Scholars have long pondered the fact that the age of enlightenment was also an age of religious awakening. Popular religious movements, many of them involving belief in direct divine inspiration (described by its critics as ‘enthusiasm’), appeared throughout the eighteenth century, and in England at least the most significant of these was almost certainly Methodism. Two ways of settling the conundrum are to maintain that the enlightenment affected only a narrow sliver of society or, alternatively, that enlightened and popular religious cultures existed in a symbiotic relationship in which each was defined in opposition to the other. According to the latter explanation, enthusiasm was, in J.G.A. Pocock’s memorable phrase, the ‘antiself of enlightenment’. In recent years, scholars have been drawn to a third kind of explanation, which posits other kinds of connection between Methodism and enlightenment. Two recent PhD theses for instance—Timothy Holgerson’s The Wesleyan Enlightenment: Closing the Gap between Heart Religion and Reason in Eighteenth Century England (Kansas State University, 2017) and Kyle Robinson’s Body and Soul of Enlightenment: John Wesley, Methodism, and the Age of Reason (University of Rochester, 2018)—have explored this line of argument, suggesting that Methodism drew on enlightened ideas to a greater extent than has been previously acknowledged. In this kind of account, Methodism and enlightenment come to be partly the products of the same developments, which makes their coexistence less surprising. This view can be made additionally plausible by stressing the clerical or conservative nature of the English enlightenment: compared to someone like D’Holbach in France, who was widely known for his atheism, John Wesley and some of his more overtly enlightened compatriots might not look so intellectually distant.