18th Century: The American Enlightenment

The American Enlightenment Occurring throughout the 18th century, the American Enlightenment was an intellectual and cultural movement in the thirteen American colonies. While the exact duration of the Enlightenment is still unknown, during the years roughly between 1765 and 1818, institutions for learning developed rapidly as this movement promised to apply scientific reasoning to politics, art, religion, and literature. The American Enlightenment was strongly based off the European Enlightenment, however, philosophers and other thinkers tried to emulate it - making it something completely new and different (Reid-Maroney 2004). During this time, people became largely more skeptical of the traditional way of doing things, making way for a …show more content…
Trying to get rid of monarchism, the ideas of Christianity were threatened because philosophers argued that Christianity backed up the ideas of monarchy. Since the ideas of science were expanding, religion became less important and less valid in many people’s eyes as there was no means of validation (The American Enlightenment - Boundless Open Textbook). On the other hand, many of the Enlightenment thinkers wanted religious freedom for their denominations, leading to the abandonment of churches by the state and religious tolerance because the Constitution banned establishing a state supported religion. As it turns out, this applied mainly to the federal government, and it was still up to the states to decide if they wanted to support the churches. This was against everything that had been stood for in the …show more content…
Thought it was derived from the European Enlightenment, it still allowed for independence to come from England. There are always going to be positives and negatives stemming from it, but truthfully the Enlightenment paved the way for the existence of our country today. As it seems most of our liberalistic views have stemmed from the Enlightenment, and it had a big toll on religion and education for the most part. Our system has been widely influenced by the idea that God has no place to be forced into people’s lives, but some argue that is where our country went