Two things. 

First, come one come all to the website of the Princeton Seminary Center for the Study of Scottish Philosophy.  September 6-7-8 bicentennial conference on Scottish Common Sense and Natural Law Philosophy in America.  Rhetorical traditions and teaching, Witherspoon, legal language and doctrines, James Wilson, constitution ratification debates, philosophical and popular sources of the language of the Declaration, self-presentations of Patrick Henry, Washington, Richard Henry Lee, Jefferson, the concept of the natural genius and natural orator.  These are but a few of the delights that you might consider working up as an abstract for this opportunity for a funded conference.

Second.  My recent work in progress, a history of American Baptists contributions to enlightenment thought.....

Dictionary of the American Enlightenment

Mark Spencer, ed.

“Baptists”

Contributions of Baptists to American Enlightenment thought include an insistence on liberty of conscience, or “soul freedom”, a rejection of any control of the state over religious belief and practice, and a related objection even to the church’s authority to dictate, coerce, or enforce religious behavior.  Seventeenth-century American Baptists refuted colonists’ claims to Native American lands, and thereby to the legality of colonial charters based on such claims.  Many eighteenth-century American Baptists included slaves in all aspects of their religious communities, including baptism, worship, and domestic devotions (Isaac 1974). Viewed retrospectively through the lens of nineteenth and twentieth-century Baptist evangelicalism, often with a lack of emphasis upon its philosophical and political roots, the history of American Baptists has obscured attention to their first two centuries, when they contributed significantly to the formation of moral and political philosophies that were central to the founding era.

            The role of Baptists during the American evangelical enlightenment (Landsman 1991; Noll 2002) can be viewed in three overlapping historical segments: seventeenth century immigration to the Great Awakening (1610-1740); struggles for religious toleration (1680-1791); and denominational disputes before and after independence (1760-1800).  A second useful perspective has been provided by the model of multiple enlightenments during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (May 1976, Noll 2002, Pocock 1993).  Eighteenth-century Americans responded to several different enlightenments.  The moderate or rationalist enlightenment ideas of the seventeenth century were initially well received: Newton’s physics, Locke’s social contract, republican political theories of self government and reciprocal rights and duties. By the eighteenth century, however, amplifications of enlightenment ideas emphasizing human reason and empirical science, as defined by Continental and British philosophers such as Voltaire, and Hume, came to be held in disgust as skeptical, “deist” and even atheist. A third group of thinkers, including Rousseau, and Thomas Paine advanced revolutionary political theories that explicitly rejected religion. A fourth group of enlightenment thinkers, including the Scottish philosophers Frances Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart, created a synthesis of religious with moral and enlightenment rationalist thought, and advanced the ideas of common sense, social cohesion, and moral improvement that could be promoted through the pursuit of excellence in all areas of human culture: literature, philosophy, rhetoric, sermons, history.  The Scottish Enlightenment or “didactic” enlightenment program comprised a new moral philosophy, a theistic mental science, and an evangelical accommodation of enlightenment thinking (Noll 2002, 94). In America the synthesis was widely disseminated, and provided a receptiveness to the first “great awakening” beginning in the 1730s, as well as to the ideas that promoted independence from the British church and then state.

It is a great irony that New England America’s first identity as a harbor open to those escaping religious persecution became so quickly an autocratic orthodoxy. At the same time, the doctrinal sophistication that all parties brought to their debates, honed by earlier struggles with the established Church of England, attested to the conceptualization of doctrines and beliefs concerning government, political and spiritual freedom, individual conscience, and the control of scriptural interpretation. These questions would persist as subjects of spiritual as well as intellectual deliberation throughout the long eighteenth century in America. The Separatist and Baptist insistence upon “soul freedom”, liberty of individual conscience understood as a political right, free will in choosing Christ, and discernment in scriptural interpretation rested upon larger enlightenment ideas of free will, moral choice, and rejections of interpretive orthodoxies and doctrines.  Understood not just as rights but also as duties, freedom of conscience and of speech, and the practice of deliberative debate about matters of scriptural interpretation as well as constitutional law, became enshrined in founding era religious and political thinking.  In his “Liberty or Death” speech, Patrick Henry reflected the synthesis of religious beliefs and political thought that by then permeated the collective American mind. “. . .in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty towards the majesty of heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings” (1774).

Ahlstrom, Sydney F., A Religious History of the American People. (New Haven, 1972).

Forbes, Robert Pierce, “Slavery and the Evangelical Enlightenment”, in Religion and the-Debate Over Slavery, eds.  John C. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (Atlanta, 1998), pp. 2-48.

Isaac, Rhys, “Evangelical Revolt: The Nature of the Baptists' Challenge to the Traditional Order in Virginia,1765 to 1775”,  The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Jul., 1974), pp. 345-368.

Landsman, Ned C., From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture 1680-1760 (Boston 1997).

---. “Presbyterians and Provincial Society: the Evangelical Enlightenment in the West of Scotland 1740-1775”, in Sociability and Society: the Social World of the Scottish Enlightenment, Eighteenth Century Life 15 (1991), pp. 194-201.

Leonard, Bill J.,  Baptists in America, Ch 1, Beginnings.  (New York,  2005).

May, Henry L. The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976).

Murrin, John M “Religion and Politics in America from the First Settlement to the Civil War,” in Religion and American Politics from the Colonial Period to the Present, eds. Mark A. Noll and Luke E. Harlow (New York, 2007), pp. 23-46.

Noll, Mark A. America’s God, from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2002).

---. A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI, 2001).

Pocock, J. G. A., “Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760-1790, Part I: The Imperial Crisis”, in The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800, ed. Pocock (New York 1993).