For the past three years, GW Foote & Co. Ltd have been working on a project to digitise the complete run of print versions of the Freethinker from 1881 to 2014. This project has now been completed and everyone can access this extraordinary back catalogue free of charge here.

In the first instalment of this series, I explained my own interest in freethought literature and my continuing career as a part-time bookseller for over 40 years. I have had the privilege of handling thousands of freethought books, pamphlets, journals, and other ephemera. However, the occasions when I have come across past issues of the Freethinker have been remarkably few. I have handled early bound volumes just twice and even later examples are rare, with dealers often demanding prices best described as speculative. I have asked myself why this is and guess that the attitude to newspapers is generally that you read them and then throw them away.

What is more, the printed Freethinker was always published in a relatively large format—the first copies were foolscap size (approximately 34 x 20 cm). This lasted for many years and made them difficult to store. The copies I have come across have almost always been bound volumes sold at the end of the calendar year. There were two types of these, one leather bound and one bound in sturdy green cloth. The former did not age well, with the leather cracking and the boards detaching, but the latter stood the test of time. I am delighted to say that one of the two sets I have handled still adorns my bookshelves and continues to provide me with hours of instruction, distraction, and entertainment.

If you agree that the Freethinker has been the dominant voice of British secularism and freethought for 143 years, and that secularism and freethought are central to a free and democratic society, then the Freethinker is precious, and it is troubling that up to now the archive has been so difficult to access. For most, it has meant an arduous physical visit to a copyright library. This is why the conclusion of the GW Foote & Co. digitisation project is cause for cheers and celebration.

As a tentative pointer to what readers might enjoy about the archive, I offer the following comments on the Freethinker’s history and an indication of what I have discovered over the years in my own printed collection.

In a previous article, I wrote of George Willam Foote’s (1850-1915) early life, his founding of the Freethinker in 1881, and his year-long imprisonment for blasphemy. An additional matter that deserves recognition is that Foote’s actions involved a large element of self-sacrifice. He was a cultivated, bookish man, a librarian with refined literary tastes who wrote beautifully. For him, the abrasive, satirical, and outrageous style of the new journal was initially alien. However, he was so incensed by the treatment of the President of the National Secular Society (NSS), Charles Bradlaugh, and the deprivation of Bradlaugh’s right to sit as an MP for Northampton, that he determined to take the fight to the ‘bigots’.

He was also influenced by the established tone of freethought publications, epitomised by George Jacob Holyoake’s (1817-1906) writings which were thoughtful, worthy, totally lacking in humour, and, for many, rather boring. Foote reasoned that humour was a devastating weapon when employed against pompous authority figures in the established church and against religion in general. He reasoned that nobody takes seriously an individual or idea that has been laughed at and he also noted the satirical power of cartoons, which he was to employ with great effect and which led to his conviction for blasphemy. Some things never change; cartoons have not lost their power to provoke in the modern world.

Foote’s years as editor were not only characterised by his pungent attacks on the religious and religion. After his accession to the NSS Presidency in 1890, the Freethinker emerged as the NSS’s ‘in-house’ journal, acting as a type of noticeboard providing details of lectures, meetings, and publications. I particularly enjoy Joseph Mazzini Wheeler’s tightly written historical and biographical articles. Here was a man who grasped the significance of the intellectual and historical traditions of freethought. It is a great pity that his poor health and early death scuppered his plans to write a history of those traditions.

By the beginning of the First World War, Foote was ailing. Although he nominally remained editor, he had relocated to Westcliff-on-Sea for the sea air and occasionally commuted into London. Much of the actual editorial work and writing was being carried on by his sub-editor and loyal deputy, Chapman Cohen (1868-1954). Cohen formally took over the editor’s position and became President of the NSS when Foote died in 1915. He was known to a generation as CC, remaining editor until 1951. The Freethinker had had just two editors in its first 70 years. 

Like Foote, Cohen came to dominate the journal and make it his own, but there were differences in approach, substance, and style.  By the time of Cohen’s accession, the days when freethought was associated with radical political campaigns and working-class activism were long past. CC had little or no contact with politicians and always resisted political interventions in his many public meetings. His writings were characterised by a relatively sober critique of the illogicality, contradictions, and self-serving nature of religion and the religious. His arguments were rooted in philosophy, natural and social science, and literature. Foote’s biting satire was no more, and the cartoons long forgotten.

