propositional claims about the supernatural nor limited to a set of external practices that elevate a worship-worthy deity. His acceptance of the possibility that general providence (a basic sense of purposiveness in nature) is intelligible exemplifies an approach to theism that takes a middle path between militant atheists and evangelical theists of our day. This approach can be a constructive resource, along with his insights regarding sympathy and his moderate passions, for current debates in religious studies.

For Hume, history confirmed that the general sentiment for religion was an ever-present feature of the human social being (though it was secondary, and monotheism was not universal).⁸ From this it follows that we are, as far as Hume was concerned, generally religious in some form or another. The matter of human religiousness, then, was actually settled for Hume. He was not at all skeptical about the presence of religion in most human societies: he affirmed that religion was naturally derived from human passions. His critical work challenged the content of the beliefs of popular religion. It asked the question, how should religion function? In other words, Hume’s dilemma regarding religion was about the role religion should play so that we derive more benefit than harm from it. False or popular religion was the set of beliefs and practices legitimated by philosophy that reflected enthusiastic reverence for a deity and celebrated miracles. True religion might be understood, then, as an ensemble of natural beliefs that allows us to moderate our passions and develop our character. This rare form of religion makes us more Humean, that is, better able to take life as it comes, aware of our inextricable connection to our neighbors and our society, and appreciative of the mystery of nature. On my account, these are religious issues, not moral ones, and Hume’s use of the terms “true religion” and “true piety,” as well as his many mentions of a deity, religious attributes, beliefs, and so on, suggests that he wanted to be an interlocutor in the conversation on religion and not simply in the one on morality.

Hume took historical manifestations of religion to be mainly destructive. Yet religion in general—that is, the idea of religion—was neither simply good nor bad but always an admixture of both. It is quite evident that he firmly rejected revealed religion and its dramatic transformations, the myths and miracles of vulgar religion, faith narratives that supported popular piety, particular worship practices of churches, and the commandments of the Torah. His true religion, then, cannot be taken as religious in the conventional sense. His historical work, however, suggests that a worldview that “reforms” and “purifies” has religious value: it strengthens our feelings of connectedness to all, helps virtuous character development, and assists in the moderation of our passions. To be clear: I have no interest in discussing Hume’s personal struggles with Presbyterianism, nor am I interested in reading his work through the lens of Christianity. I aim, instead, to give his suggestion for religion’s proper office more use-value for debates in religious studies by foregrounding what I take to be its (potentially) generative insights.

Writers that view Hume’s positive claims about religion as insincere or ironic challenge the view that his true religion has any religious merit. They contend that he is at best inconsistent on the design argument and that his theories of the passions and morality are ethical positions, not religious ones. These readings are valid. Hume’s project does not demand to be taken on religious terms. This, however, does not foreclose the possibility that taking it on its religious merits and building from them is both warranted by his use of the term “true religion” and potentially useful for contemporary scholars in religious studies. Nor does it exclude us from raising questions about what constitutes the notion “religious merit” recycled by these writers. I hope to show that a broad reconsideration of Hume’s overall position on religion can reveal his work to be a resource for popular debates concerning religion and valuable for work in both religious studies and Hume studies. I defend against the somewhat oxymoronic reading that Hume’s true religion has no religious merit.

Contemporary Scholars on Hume

Scholarly work on the Enlightenment era takes Hume’s critique of autonomous reason as the basis for his skepticism and construes his discontent with popular religion as grounds for his atheism.⁹ These common interpretations overlook Hume’s clearly stated desire to build a science, mask the degree to which Hume despised dogmatism and atheism, and, finally, disguise his method of empirical observation, his sense of subjective dispositions, and his emphasis on probable conclusions. Two very basic examples of this tendency from general studies of the Enlightenment are Peter Gay’s insights, which overemphasize Hume’s critical project in religion and position him as the poster child for paganism; and Carl Becker’s thesis that Enlightenment thinkers were invested in substituting the concept of heaven with the idea of posterity, which misplaces Hume’s constructive project in service of that end.¹⁰ Hume was critical of autonomous, objective, and ahistorical reason, yet he was neither a pagan as Gay argues, nor an advocate of posterity as Becker suggests.

