The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

Susan Jacoby, “The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought”, Yale Univ Press Books (2013) 211 pp. 

Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll (August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899) was a lawyer, a Civil War veteran, political leader, and orator of United States during the Golden Age of Freethought, noted for his broad range of culture and his defense of agnosticism. He was nicknamed "The Great Agnostic".  He devoted his life to freethought, a term that first appeared in England in the late seventeenth century; it meant devotion to a way of looking at the world based on observation & scientific evidence rather than on ancient ‘sacred’ writings composed by men who believed that the sun revolved around the earth.

My Notes:

Pg. 5:  To nineteenth-century freethinkers, as to their eighteenth-century predecessors, intellectual and material progress went hand-in-hand with abandonment of superstition, and strong ties between government and religion amounted to state-endorsed superstition.  Ingersoll, born decades before cities were illuminated by electricity, before the role of bacteria in the transmission of disease was understood, before Darwin’s revolutionary insight that humans were descended from lower animals was fully accepted even within the scientific community, Ingersoll was the most outspoken and influential voice in a movement that was to forge a secular intellectual bridge into the twentieth century for many of his countrymen.

Pg. 6:  Both the late nineteenth-century and the last thirty years of the twentieth century were characterized by one challenge after another to what were once considered settled cultural truths. The argument over the proper role of religion in civil government was (and is) only a subsidiary of the larger question of whether the claims of supposedly revealed religion deserve any particular respect or deference in a pluralistic society.  The other cultural issues that divided Americans in Ingersoll’s time are equally familiar and include evolution, race, immigration, women’s rights, sexual behavior, freedom of artistic expression, and vast disparities in wealth.  In the nineteenth century, however, the issues were newer, as was the science bolstering the secular side of the arguments, and the forces of religious orthodoxy were stronger. The overarching question in Ingersoll’s time was whether any of these issues could or should be resolved by appeals to divine authority

Pg. 24:  Ingersoll rejected Spencer’s use of Darwin’s theory in what was called social Darwinism, where the belief was spread that “tooth and claw” would be the rule in civilized societies. His rejection of social Darwinism, at a time when many freethinkers, to their discredit, shared the views of conservative religious believers about the natural inferiority of the poor, immigrants, and blacks, raises Ingersoll above most of his contemporaries in American secular thought.  There are two distinct threads in the history of American secularism—the first descending from the humanism and egalitarianism of Paine and the second from nineteenth-century social Darwinism through the twentieth-century every-man-for-himself ‘objectivism’ of Ayn Rand. A true intellectual descendant of Paine, Ingersoll linked reason and science to the success and survival of democracy, as the Enlightenment deists among the founders did, and contended that the capacity for rational thought existed among all races and social classes.

Pg. 110:  In 1883 the Supreme Court handed down a decision (109 U.S. 3) that basically gutted the Civil Rights Act or 1875, which had outlawed racial discrimination in public accommodations and transportation. This decision stood as the basis of Jim Crow in everyday southern life for more than eighty years, until passage of the Public Accomodations Act of 1964. Ingersoll was adamantly opposed to this 1883 decision.

Pg. 114:  In 1882, Congress passed the first immigration law in the nation’s history aimed specifically to bar the entrance of workers from a particular country—The Chinese Exclusion Act.  In 1892, the Exclusion Act was toughened to require al Chinese residents of the United States to require a residence permit. Chinese were forbidden to bear witness in court should they be arrested for not carrying their internal ‘passport’ and were denied bail. The Supreme Court upheld this act 5-4.  Again Ingersoll was in the opposition.

Pg. 137:  The nation founders’ were aware of the existing crazy-quilt of state laws favoring religion in general and, in many instances, one established religion.  At the time the national constitution was ratified, the Massachusetts state constitution prohibited both Jews and Catholics from holding public office.  Delaware required officeholders to affirm their belief in the Holy Trinity.  New York allowed Jews and Protestants, but not Catholics, to hold office.  What the founders did by leaving God out of the Constitution, and making it clear that religious belief was not a condition for holding federal office, was announce that the new nation was going to do things differently.  Between 1789 and 1792, five of the original thirteen states changed their religious laws to reflect the more secular values of the Constitution.  New states joining the union generally took the federal constitution as their model on relations between church and state.

Pg. 199:  Ingersoll made the connection between repressive religion and everyday burdens and injustices. The Enlightenment rationalists, especially Paine and Voltaire, understood and excoriated the role of religion, coupled with state power, in large issues that included slavery, torture, and capital punishment.  Ingersoll maintained that religion played a major role from the prevalent belief, well into the nineteenth century, that God had created the poor for a reason and that only those who could pay deserved to be educated, to the religiously based laws and customs that sanctioned marital violence, deemed it a moral disgrace for a woman to leave her husband for any reason, and denied women access to education and the means of making a living.  Debtors’ prisons, cruelty to children and animals, inhumane treatment both of the insane and of criminals: All were justified by biblical precepts that formed the original basis for mistreatment of the powerless by the powerful.  To Ingersoll, the glory of the founding generation was that it did not establish a Christian nation.  There is no establishment figure who says anything of the kind in America today.