Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of science and religion but to the flexibility, in both the physical and metaphysical senses, of the human brain.

The revolutionary idea that children have rights was born in the Enlightenment, but the practical application of that concept, in schools and within families, was very much a product of the progressive side of the Victorian era.

I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice, and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they represent the Divine will.

The most regrettable consequence of the discontinuity in the record of American rationalist dissent is that its moral lessons must be relearned in every generation. It is telling that even so voracious a reader as Garrison was beyond the midpoint of his life when he discovered his spiritual ancestor Thomas Paine. When your own mind is your own church, it can take a very long time for future generations to make their way to the sanctuary.

But secularists are not value free; their values are simply grounded in earthly concerns rather than in anticipation of heavenly rewards or fear of infernal punishments.

Ingersoll’s spotless reputation as a husband and father was a source of considerable frustration to those who would have loved to catch him in bed, dead or alive, with a young woman. One conservative critic, miffed by the many references in Ingersoll’s obituaries to his happy family life, grumbled that it was “not easy to perceive just why his private virtues have been so breathlessly brought forward and detailed with so much strenuous insistence; for surely husbands who are faithful, fathers who are loving, and friends who are generous and sympathetic, are not so rare in this our world as to make of them phenomena to be noted in the annals of the age.

Deists of Jefferson’s generation fought tax support for religious institutions at a time when the only influential American religious sects were Protestant. Their nineteenth-century successors were unquestionably appalled when the Roman Catholic Church became the first large religious denomination to establish its own school system in America, and they viewed the growth of Catholic schools as a threat to the expansion of public education—a major goal of all social reformers after the Civil War.

For if freethinkers did not have a political platform, they nevertheless agreed on a wide range of social, cultural, and artistic concerns, which generated such fierce debate in the decades after the Civil War that they would form a template for the nation’s “culture wars” a century later. These included free political speech; freedom of artistic expression; expanded legal and economic rights for women that went well beyond the narrow political goal of suffrage; the necessity of ending domestic violence against women and children; dissemination of birth control information (a major target of the punitive postal laws, defining birth control information as obscene, that bore the name of Anthony Comstock); opposition to capital punishment and to inhumane conditions in prisons and insane asylums; and, above all, the expansion of public education. American

In 1929, George Macdonald recalled that there “has always been a considerable fringe of ascetics in the Freethought ranks—foes of rum, tobacco, corsets, sex, meat, and white bread. . . . Their slogan is: ‘The whiter the bread the sooner you’re dead.

Truth never envelops itself in mystery, and the mystery in which it is at any time enveloped is the work of its antagonist.