Prof. Jeffrey Stout - Abolitionism, Political Religion, and Secularism

Professor Jeffrey Stout, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Abolitionism, Political Religion, and Secularism". It is the fourth lecture in the series 'Religion Unbound: Ideals and Powers from Cicero to King’.

If the Enlightenment had actually separated religion from politics, subsequent struggles over slavery would have had less to do with religion than they did. It was not until the early 1850s that a movement called ‘secularism’ emerged. Under the influence of Comte, some of its first defenders proposed a ‘religion of humanity’ to perform the public functions long performed by Christianity. Other secularists agreed that Christianity should be removed from politics, but did not expect a substitute for it to be agreed upon, and proposed either privatizing or eliminating religion.