Scholars who have made valuable and highly visible contributions in Hume studies for the last twenty years—particularly Peter Millican, Janet Broughton, and Galen Strawson—mention but do not focus on Hume’s bifurcated approach to religion. Terence Penelhum and Keith Yandell, two noted scholars that closely attend to Hume’s epistemology, do treat his philosophy of religion.¹¹ Both thinkers read Hume’s religious writings filtered through his theory of ideas as articulated in the Treatise and first Enquiry. Their detailed analyses emphasize his critique of the rational foundations of religion, the contradictions and inconsistencies of his statements on religious belief, how his theory of belief fits or does not fit into his theory of ideas, his use of irony and sense of theism, and the “absence or near-absence of positive psychological considerations” for religion in his work.¹² Penelhum and Yandell have greatly improved our understanding of Hume’s philosophy of religion in important ways. Their conclusions, however, pay scant attention to the role of his philosophical writings for the possibility of genuine theism, and they do not discuss the passional grounds of religion. Thus they largely preclude using Hume as a constructive resource for contemporary debates in religion and underestimate the value of his category ‘true religion.’ Overall, their work reflects a larger trend: to position Hume as generally irreligious.

Two recent contributions, Paul Russell’s The Riddle of Hume’s “Treatise”: Skepticism, Naturalism, and Irreligion and Thomas Holden’s Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism, follow in the trajectory of work by Penelhum and Yandell in that they directly explore religious dimensions of Hume’s thought. These works are immensely valuable. Russell’s well-developed argument for Hume’s “irreligion” is compelling, but he discusses only Hume’s Treatise and says little about religion’s proper office.¹³ Holden’s text is also nicely argued and quite persuasive. It attends to the entirety of Hume’s corpus and argues for Hume’s moral atheism. Both books largely overlook Hume’s bifurcated approach to religion and confirm the popular philosophical bias to use Hume’s arguments as a resource against religion instead of as a means to reconceive it. Perhaps there is a hidden agenda in the common move by philosophers to emphasize Hume’s critique of religion and avoid the plethora of possibilities generated by his explicit belief that religion is coterminous with human life. More likely, this approach reflects an outdated way of conceiving religion that largely has been abandoned by scholars in religious studies. What Russell reads as Hume’s irreligion is simply Hume’s undermining of orthodox Christian deity and Biblical religion. Similarly, Holden reduces moral atheism to Hume’s belief that the conventional Christian God and moral worldview are not the sources of our moral norms. It does not follow, from either Russell’s or Holden’s argument, that Hume was against religion at all times and in all forms. Hume was explicit about this. He was against ‘vulgar’ ways of thinking about religion, shunned the beliefs of popular religion, and challenged the grounds of conventional Christianity. Russell and Holden have illuminated new ways of thinking about Hume’s critique of religion. They are not useful resources, however, for the generative work to be done in the philosophy of religion.

To be fair, Yandell, Penelhum, Holden, and Russell do not intend their work to be a resource for constructive work in religious studies. This effort is the domain of religious studies scholars who take religion as a broad and complicated human enterprise always mixed with beauty and terror. At their best, scholars in the study of religion begin with the implicit understanding that religion is not entirely exhausted by the variety of its historical appearances. Thus, they assess various worldviews that have expansive concepts of deities (e.g., Wicca and nontheistic religions such as Buddhism), moral systems independent of theism, and nonceremonial approaches to the world with one eye on history and another on the future. Attending to certain ideas and practices as religious in this way is a means of investigating the wide range of human symbolic activities that some Westerners have denoted as sacred over time and anticipating ways in which these imaginative constructions might shift in content and outcome for the future. Broadly speaking, it is these sorts of interests that often fuel some of the most useful work in the study of religion, and Hume’s constructive interventions have been left out of this conversation. This book aspires, in part, to revive his work in light of these interests. My hunch, as I began thinking about Hume in this way, was that reading his work with this kind of investment might yield something useful for discourse in religious studies. Building on the work of Hume scholars, I link Donald Livingston’s idea of “general providence,” Joseph Godfrey’s notion of moderate “fundamental hope,” and Annette Baier’s sense of Hume’s “practical morality,” to argue that it does and that these are the likely pillars that constitute religion’s “proper office.”¹⁴

