In this chapter we turn our attention to Hume's approach to religion, an area where, as in studies of his moral and political philosophy, the imagination has received little attention from commentators despite the prominent role it plays in many of his discussions. The literature has tended to focus on specific substantive areas, such as the nature of religious belief, Philo's ‘reversal’ at the end of the Dialogues, and the essay on miracles in the first Enquiry, along with attempts to decipher the nature of any religious beliefs he might himself have held: Hume has been characterised variously as an ‘atheist’, an ‘aesthetic theist’, a ‘philosophical theist’, an ‘agnostic’, an ‘attenuated deist’, a ‘moral atheist’, a ‘religious sceptic’ and a ‘sceptical fideist’.

As with the scholarly focus on specific areas of Hume's approach to morals and politics, addressing the subject of religion in many instances does not require consideration of the imagination directly, although the extent to which it has been passed over – even in book-length studies of the subject – is still surprising. In some ways, moreover, religion is the most difficult area in which to identify precisely the place Hume assigns the imagination, not only because of the well-known interpretive quandaries endemic to deciphering his enigmatic writings on the subject but also to the very topic of religion itself, which, as Hume acknowledges explicitly, poses special problems for the philosopher. In ‘theological reasonings’ we are ‘strangers in a strange land’, as Philo says early in the Dialogues, travellers who not only seek objects ‘too large for our grasp’, but who do so without the compass of ‘common sense and experience’ that guides methods and strengthens conclusions when considering trade, morals, politics or criticism (DNR 1.10). Hume almost certainly lost whatever personal commitment he ever had to Christianity while still in his teens, but his many writings on religious matters suggest that he felt ‘constrained, ever and again, almost in spite of himself’, as Kemp Smith puts it, ‘to speculate anew on it. It was so many-sided and so ambiguous in its manifestations, so puzzling in its lack of conformity to the other, more ordinary, aspects of human existence!’