In her book Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (2010), Sarah Apetrei made an accurate and fearless criticism: “There is something slightly grating, something nigglingly unsatisfactory about the expressions used by many historians to describe the cultural interplay between women and religion” (2010, 27), and by “historians,” one may include literary critics. “But many recent scholars while recognizing the partisan agenda, are unconcerned with Wollstonecraft’s personal belief,” Lisa Plummer Crafton noted in her scholarship on the debate about the French Revolution in English literature, “American scholars, especially, and those who to Wollstonecraft via liberal feminism, place Wollstonecraft in a secular framework dominated by the language of rights” (1997, 30). As an example, she critiqued Gary Kelly’s own treatment of Wollstonecraft as a Revolutionary feminist writer (1992) in which she accuses him, with foundation, for being like “many writers on early feminists” in “explain[ing] away” religious references an assuming that “the argument is stronger without them” (30). She also noticed that especially “twentieth-century liberal feminism” has chosen to ignore Wollstonecraft’s religious beliefs. Those who have written on her treat religion as “predictable or irrational” and that it “does not ‘count’ as political” (30).

And to cite just one more of several who have observed the anti-Christian climate of the Postmodern Age:

It is not that the biographers and academics have failed to address Wollstonecraft’s beliefs, doubts, doctrines, and religious practices; indeed, all of them have had much to say on this topic; however, most of them summarily replicate Godwin’s comments on Wollstonecraft and her religion, without considering what Wollstonecraft conveyed about her beliefs throughout her works and letters. Many of them have been too quick to suppose that once Wollstonecraft had become truly “enlightened,” she had very little need for Christianity as if those that subscribed and subscribe to religious faith, respectively, were and are only ignorant, superstitious, and narrow-minded.