Hume presents “superstition” and “enthusiasm” as two aberrational “corruptions of true religion.” Nonetheless, no alert reader could fail to suspect that Hume in fact believes that these two ideal–typical extremes describe a continuum of religious possibilities that comprehends the totality of religions known throughout history. The “superstitious” give power to priests in the hope of compensating for their own unworthiness to communicate with God; the “enthusiastic” whip themselves up into a state of unshakeable conviction of their religious competence to interact directly with God, without reliance on the higher competence of priests. All known religions fall somewhere between the poles of this continuum. Even if one were persuaded that in Hume's view there is the hypothetical possibility of a “philosophical religion” elevated above this continuum of false religions, Hume makes very clear that such a philosophical religion is morally, politically, culturally, and historically irrelevant: Religion just is (one variety or another of) false religion. (Hume would have found it unimaginable that fully secular societies were on the horizon, historically speaking; he writes that although “it will probably become difficult to persuade [nations in a future age] that any human, two-legged creature could ever embrace [principles as absurd as the doctrine of Transubstantiation], it is a thousand to one, but these nations themselves shall have something full as absurd in their own creed.”)

Hume directly challenges the idea of a civil religion. (Admittedly, nothing is ever entirely “direct” in Hume, for he adopts a whole range of ingenious literary devices to mask the directness of his challenge.) In the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, Section XI, the question is posed in terms of whether the atheist inquiries of a philosopher like Epicurus can proceed “in great harmony” with the society in which such philosophers live. Hume states, in his own voice, the question, namely whether Epicurean subversion of civic beliefs (“the established superstition”) “loosen[s], in a great measure, the ties of morality, and may be supposed, for that reason, pernicious to the peace of civil society.” Hume puts the answer to this challenge in the mouth of “a friend who loves skeptical paradoxes.” The so-called friend aims to demonstrate that “when, in my philosophical disquisitions, I deny a providence and a future state, I undermine not the foundations of society.”