What were Edward Gibbon’s views on religion?

Edward Gibbon’s views on religion were characterized by skepticism and a commitment to treating faith as a phenomenon of human experience rather than divine revelation. While he was not a militant agnostic, he held little sympathy for those who believed in supernatural intervention, often treating such matters with irony in his historical writing.1

In his masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon famously attributed the decay of the Greco-Roman world to the "triumph of barbarism and religion," viewing the rise of Christianity as a significant factor in the empire's moral and political decline. This critical perspective, particularly in the 15th and 16th chapters, sparked controversy and led to attacks from contemporaries who feared his skepticism threatened the established order.1

Earlier in his life, Gibbon experienced a brief, purely intellectual conversion to Roman Catholicism as a teenager, which led his father to send him to Lausanne to be tutored by a Calvinist minister. He eventually abjured this faith and returned to the Protestant communion, though he later described this as a suspension of his religious inquiries.2