Skepticism

Skepticism

Sources

Ingersoll. As modern scientific thought percolated through American society, religious belief became genuinely optional for the first time in American history. Before 1878 religious skepticism made little impact on American life. Under the influence of both Darwinian biology and popular evolutionary thought, however, it became possible for Americans to reject religion forthrightly without negative consequences in genteel society. One popular strain of the new agnosticism (a belief that neither accepts nor denies the existence of God) moved beyond religion in the name of higher moral evolution. Robert Green Ingersoll, whom one admirer called “the Dwight L. Moody of Free Religion,” was loosely associated with this movement. In a public career that spanned the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Ingersoll traveled the country promoting agnosticism as a morally superior replacement to conventional Christianity and attacking the hypocrisy of organized religion. A veteran of the Civil War and an accomplished trial lawyer, Ingersoll was a well-known figure in Republican politics. On the lecture circuit Ingersoll caused waves of sensation by forthrightly attacking the clergy and comparing organized religion to the institution of slavery. He described agnosticism as mental abolitionism. Ingersoll emphasized modern science, which he viewed as a surer form of faith in the modern world. He advocated reliance on rational science, the irresistible nature of human progress, and the potential for human moral perfection with the fervor of an itinerant evangelist. He looked forward to a day when organized religion would wither away. “Humanity is the sky, and these religions and dogmas and theories are but mists and clouds continually changing, destined finally to melt away,” he wrote.

Other Skeptics. To the rage of Protestant leaders, Ingersoll successfully presented agnosticism in a socially impeccable and conventional form. Religious skepticism was also increasingly common among the growing group of university-educated Americans and became the norm among scientists. A few American intellectuals went so far as to portray the relationship between science and religion in military terms. Andrew White, the first president of Cornell University, captured this spirit in the title of his polemical work published in 1896, The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. William Graham Sumner of Yale University, a prominent social Darwinist, was also a critic of organized religion. More representative of the trend of university thought about religion was the philosopher John Dewey, who abandoned Christianity in the 1890s. Dewey grounded his search for meaning on naturalistic and evolutionary principles. He came to view abstract questions about God or the nature of ultimate reality as unanswerable and therefore futile. As a result, he built a philosophical system based on the confidence that science can observe and describe how the human mind and society work.

Feminist Skepticism. Feminist leaders also advanced arguments critical of institutional religion. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the leaders of the I women’s suffrage movement in the United States, came to view Christianity as an instrument of female enslavement. She organized and edited the controversial Woman’s Bible, which was published in two volumes in 1895 and 1898. The volumes focused criticism on biblical passages in both Hebrew and Christian Scriptures in which women figure. Stanton and her collaborators criticized what they regarded as the degradation of women in key biblical texts and offered alternative readings of some passages that affirmed women and their equality. Stanton recruited women scholars with advanced training in the historical-critical methods, and the book was well informed about the most advanced biblical scholarship. But although Stanton endorsed the tools of modern biblical criticism, she was chiefly interested in using them to undermine American popular values and social conventions that rooted the restriction of women in the sacred texts of the Bible. The project led Stanton to deny the divine inspiration of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures on the grounds that God would not inspire inequality. Like many women of her social class and Protestant background, Stanton looked more favorably on the Spiritualist movement, a belief that the spirit is a prime element of reality and that the dead can communicate with the living through a medium.

Sources

David R. Anderson, Robert Ingersoll (Boston: Twayne, 1972);

Carol A. Newsome and Sharon H. Ringe, eds., The Women’s Bible Commentary (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992);

James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).