J. C. A. Gaskin and Antony Flew have treated Hume’s religious thought in detail and in connection with his philosophical investments. They contend that Hume is neither a skeptic nor an atheist yet they allow for an “attenuated deism,” a set of “natural beliefs,” and a category called “true religion” in his work.¹⁵ Like Penelhum and Yandell (and Russell and Holden), Gaskin and Flew convincingly present Hume’s critical disposition regarding religion: he attributed negative value to its historical manifestations; he strongly argued against central tenets of conventional Christianity (namely, miracles and a particular providence); he made powerful criticisms of superstition and enthusiasm; and he showed little regard for the traditional conceptions of the divine. Unlike Penelhum and Yandell, Gaskin and Flew read across Hume’s entire corpus (including his History of England and his letters) and represent his thought on religion in its diversity. Their presentation of the breadth of Hume’s thought regarding religion gives readers a way to loosen the grip of skeptical interpretations that dog Hume’s reputation. Still, their obsession with Hume’s treatment of the design argument suggests they equate religion with theism and confirms that their interpretive lens for theism is constrained by an orthodox notion of theism that, by definition, fatefully consigns Hume’s perspective to irreligion.¹⁶ I rely on many of the insights provided by Flew and Gaskin. Gaskin’s tendency, however, to miss the value of Hume’s moral thought for his true religion, as well as Flew’s phenomenalist reading of Hume, delimit their potential to effectively situate him for constructive work in the philosophy of religion.¹⁷

Scholarship on Hume that places his commitment to history and nature within his broad framework and takes his philosophical, historical, and religious works seriously provides us with the best sense of his mostly implicit suggestion for religion. This is the method deployed by Donald Livingston and Annette Baier, in very different ways. Baier’s work venerates the complicated role that the passions and history play in Hume’s moral thought, while Livingston’s masterful treatment of Hume explicitly confirms Hume’s investment in both true philosophy and true religion.¹⁸ Both thinkers show an acute awareness that Hume was not a dogmatic atheist and that he was primarily invested in philosophy (that is, rational reflection) for social effects: to improve conditions of liberty by increasing stability and happiness.¹⁹ Both thinkers pay close attention to Hume’s positive description of religion and correctly privilege the view that his intellectual investments were driven by social and religious concerns as well as political considerations and philosophical strategies. The cornerstones for my argument are the basic theism Livingston grants Hume, Baier’s acknowledgment that Hume’s calm passions serve socioethical interests, and Joseph Godfrey’s idea that religious hope can be fundamental hope (what Hume would call a calm passion).

My Approach to Hume

In the introduction to his first work Hume claimed that he wanted “to establish a science . . . superior in utility to any other of human comprehension” (T, xxiii). From the beginning of his writing career, “utility” was the ultimate aim and driving force of his wide-ranging enterprise.²⁰ Against the Platonist commitment to escape time and transcend conditions, Hume’s goals were practical: he wanted to contribute ideas that enhanced common life and increased social peace. Against false metaphysics and popular religion, he was confident about the history of human propensity for both good and evil, committed to our being ensconced in a complex web of traditions, and invested in the slight possibility that we might improve conditions for generations to come. In some ways, we can say that the classic repose of stoic tranquility was transformed in Hume to a posture of equipoise: that we do our best to live in full contact with the mystery of life and remain open to its challenging vicissitudes without a paralyzing fear.

Hume’s positive project was derived from his attention to history, which confirmed that divisiveness and conflict between both individuals and societies were often based on clashing religious beliefs and nature, the set of constantly combative and generative conditions that provided the grounds for, and connected a variety of, historical events. His philosophical response to the human limitations that history revealed neither fully rejected the radicalism of the philosophes (D’Holbach, Voltaire) nor completely embraced the rationalism of the metaphysicians (Descartes). Similarly, his response to the seeming chaos of experience was neither developed completely outside of the discursive framework of the natural religion of the deists (Tindal, Morgan) nor fully independent of the moderate Presbyterianism of his clergy friends (Blair, Carlyle). We might say that Hume’s suggestion for religion—neither a prescription nor a dogmatic plan—was endowed by epistemological humility and an affirmation of common sense, a gentle hope that we could better moderate the passions, and a moral commitment to social and civic stability.

