Religion: Faith in the age of reason

This essay reviews some of the key developments in research into religion since JECS was founded in 1978. In the late 1970s the dominant paradigm was to view the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason, whose principal characteristic was a secularising Enlightenment. Since then the Enlightenment itself has been reconceptualised, and scholars are more alive to the positive relationship between the Enlightenment and religion. Moreover, religion is now viewed as being crucial to politics, questions of national identity and cultural matters - in short, as being more vital to the eighteenth century in 2011 than it was in 1978. © 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.