The Evangelical Counter-Enlightenment

This contribution to the global history of ideas uses biographical profiles of 18th-century contemporaries to find what Salafist and Sufi Islam, Evangelical Protestant and Jansenist Catholic Christianity, and Hasidic Judaism have in common. Such figures include Muḥammad Ibn abd al-Waḥhab, Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf, Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Israel Ba’al Shem Tov. The book is a unique and comprehensive study of the conflicted relationship between the “evangelical” movements in all three Abrahamic religions and the ideas of the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment. Centered on the 18th century, the book reaches back to the third century for precedents and context, and forward to the 21st for the legacy of these movements. This text appeals to students and researchers in many fields, including Philosophy and Religion, their histories, and World History, while also appealing to the interested lay reader.

• Salafist and Wahhabi Islam
• evangelical Protestantism
• Jansenist Catholicism
• Hasidic Judaism
• philosophical Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism
• intellectual history of religion in the 18th century
• history of religions
• religion in the 18th Century
• abrahamic religions

• History Teacher, Dean of Humanities, (emeritus) Saint Ann’s School, Brooklyn, USA

  William R. Everdell

William R. Everdell is an American teacher and author.  His three prior books have also been on the history of ideas.  He has written articles on French historical studies and History of European Ideas, and is the author of numerous reviews in journals including Studies in the Novel and the New York Times Book Review.

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