More on Freethinkers

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism impresses me more and more, the further I get into it. It is testimony to the fact that the "culture wars" of today have deep roots.

Today we see religious conservatives — fundamentalists, evangelicals, traditionalist Christians, the super-orthodox, whatever you want to call them — battling liberals, some of whom are religious liberals, and some of whom are religionless atheists, agnostics, and so on.

When we look back at the founding of the United States of America, Jacoby shows, we see the same basic thing. Only the labels have changed ... especially the ones applied to those on the left. While Jacoby uses similar terms to those we use today for the religious right of 1776 and 1789, or the first decade of the 1800s — words like "evangelical," "orthodox," "conservative," etc. — early Americans on the left were referred to as "freethinkers" (by themselves) and "infidels" (by their enemies).

Then as now, and in every period in between, some of these so-called "infidels" were actually quite religious. They were not religious, though, on the same terms as those on the religious right.

For example, during the decades of the 19th century leading up to the Civil War, religious lefties were solidly abolitionist. They hated slavery as much as most of the atheists, agnostics, deists, and other non-religious exercisers of freethought in their day. But, even outside the Old South, the much larger religious right found justification for slavery in passages they read in the Bible and did not oppose the ownership of humans as chattel in America.

The same right/left split occurred in the early days of feminism. During that same 19th century, the thrust of the anti-patriarchal movement was primarly to secure the vote for women. But the fight for women's suffrage saw agnostics like Susan B. Anthony break (to a degree) with fellow agnostics like Elizabeth Cady Stanton to join forces tactically with the likes of the religiously conservative Women's Christian Temperance Union. That alliance would one day bear fruit in female enfranchisement, via a Constitutional amendment (a good thing), and in Prohibition, also via amending the Constitution (a historical mistake).

Even though there were such occasional tactical bridges built between religious conservatives à la the WCTU and freethinkers like Anthony, for the most part the two sides were ever at war ... with, according to Jacoby, liberal Protestants and non-orthodox Jews most often aligned with agnostics, atheists, and deists against the worldview of stricter, more traditional Christians and orthodox Jews. (There were few liberal Catholics, she says, until the 20th century.)

Jacoby claims Abraham Lincoln for the freethinking side, even if he was able to fudge the distinction in his soaring rhetoric, perhaps out of political expediency, perhaps because he was such a doubter that he was unable to commit himself to any particular religious view.

And she rhapsodizes over out-and-out freethinkers like Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary pamphleteer, and Robert Ingersoll, the "Great Agnostic," who was a mover and shaker in late-19th-century, Gilded-Age America, but who has largely been forgotten. Why? Because, Jacoby says, his ideological enemies got to work after he died and pretty much expunged his memory from history books.

Emma Goldman on the cover of one of her books

Also in Jacoby's Pre-1900 Freethought Hall of Fame are leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; feminists Lucretia Mott, Ernestine Rose, and Emma Goldman; all who supported Charles Darwin's theory of evolution when it was put forth in and after 1859; and such literary luminaries as Walt Whitman, whose collection Leaves of Grass was the first book "banned in Boston" because it contained poems frankly celebrating sex as well as the full equality of women.

Walt Whitman

Whitman's "To a Common Prostitute" was a particular sore spot. In it, Whitman (who was actually homosexual) calls himself "liberal and lusty as nature" and tells his hypothetical inamorata, "Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you."

It was upon learning of Whitman as the focus of freethinkers' oppostion to government censorship in the late 19th century that I got the point: Jacoby's book is not just a good one, it is (as one of the back-cover blurbs proclaims) a "necessary" one. It seems to me essential. "Not till the sun excludes you, do I exclude you" sounds like a mantra for my own freethinking religious liberalism, echoing the episode in which Jesus wouldn't let the religious conservatives of his day of his day stone a harlot to death.

So I can't wait to see how the constant thread of battle between fundamentalists (a term which wasn't even invented until 1910) and freethinkers (a term which was becoming an anachronism by then) is stretched forward into the 100 years or so leading up to now.

* * *

It occurred to me, after writing the above, that there may be a way to explain the rightward swing of American politics over the last 25 years in terms of freethinkers.

The "neoconservatism" we know today got its intellectual start about 50 years back with thinkers like Irving Kristol; Norman Podhoretz; the former's wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb; and the latter's wife, Midge Decter. They had at one time been communistic in their beliefs — specifically, Trotskyist. Though all were Jewish, I believe I am correct in saying they were nonobservant, secular Jews. But then, in the phrase coined by Kristol, they were "mugged by reality." Their ultra-left illusions could not stand up to the light of 1950s and '60s events. It was then that they switched to a new brand of conservatism that had many things in common with religious (and nonreligious) paleoconservatism, but that nonetheless remained predominantly secular.

It seems they also had much in common with, per Jacoby (p. 230), "the minority of freethinkers" of the early 20th century who "were social conservatives strongly influenced by Spencerian social Darwinism. Their antireligious views were coupled with a strong element of contempt for the poor and uneducated."

Social Darwinism was an application by Herbert Spencer of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" to, not nature, but society. In this view, the "unfit" deserved to be left to their fate because to coddle them with government programs would weaken the society as a whole.

It seems to me that the neoconservative tax cuts of the George W. Bush administration, in which the wealthy have gotten the biggest breaks, can trace their ideological lineage back to socially conservative, anti-Progressive freethinkers of a century ago. Then these freethinkers were in the minority among secularists. Today, at least when they form judicious electoral coalitions with members of the religious right, they seem to be running things.

In other words, the neoconservative movement was started by people who, in their former communist stance, had been oriented to economic and social justice. After being "mugged by reality," however, they seem to have adopted a slightly-mutated form of Spencerian social Darwinism. I think it is this formulation of secularist freethought which, though allied practically and politically with religious conservatives, dominates our politics today.

Or could I be wrong?