The Enlightenment And The American Revolution

The Enlightenment is a difficult phenomenon to teach or explain because it seems wispy, airy, it doesn’t have clear boundaries, and it is hard to catch. Essentially, the Englightenment was an intellectual movement where everyone started to think about everything differently than they did before. It was quite revolutionary, as manifested in the American Revolution. The Enlightenment, taking place within the eighteenth century, brought with it the “modern” world. In order to understand the Enlightenment and what makes it modern, Enlightenment ideas and beliefs must be compared to the premodern world. In the premodern world, the Christian belief was that people were always sinning and the truth was clouded because of the Fall of humanity in Genesis.
Decreased mortality rates were also a factor that influenced the Enlightenment. People were living past 50 or even 60 years old because of many improvements in society like farming techniques and housing for peasants. Now, instead of believing their lives were supposed to be short and intolerable because their lives in heaven would be glorious, they had extra time. They could be a leisurely. People began to ask questions, especially toward their church leaders, many of whom were bad people or leaders. The Protestant Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, and longer life expectancies were all precursors to the Enlightenment. The Scientific Revolution was also a major part of the Enlightenment. For example, beliefs on planetary motion changed thanks to Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler. Rather than the planets moving in a circular orbit with a consistent speed around the earth, scientific evidence revealed that the planets actually had an elliptical orbit with varying speeds around the sun. Newton’s discovery of gravity was also quite influential in reshaping the way everyone thought about falling
Atheists and agnostics became more prevalent, especially after 1800. Elite people felt pride in their changing religious beliefs, as if it wasn’t “cool” or “fashionable” to believe in a relational God anymore. With all of this background and explanation of the Enlightenment, it is easier to understand the context in which America emerged. The Enlightenment provided optimism and hope. People wondered what could be changed to make the world a better place. This was significantly different from the European kings who had been perfectly content with no change. Leaders in the United States do the opposite; they promise change for the better. It was a revolutionary idea that America wanted nothing to do with kings. It was also strange to want to elevate the common people by giving everyone rights in order to even the playing field between the wealthy and poor. The American Revolution was the political rollout of the Enlightenment, showing what Enlightenment ideals look like in practice, and making America a radically different kind of