In some ways, Hume’s historically grounded challenge to autonomous reason, popular religion, and moral rationalism was also leavened by an inordinate intellectual freedom unmatched by his immediate predecessors and his peers. He was neither constrained by an overwhelming commitment to his Christian lineage nor propelled by an irresistible disdain for it. Never completely against the idea of religion, Hume targeted religion as a species of philosophy, the vulgar form of religion that provided the illusion of metaphysical certainty and ontological reliability, supplied strict codes for moral conduct, and relied on fantastical hopes and illusory fears. Hume referred to this specific form of religion (most closely known to him as Scottish Presbyterianism) as popular religion, and it, along with enthusiasm and superstition, drew his ire.

I approach Hume as a broad, synthetic thinker informed by a love of wisdom and as a seeker inspired to find a way—that he might suggest to others—to be happy without the need for otherworldly transformation or sovereign authority and without impinging on the happiness of others. Mine is neither a disengaged reading of Hume nor is it an analytic approach: I try to write from inside the lived experience of joy, frustration, and laughter that I have as I read him. He venerated passionate engagement, energetic style, and lively provocation over disengaged reason, analytic argument, and stale professionalism. He aimed to be emotionally persuasive more than he did to be logically sound and seemed not to mind having contradictions in his writing. Hume strove, against the grain, for a kind of humaneness with his pen. The following argument aspires to this sort of Humean style. My encounter with the sum of Hume’s project has led me to believe it is a generative venture that inspires curiosity and aims to challenge many assumptions of the popular approaches of its day. I try to celebrate the spirit of his overall commitments and cherish his verbal dance to transform some of the textual possibilities available to him. Hume was comfortable with the complexity of human beings: our proclivity to good as well as our propensity for evil. My Humean approach takes his work as a philosophical and literary model in the way, for example, that he may have understood the work of Cicero and likely the way that Sir James understood him.

Roughly speaking, I read Hume’s epistemology as it relates to the question of theism against the logical positivists and phenomenalists who are generally concerned about the truth-value of propositions in Hume. I also take him to be a synthetic thinker about morality and the development of virtuous character against those who read him as a strict Hutchesonian about morals (someone who accepts that morals depend on an a priori moral sensibility). And I understand his theory of the passions to address not only psychological concerns but also social and political ones.²¹ Combining these elements, I hope to give a viable interpretation of a (barely stated) suggestion for religion.

Organization of the Argument

Admittedly, true religion has always been a contested term in religious discourse. Orthodox Christians use the descriptor “true religion” to refer to religious beliefs that depend on revelation. For freethinkers—many who later identified as deists—true religion was a set of religious beliefs derived from rational reflection on our experience of nature. Hume did not accept either of these views. He held little regard for religion based on revelation, interpretations of nature that led to the idea of a God with moral attributes, and a religion of reason that denied the foundational role of the passions in any human enterprise.

My first chapter is a prologue to the overall argument: it traces a particular narrative of true religion from the classical era through the English Enlightenment to Hume’s radical revision. My claim is that the traditional method of interpreting religious writers as either skeptics, critics, and atheists on one side and defenders, supporters, and institutionalizers on the other is obfuscating. I suggest a slight shift in framing: to read some as employing a hermeneutic of curiosity regarding religion and others as employing a hermeneutic of credulity.²² This allows for a richer assessment of thinkers on both sides of the religious question, and it opens our minds to the constructive components of work written by those we tend to label as critics (and summarily dismiss). Beginning with Cicero, I build a narrative of thinkers who deploy a hermeneutic of curiosity regarding religion, from second- and third-century writers Celsus and Porphyry through late medieval contributions of Hugo Grotius and Lord Herbert of Cherbury to Enlightenment figures Matthew Tindal and Thomas Morgan.

The body of my argument is given in the three chapters that follow the first one. Each attends to a feature of the speculative true religion that I am trying to build. Chapter 2 argues that Hume’s early philosophical writings presuppose a natural belief in general providence. Without the presupposition of regularity in nature (“secret springs and principles”) Hume could not have formulated his theory of ideas. I call this Hume’s basic theism and argue that it is foundational to his project and a presupposition of any science. I examine the path Hume carves between Cartesian rationalism and Pyrrhonian skepticism to demonstrate that this basic theism can evolve into either the vulgar theism of false religion or the genuine theism of true religion. I rehearse Hume’s theory of ideas and his discussion of belief to show that his causal worldview allows for the assertion that our imagination naturally projects an Author of Nature (ultimately unknowable) based on our observation of effects (with unobservable causes). This genuine theism is made intelligible in Norman Kemp Smith’s discussion of Hume’s theory of belief, which posits the category of natural belief. Thus, I can justifiably posit natural belief in genuine theism as the first leg in the stool of a Humean true religion.

