Thomas Kidd is not bullish on the Enlightenment. “The Enlightenment is an ideologically loaded term that implies that much of the western intellectual tradition before The Enlightenment was ‘dark.’ Much of that tradition was, of course, Christian. ‘The Enlightenment’ presupposes an arc of history toward secular democratic scientific liberalism.”

Today, he recommends five books on how this movement influenced Americans and the Founders. Here’s one of his recommendations:

Jeffry Morrison, John Witherspoon and the Founding of the American Republic (2005). From one of our finest scholars of Christianity and the Founding, I might also recommend Morrison’s volume on George Washington’s political philosophy. But here Morrison assesses the broad significance of Witherspoon, Princeton’s president and the only pastor to sign the Declaration of Independence, and his defense of the “public interest of religion.”