To my mind, Cohen’s greatest attribute was his ability to make the logical case for freethought in terms accessible to general readers. He never talked down, he just wrote logically and clearly in elegant, plain English that all could understand. Forty years ago, when I started book dealing, there were a few older customers who knew him. More than once I heard him described as ‘my greatest teacher’. To this, I would add that there was not a freethinking argument advanced by Bertrand Russell that CC had not made before. This is not to belittle Russell; rather, it is to recognise Cohen. For those who want to understand the case for atheism and the dangers of religion, just go to the Cohen years in the archive.

Before moving on, I must recognise CC’s sheer hard work. Each week through the 1920s and 30s he edited 12 or 16 foolscap pages, some of which he wrote. He corresponded with readers, provided the NSS with leadership, and spent his weekends speaking publicly. In the summer, that meant ‘outdoors’, in parks and public spaces. From September to April, he was ‘indoors’, travelling the country giving lectures (sometimes three in a single weekend). For example, during the 1919-1920 indoor season he spoke at no less than 34 venues on more than 50 occasions. This was a pattern and level of activity that he maintained throughout the interwar years.

One contributor whose writings will be enjoyed by those with an interest in freethought and radical history is Herbert Cutner (1881-1969), although he did not restrict himself to historical subjects. He began his contributions in 1920 and by 1959 had had his 1,000^th article published.

Since Cohen’s resignation the turnover of editors has been more rapid, at times too rapid, although an important exception was Barry Duke’s 24-year tenure beginning in 1998. One editor who had a particular impact on me was Bill McIlroy (1928-2013), who served three separate terms totalling more than 14 years. As well as commissioning some important historical essays, and networking with individuals such as politicians Tony Benn and Michael Foot and academics Edward Royle and David Berman, Bill had a talent for punchy, witty headlines. Here are some examples to whet the appetite. ‘Pious Indoctrinators Tighten Grip on Classroom Captives’ (July 1988); ‘Embryology Bill: “Pro-Life” Dirty Tricks Campaign Aborted’ (May 1990); ‘Patten Links Crime Rate with Decline in Fear of Fire and Brimstone’ (May 1992).

Another relatively recent contributor who should be mentioned is Jim Herrick (1943-2023), a stalwart of the freethought and secularist movement in general, editor of the Freethinker from 1977 to 1981, and contributor on a diverse range of subjects over many years. I have particularly enjoyed Jim’s theatre reviews and historical articles. An invaluable contribution is his centenary history of the journal, Vision and Realism: A Hundred Years of the Freethinker, published in 1982.

So, the Freethinker lives on as a contemporary digital magazine rooted in its historical archive. Not everything published in its pages over the past 143 years has been impressive, although much of it is. But for me, it is a kind of intellectual treasure trove hidden away for too long and unavailable to even its most fervent supporters. There is nothing quite like it, with its alternative and critical take on religious belief, contemporary events, and social developments. It is also a testament to those who have gone before and who have on occasion sacrificed their own interests rather than surrender their intellectual freedom. The digital archive will be invaluable in keeping this intellectual tradition, once termed ‘the best of causes’, alive for a long time to come.

Editor: The Freethinker digital archive is a great achievement, the work of many hands. Though it, like the Freethinker today, is free to read, many resources were put into it and donations from readers are much appreciated. Anyone who donates over £500 will not only have our immense gratitude but will be publicly recognised, with their name proudly displayed in the archive itself (if they so desire). For technical reasons, please get in touch with us if you wish to donate £500 or more rather than using our usual donation form. Meanwhile, enjoy the archive.

The post Books from Bob’s Library #4: The ‘Freethinker’—over a century of issues now available as a digital archive appeared first on The Freethinker.

When Forster officially announced Seven Shoulders and its premise on Twitter/X, he was skewered on all sides. White people disguising themselves as black is passé and will provoke offence and indignation whatever the reason may be. Many black people, in particular, responded negatively because they felt that they were the best qualified to discuss the reality of being black. They also felt that they didn’t need a white Canadian man to don a synthetic afro wig, wear coloured contact lenses, and put on brown-coloured Maybelline foundation (specifically, mocha shade—because ‘I figured it was best not to get too ambitious’) to find out whether racism still exists in America. 