In chapter 3, I discuss the discourse on the passions that Hume inherited and present his general theory of the passions. He explicitly described the category of hope—the opposite of fear—as a direct passion that occurred when “the mind by an original instinct tends to unite itself with the good, and to avoid the evil” (T, 2.3.9.2). He showed in both the Enquiry (1748) and the Natural History of Religion (1757) that this hope, always linked to fear, was the driving force behind popular religion, superstition, and enthusiasm, along with their concomitants, miracles and salvation. My intervention is to elucidate Hume’s notion of hope in light of Joseph Godfrey’s theory of hope. This exposes that Hume’s own hopes—“where experiments of this kind are judiciously collected and compared, we may hope to establish on them a science” (T, intro., 10)—were very calm and moderate. He never exhibited, in his life, letters, or work, personal hopes of the sort that he described as direct passion hopes. He consciously moderated his passions and was generally known to be of a temperate, peaceful, and congenial disposition even in the face of personal misery. This disposition, which Godfrey contends is a type of hope (fundamental hope), might be a useful component of our Humean true religion. It implies a trust in nature, and this particular kind of trust implies a belief that what we have is all we need.²³

Chapter 4 places Hume’s moral thought in the context of his immediate predecessors, that is, between the rationalists and sentimentalists. This sets up my argument, based on Annette Baier’s extensive work, for a religious sensibility in Hume’s practical morality. Hume’s conviction is that sympathy—a psychological mechanism that allows us to share the feelings of another—assists us in the development of virtuous character. Our moral lives are constituted by the exercise of this mechanism that affirms the power of the affective realm to bind us in a common, sociohistorical project for practical morality. The attainment of a feeling of social happiness leads toward approbation and the development of virtuous character. If we take this practical morality as a means of binding humans more closely, it gives us a final dimension for our Humean true religion. This aspect celebrates our natural capacity to form affective solidarity (the common point of view) and acknowledges the social constitution of our moral sentiments.

My concluding chapter discusses the possible usefulness of attending to genuine theism, practical morality, and moderate hope in Hume’s work. It highlights the closeness between Thomas Nagel’s recent naturalist teleology and Hume’s genuine theism, notes how my reading of Hume can be deployed against radical atheists and evangelicals alike, and discusses some general theories of religion amenable to my argument for Hume’s true religion. By doing so, it attempts to provide further justification for why we might benefit from having scrutinized Hume’s inchoate category ‘true religion.’ Or, to put it slightly differently, it gives Hume’s argument value for thinkers in religious studies. Philosophers have traditionally dismissed Hume’s category ‘true religion’ on the grounds that it is useless as religious worldview, that Hume was insincere in his assertions of it, or that it was a simple way to subvert religion. These approaches refuse to appreciate the breadth of religious theories, methods in the study of religion, and diversity within the history of religion. Reflection on religion demonstrates that affection-based worldviews that celebrate nature yet posit no worship content or those that have a broad sense of a deity with no attributes and refuse to stipulate a firm moral code can still be referred to as “religion.”

A general theme that runs through my argument is that the field of philosophy of religion is a mode of inquiry that perennially raises the questions of what constitutes religion and how we might talk about it. This reminds us that religion always manifests as a specific set of beliefs, actions, and reflections located in a particular tradition. These traditions are always fluid and malleable; in part, they are shaped by social forces, habits of common life, political contexts, geographical location, and so on. We should, therefore, consistently challenge our presuppositions about religion and keep track of the various commitments that we import to our discussions of it. I hope that readers will use Hume’s work as a source for reenergized discourse in the field of religious studies. If our speculative, Humean-influenced true religion is constituted by a humble philosophical theism, a moral commitment to happiness, and a moderate way of hoping, then we have extended the set of tools we have to work with in religious studies. Still, “I am apt, in a cool hour, to suspect, in general, that most of my reasonings will be more useful by furnishing hints and exciting people’s curiosity than as containing any principles that will augment the stock of knowledge that must pass to future ages” (LET, 1.16.39).