ABSTRACT
From the safety of Protestant Enlightenment, the writers known as the English deists challenged Christianity as a revealed religion. These writers also contributed to 'Transatlantic Enlightenment' in America, specifically to an ideology, which emphasizes openness of mind, the free cultivation of letters, the extension of commerce and the growing liberality of sentiment as essential ingredients for a successful republic. As agents of reform, these writers contributed to the Enlightenment, understood as a range of ideas, values and shifts in practical learning, which occurs mainly in Europe and the Americas from about 1640 to 1830. These writers were able to be catalysts of Enlightenment in certain respects because modernity and Enlightenment interacted in complex ways, both over time and in different countries. These writers also contributed, however, to modernity in the sense of the primacy of instrumental rationality over tradition and a mode of social organization involving the differentiation of autonomous spheres.