Forster follows in the footsteps of other ‘journalistic blackface’ practitioners, on whose example he rests very heavily: he cites Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, author of 1967’s Black Like Me (which he particularly admires), and Grace Halsell, author of 1969’s Soul Sister. All of them went incognito as ‘black’ to try to enlighten a largely ignorant and indifferent white America on the reality of the pervasive racism faced by black Americans, whether under the oppressive Jim Crow apartheid regime of the South in the 20^th century or the unofficial but ubiquitous racism that black communities endured across Northern cities during the same period.

Even though journalistic blackface has already been done three times, Forster ‘felt [he] had no choice’ but to anoint himself as the heir to this tradition. Moreover, he proclaims that he is sui generis because he is ‘the first person to earnestly cross the color barrier in over half a century’—and he is especially unique because he is the first person to do so in a post-Rodney King, post-Barack Obama, and post-George Floyd America. This claim isn’t strictly true, as there have been reality TV shows from this century setting up social experiments where whites have been disguised as blacks and vice versa to see what life is like ‘on the other side’ of the racial divide. 

Nevertheless, Forster doesn’t advertise Seven Shoulders as a moralistic screed. Instead, it’s a book that ‘prioritises methodical language and comprehensive analysis over emotional fervour and moral condemnation’ and he is the right person for this task because he is ‘inclined to describe rather than admonish.’

Unlike Ray Sprigle, who ‘ate, slept, traveled, lived Black’ (‘I lodged in Negro households. I ate in Negro restaurants. I slept in Negro hotels and lodging houses. I crept through the back and side doors of railroad stations’), Forster doesn’t embed himself within predominantly black communities. He doesn’t attempt to live a social life as a black man. No, the way Forster seeks to ‘taxonomize’ American racism (which, he says, can be divided into various categories, including two oft-conflated ones: ‘macro-level racial disparities’ and ‘institutional injustice’) is to pose as a hitchhiker on the sides, or shoulders, of seven different roads across the US, ‘first as a White man, and then again as a Black man on the following day.’

He claims this hitchhiking experiment is an accurate way to ‘taxonomize’ contemporary racism in America because it ‘exposes real sentiments that might otherwise be concealed… It reveals how [Americans] act when nobody is telling them how to act.’ It reveals another category of racism: the ‘interpersonal’ type.

The problem with this is that this isn’t the America of the Beatniks, where hitchhiking culture was a lot more prominent than it is today. And it is rather shallow to make sweeping judgements on a topic as broad and intricate as race in America on the sole basis of a limited hitchhiking experiment—which is why the pompous statements peppered throughout the book are so jarring. For instance:

[N]obody has an experiential barometer with respect to race… nobody except for me… [You] may say that I haven’t lived enough Black life for my barometer to be useful. Say what you will. My barometer is better than anyone else’s. 

Or: 

I am a visionary writer who wants to demystify race in a way that is creative, compelling, and beautiful.

For all the vim and haughty rhetoric Forster deploys, Seven Shoulders is as underwhelming as it is superficial. This is disappointing in its own way, as I was slightly intrigued by the premise. Instead, I encountered a book that was confused and incoherently written. Publishing a chapter that actually contains the line ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to say in this chapter’ doesn’t exactly instil confidence in you as a writer, ‘visionary’ or otherwise.

Though the journalistic blackface was unnecessary, not to mention silly, there might perhaps have been an interesting, if provocative, book investigating the textures and dynamics of race in America in the 21^st century from a considered first-person view. Ray Sprigle and John Howard Griffin in their ethnographical studies at least spoke to black Americans and collected testimonies of their experiences of racism. The closest Forster comes to anything like this is a pedestrian interview with two unnamed black politicians (whom he interviewed as a white man) who were clearly unaware of what project their remarks were lent to. 

Most of the commentary surrounding Seven Shoulders has focused on Forster’s use of blackface and thus the gravamen has been missed. He claims that in America today, instances of institutional racism are ‘extremely [he repeats this word over several pages in case you didn’t get it the first time—yes, really]…difficult to identify, and outward demonstrations of interpersonal racism are also a vanishing phenomenon.’ 

