Saving Enlightenment: Jefferson’s Bible, Douglass’s Faith, and the Work of the Spirit

This article argues that Frederick Douglass’s invocations of Christian spirituality, specifically his belief in divine power and prophecy, constitute a mode of political judgment that (1) grounds his moral convictions, (2) animates his immanent critique of proslavery theology and racial science from their own stated premises, and (3) widens the scope of public reason beyond secular rationalism, scientific empiricism, and inherited religious custom. Against Thomas Jefferson’s “materialist” foreclosure of spiritual discourse, which modern scholarship risks reproducing, Douglass envisions a liberal democratic order in which prophetic spirituality can refine and expand democratic commitments. Methodologically, this article models an approach to intellectual history that treats spirituality as a mode of political reasoning in its own right, rather than as background context or rhetorical convention. Recovering this dimension of Douglass’s thought complicates narratives of secularization and reconceives Enlightenment liberalism as a framework in which faith, reason, and democracy are fundamentally imbricated.