ABSTRACT
In the context of protracted violence between the European churches of the seventeenth century, there were good reasons for a flight from religious claims to authority (Stout 1981). The religion of the day had demonstrated itself incompetent to deal with the complexities of politics, and the Enlightenment’s drive to secularise philosophy and public discourse was a reasonable outcome. Questioning the authority of religion has been a constitutive feature of modern Western culture ever since.