This thesis very much rhymes with that of Dinesh D’Souza’s 1995 book The End of Racism and other arguments from American conservatives. In other words, Forster isn’t as original and avant-garde as his bumptious pronouncements would have us believe. Forster concedes that what he calls ‘shoulder racism’, based on what we might call unconscious bias, might occur in certain circumstances—but says that it is not a pressing social problem.

He also notes that he was perceived differently by the homeless when he was white compared to when he was black: he was constantly asked for money by homeless people (of whatever colour) as a white man, yet he wasn’t pestered by anyone for money as a black man, which I find believable. But that is the extent of the depth he arrives at when contemplating how whites and blacks may be perceived differently within society. 

Whatever your opinion on whether Ray Sprigle, John Howard Griffin, and Grace Halsell were ever justified in engaging in journalistic blackface, one cannot deny that, in service of the cause of racial equality, they made sincere efforts to understand the reality of the racism that plagued their time. In contrast, Forster’s efforts in Seven Shoulders are an unserious and not even entertaining attempt at gonzo journalism. It feels like it was written in an unhinged frenzy, without any serious understanding of the complicated subject it broaches, and it makes bold claims and states tendentious conclusions based on a flimsy ‘experiment’ that a bad YouTuber could conduct.

As a black man—technically mixed race—I’m not even offended. I have thick skin and a broad back, so it takes a lot to make me cry. Besides, to be offended or hurt by Sam Forster’s gimmick I would have had to have taken it seriously. I do agree with Forster that most of the books currently written about race, whether by blacks or whites, are ‘tremendously boring.’ Alas, his is the latest addition to that pile. 

Related reading

Race: the most difficult subject of all? Interview with Inaya Folarin Iman by Emma Park

Two types of ‘assimilation’: the US and China, by Grayson Slover

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Linnaeus, Buffon, and the battle for biology, by Charles Foster

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

Can sentientism save the world? Interview with Jamie Woodhouse, by Emma Park

David Tennant, Kemi Badenoch, and the ugly sin of identity politics: a view from the right, by Frank Haviland

The post Gimmick journalism and race in America: review of ‘Seven Shoulders’ by Sam Forster appeared first on The Freethinker.

Myth? Legend? Folklore? History? Fiction? This is The Story of Russia, as the title of Orlando Figes’s 2022 book puts it.

Every nation, every country, and, indeed, every empire has a founding myth: some event or figure that is meant to embody the values and origins of the state and unify the people with an overarching narrative of where they came from and where they are going. Figes shows, however, that Russia is a peculiar exception to this norm. For many reasons, when it comes to Russia’s history and origins, there is no true consensus or understanding. Rather, Russia’s history and origins are so deeply intertwined with myths, narratives, legends, politics, folklore, and religion that you must first be willing to dive deeply into all these intricate components and then sift through them to discover even a morsel of truth.

As Figes demonstrates in his work, despotism is one constant truth of Russia over 800 years, from the authoritarianism of Kievan Rus’ (the progenitor of modern Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) to Putinism. The systems and titles may have changed several times, but the brutal and violent methods of securing and maintaining centralised power in Russia have remained largely unaltered—because, circularly, the belief that Russia can only be ruled by brutality and violence has remained largely unaltered as well.

Russian industrialisation did not even begin until the late 19^th century, partially because of Russia’s reliance on serf labour. Because serfs had no social or economic mobility, and even their physical mobility was restricted to the confines of their village, there was no space for innovators, investors, and entrepreneurs who could revolutionise the system. The natural emergence of capitalism, inextricably connected to industrialisation (like an axle to a wheel), was impossible for a long time in Russia. In Russia, unlike the rest of Europe, the state, in the form of the Tsar, was the sole financier of industrialisation.

During the first half of the 18^th century, the skill of history writing was still emerging in Russia. A German scholar named Gerhard Friedrich Müller outraged the Russian academics at the newly established St Petersburg Academy of Sciences by daring to conclude, based on his research of the Primary Chronicle, that Russia’s origins could be traced back to the Vikings. To say that Scandinavians created Russia was not something to be lightly asserted at a time when Russia had just emerged from victory in one of its many wars with Sweden!

Müller was accused by Mikhail Lomonosov, his rival in the academy, of degrading the Slavs by presenting them as savages who couldn’t organise their state without outside help. The Russians, according to Lomonosov, were not Vikings, but Baltic Slavs, descendants of the Iranian Roxolani people, whose history dates back into the mists of antiquity.

