Your history is skewed. It was the Enlightenment that focused the harsh light of scrutiny on biblical literalism. It was the waning influence of the church that allowed hard questions about the natural world to be explored. Belief is easy. Knowlege takes effort.You have the story wrong. People didn't think about taking the Bible literally until the enlightenment--and even then it didn't get much traction until the late 1800s. It was never a majority view, and even that minority was slipping into oblivion until some Evangelicals starting banging their drum in the 1970s about everyone taking the Bible literally. That didn't get much traction, either, but apparently you and/or your family got swept up into it.
It is a serious error to claim that biblical literalism is a result of the Enlightenment. Centuries ago, Genesis was accepted as being literally true - the evidence for evolution was ignored or misinterpreted. It was good Christians, people who accepted as a matter of course that Genesis was literally true, who found the evidence for naturalism said something else, that the Earth was much older, that life had changed over time, and that there was no world wide flood that drowned the pkanet. Accepting reason and rationality is not what creationists were ever asking. All the creation ministries require a ''statement of faith''. They are asking people to close their minds, to ignore what generations of research has discovered, and retreat to a long discredited doctrine.