The Enlightenment and the Origins of Religious Toleration
Lynn Hunt
Summary
Religious toleration in Europe began as a practical measure taken by governments that could not enforce religious conformity. Over the course of the eighteenth century religious toleration gradually evolved into freedom of religion and became one of the rights that came to be called human rights. Is all the credit (or blame) due to the intellectual movement known as the Enlightenment, as both its adherents and its detractors argued at the time? Without unduly minimizing the impact of Enlightenment writings on the subject, a broader explanation needs to be developed, in particular one that calls attention to the influence of visual representations of the diversity of religious practices around the world.
Travel literature has long been recognized as an important influence on Enlightenment thought and on the development of new ideas about religion. Freedom of religion as a human right depends on the establishment of some emotional distance from one's own religion and the ability to think comparatively about religions, both of which grew out of travel literature. Freedom of religion would be meaningless if individuals were not conceivable as agents making choices about belief, and they could only be conceived as such if religion was something external to them. Travel literature helped Europeans distance themselves from their own religion, to see religion in the plural as a cultural system rather than a conviction about absolute truths.
Printed images - intaglio prints produced on a printing press with movable type - began to accompany travel literature at the end of the sixteenth century. Engravings and etchings conveyed knowledge about other religions that could not be gleaned in the same way from texts. They made it possible for viewers to identify with or at least imagine the practices of other religions. By focusing on the prints in Jean Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart's Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-1737) [Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the All the Peoples of the World], it is possible to see how a new visual understanding of religion emerged in the course of the eighteenth century and how Enlightenment notions of religious toleration could develop into truly revolutionary laws about freedom of religion.
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