Another fascinating aspect of Russian history that Figes delves into is the notion of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’, the bearer of the Orthodox Christian flame after the fall of the ‘Second Rome’, Byzantium. This succession—or natural inheritance, as it is viewed by many Russians—means that Russia has a God-given mission in the world, a view that derives in part from the medieval theology it inherited from the Byzantines. The idea that the West is in a state of degeneration and collapse and that Russia is a superior civilisation thanks to its unbending devotion to Orthodoxy is an idea that has recurred again and again in Russian history. Holy Russia, in short, is the true source of humanity’s salvation. This view of Russia as saviour fundamentally influenced both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The sacralisation of power was deeply linked to this because it portrayed the Tsar (or the Party) as the direct manifestation of God’s will on Earth (or the embodiment of the dialectic of history).

This messianic streak is still apparent. Putin’s ongoing war with Ukraine can be understood through this framework: divine right places Putin above human laws, human rights, and earthly realities, and Ukraine, due to its exposure to the degenerate societies of the West, is in need of cleansing by holy war.

Figes skilfully examines the reasons behind Russia’s failure to establish a democratic government over the centuries (contrast with Ukraine) by compellingly illustrating how democratic reforms were consistently hindered by pivotal historical events. These events include the impact of the French Revolution during Catherine the Great’s reign, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia during Alexander I’s rule, the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 (which halted his transformative reforms), the suppression of democratic ideals by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution, and the perpetuation of autocratic tendencies following the fall of the Soviet Union. While Western thinkers have debated, discussed, and theorised about the abstract notions of the state and the people, the role of religion, and the role and structure of the state for hundreds of years, there has been no similar wide-ranging, long-term enquiry in Russia.

Yet another fascinating and critical topic explored in The Story of Russia is Russia’s eastward expansion. As Figes notes, between 1500 and 1917, the territories controlled by the Russian state grew, on average, by a staggering 1,300 square kilometres per day. This expansion, of course, was not merely of land; it also included expansion of control over the indigenous populations the Russians encountered. Russian expansion was, in essence, Russian colonialism. However, unlike in many Western countries, Russia has not reflected on or reckoned with its colonial past. Russian expansion is viewed as a kind of ‘self-discovery’—or, as Figes describes it, as the story of a country colonising itself.

It is certainly not shocking that no such reckoning has occurred or even begun in Russia given that the official narrative on all matters Russian has been crafted by authoritarian regimes, from the Tsars and the Soviets to Putin. But where, then, is the international community? Where are the protests against the bloody past, so common in the West? Where is the holding to account for the cultural genocide, forced assimilation, brutal treatment, and forced imprisonment of indigenous peoples in and along the eastern portion of Eurasia?

Perhaps the only apt comparison is that of the plight of the Uyghur Muslims, a Turkic-speaking ethnic group who live in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, China. Over one million Uyghur Muslims have been imprisoned by the Chinese government since 2017, and those not imprisoned are subjected to intense surveillance, religious restrictions, forced labour, and forced sterilisation. The outcry, protests, and condemnation from the international community on this issue have also been lacking, albeit not totally absent. Similarly, but to a worse extent, the silence on the ongoing plight of the indigenous peoples of Russia is stunning.

Figes’s assessment of the Putin regime’s endorsement of the doctrine called the ‘Russian World’ is particularly valuable. According to this doctrine, Russia is a civilisation characterised by its spiritual values, in contrast to what is perceived as the liberalism and materialism of the West. The ‘Russian World’ includes not merely Russia, but also Ukraine and Belarus, a view supported by Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who believes that all Orthodox believers, whether in Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus, have a common origin and deep connection stemming from the coming of Christianity to Kievan Rus’ in 988. Kirill’s shocking inability to denounce Russia’s war on—not to mention his declaration of holy war against—Ukraine is a direct consequence of this view of history.

