The 16th- and 17th-century European wars of religion may serve as an illustration of Kant's claim, expressed in the First Supplement to “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch”, that religion provides one of the means by which Nature introduces divisions between people(s). As a reaction to this series of religious conflicts, the 18th century witnessed the emergence of a secularising tendency, advocated especially by the intellectuals that Jonathan Israel has featured as champions of the “Radical Enlightenment”: not only the French “philosophes” but also, and primarily, the “Spinozist circles” accross Europe and Northern America. Although it remains contentious what this secularising tendency actually consisted in – as Jonathan Sheehan has made clear, historians still debate to what extent enlightenment as a process was hostile to, and to what extent it entailed redefining religion as such – I will argue that there is an important sense in which we can take Kant to have contributed to this project. More specifically, this would be due to Kant's endorsing a radically new way of thinking about religion. Accordingly – to mention but a few examples of this reconception – already in his 1775 correspondence with Johann Caspar Lavater, Kant questions the view that the Scriptures have much informational or cognitive value; instead, very much like Spinoza in the “Theologico-Political Treatise”, he pictures them as a source of moral instruction. In “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?”, an essay addressing the so-called pantheism controversy, he emphasises that all our putative experiences of the supernatural must be examined as to their conformity with the idea of the Divine, originating from reason. Moreover, since Kant defines religion (in “Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason”, “The Conflict of the Faculties”, and the “Metaphysics of Morals”) as a system of moral duties regarded as divine commands, he is entitled to claim that there can be only one universal religion (as there can be only one universal morality). Grounding religion in reason and endowing it with universal purport are the strategies by means of which Kant might be taken, to use the words of Margaret Jacob, to “defang [it] of [its] bellicosity”, that is, of its intrinsic potential for generating conflicts between people(s), which would situate him closer to the Radical Enlightenment project than scholars such as Israel would deem. In my paper, I will also try to critically assess what I consider to be Kant's contribution to this project, as well as the strategies he employs.