Among the many important themes discussed by Figes, one stands out to me as a necessary reminder of the malign uses to which prejudiced historical narratives can be put. That is, in true Orwellian fashion, control over how the past is understood grants control over the present and the future. The current unnecessary and unprovoked war with Ukraine is the result of Russia being detached from its history and at the mercy of an ever-changing narrative that benefits the ruling class and buttresses that class’s hold on power. This war is not just a crime against Ukraine, but also one against the best of Russia, whose literature and art have enriched Europe for centuries, and the people of Russia, whose desire for liberty has, tragically, never been fully realised. This war, in all its aspects, will only continue until and unless Russia is free to understand its own history—and learn from it.

Related reading

A view from Kyiv: Ordinary life during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, interview by Emma Park

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Two types of ‘assimilation’: the US and China, by Grayson Slover

The post Russian history, Russian myths: review of ‘The Story of Russia’ by Orlando Figes appeared first on The Freethinker.

From Chapter 1: Daisies Tell About Jesus

I remember the smell of the songbook paper, and pushing my little fingers through the tiny communion cup holders on the backs of the burnt orange itchy fabric-covered pews.

I remember selling ‘Bible Times’ pita bread by the pulpit on the church stage during my first church play and whispering the words to ‘Away in a Manger’ into a big colourful mic there one Christmas. I remember folding my hands every night on my knees by my bed and saying sorry for my sins, and the hardcover Bible story collection with the colourful illustrations we kept in the hall linen closet.

I remember how much I loved Jesus.

To me Jesus was a version of my dad. Maybe it’s the same for most Christian girls with kind and present fathers. God was a little scary, but I tried to dismiss that thought fast because he could read my mind.

At first my indoctrination was mostly harmless: Bedtime prayers, brown beard painting of Jesus surrounded by the kiddos, Children’s Church.

I don’t remember the first time I heard the Pastor shout about the love and wrath of God in one breath.

Understanding and accepting God’s anger was as critical as accepting his love. We were shameful and sinful people destined for an afterlife of torture. I was told that my belief and dedication to my relationship with Jesus saved me from this eternal damnation, and in turn, my mission was to urge others to have that faith too.

Being a Christian was normal for me, but not everyone believed in Jesus. That’s why Christians had to spread the Good News. You didn’t want anyone else to end up in the fiery pits of Hell either.

Some Christians might hand out Bibles or witness to their neighbors, but I wanted to go big or go to Hell I guess, because by eight I was preaching to my classmates on the playground and saying I was going to be a missionary in foreign countries.

I imagined myself in these African jungle scenarios, makeshift kitchens with big leaves on the floor, those little kids with bellies bloated from hunger pulling at my skirt while I cooked soup and talked about Jesus. Yes, really.

This to me would be a soul-saving sacrifice as well as the ultimate adventure.

I was born in 1983 into an average White evangelical family that made up a quarter of the country in the nineties, a Protestant family in a small rural community where we mixed with Catholics but had little exposure to religions outside of Christianity.

Protestants are the biggest Christian bloc in the U.S. They split with the Roman Catholic Church and follow the principles of the Reformation, led by German monk and university professor Martin Luther (1483–1546).

The Reformation held that one’s eternal soul could be saved only by personal faith in Jesus Christ and the grace of God, rather than via prayers to saints and confessions to priests. 

Consider terms like ‘born again’ (John 3:3) and narratives involving the prayer of salvation (Romans 10:9).

Some Protestants even came to rough it in colonial America, rather than feel like they were under the thumb of the Catholic Church. I’d gotten the notion that the nation was founded on my religion from the way that narrative had been spun for me.

I wasn’t just a mainstream Protestant but a fundamentalist and an evangelical.

A fundamentalist will insist that every word of the Bible is without error, while a mainline Protestant will concede that historical documents are susceptible to fallibility. Fundamentalists interpret scripture literally, complete with its outdated dogmas and Israelite ideology.

Evangelists busy themselves with the relentless recruitment of souls practised by salvation-based brands of Christian faith. Evangelize means ‘convert’.

From Chapter 4: The Evangelical Agenda

Regardless of any neurological factors fortifying my faith, once I grew old enough to reason, doubt, the most dangerous of all sins, crept in. Doubt could land you in Hell before you even opened your mouth or lifted a finger to sin against God or another person.

To a Pentecostal, nothing is to be respected and valued more than unwavering faith. Certainly not education or intelligence or even critical thinking.

You were supposed to ‘trust in God with all of your heart and lean not on your own understanding’ (Proverbs 3:5).

Knowledge was dangerous. Look what happened when the first humans dared seek it.

The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on.

Musician Frank Zappa

I struggled painfully with my faith in youth, but I didn’t let my doubt show, other than scribbling it over and over in my journals.

God, please take away my doubt; please open my eyes! I doubted three times today Jesus; please forgive me! I’m so sorry for doubting!!!

Without faith, Hebrews 11:6 assured me, it was impossible to please God.

Faith was my biggest struggle, the incredible challenge of my life. My lack of it was my gravest, deepest, most mortal sin.

I sought to solidify my salvation with the solidarity of other believers, tried to redeem and revive my soul by striking sin from my life. But I needed a louder voice in my mind, clarifying I wasn’t making it all up. As time went on I needed a more intense, more pronounced reprieve from guilt and a more ecstatic euphoria to wash over me in prayer and worship.

Now a new kind of joy and a whole ecosystem of knowledge has grown from the seed of doubt that was planted in my heart where I could never quite get that mustard seed to grow.

I have ceased to scream at myself in my mind, desperately trying to silence the voice of reason. I have silenced instead the voice of God.

From Chapter 7: Books Besides Bibles

For as far back as I can remember, I have loved books: reading them, writing them, collecting them, quoting them, smelling their sweet paper, smearing their ink with my tears.

I carried books to the playground at recess in elementary [school] and I took my textbooks home to devour poetry, history, and social studies in high school.

From a young age I could appreciate a well-crafted sentence, and I rarely grew bored of a story or a subject if the content was written well.

A vast wealth of literature had been off limits while I wasted countless hours perusing an old religious book instead!

There was time to make up for.

There was no Google to do research about religion when I was living that lie. Aside from, of course, books about other religions maybe, and academic papers perhaps, there wasn’t a lot of accessible literature published that challenged mainstream evangelical ideology. Prominent atheist figures weren’t podcasting yet.

When I began my quest for truth I spent endless hours in books besides Bibles, astonished and appalled at the sheer volume of information about the world I’d been so willing to remain oblivious to.

I kept my mind open, giving the theology I’d been fed and its apologists ample time to refute the new information I was swimming in. Their once compelling, convincing voices couldn’t hold up to the facts and perspectives presented by these historians and biologists.

Definitely one of the greatest perks of breaking free from an oppressive and controlling religion is that no information is off limits.

No books are banned.

Suddenly no fiction was off limits either: Dante, Nabokov, vampires, horror, trashy romance reads with women bursting out of corsets on the covers.

I could read academic material that had been forbidden, finally reading Darwin’s On The Origin of Species and exploring evolutionary science at last at age 23.

Suddenly I could eagerly accept scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality.

I was late to that table, much as humankind had been, attributing everything to the supernatural before scientific knowledge offered real answers—like we attributed sickness or healing to a god but now origins of ailments are evident because germ theory exists now.

I was born long after science filled in the gaps where gods stood in as placeholders, but like millions of other believers I’d been coerced to cling to them when they should have been discarded.

Like Douglas Adams said, ‘God used to be the best explanation we’d got, and we’ve now got vastly better ones.’ Embracing intellectual honesty at last was exciting!

From Chapter 10: Mind Rape

My child never shed a tear about Hell. She never shut herself in a closet and begged not to be hurt. She never had to feel shame for her own desires or unworthy of love because she had doubts about things that just didn’t make sense. She never had to reconcile in her mind the atrocities committed by someone she was supposed to love even more than she loved me.

At bedtime I tucked her in and told her to have dreams about candy castles and puppies and she never heard the words ‘brimstone’ or ‘gnashing of teeth’.

I love the moments when I speak of my Pentecostal past and she doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about.

‘Wait, what’s a pew, Mom?’

My heart soars in those moments. She will never be a sinner seeking sanctification. I feel she’s a more rounded individual than I am, more emotionally stable.

I had a lot of anger and anxiety to work through, character traits developed after a youth of servitude under an imaginary authoritarian entity.

I taught my daughter early, about multiple religions. When she was five and six we talked about what animals we would like to come back as, if the reincarnation religions were right.

Let children learn about different faiths, let them notice their incompatibility, and let them draw their own conclusions about the consequences of that incompatibility. As for whether they are “valid,” let them make up their own minds when they are old enough to do so.

Richard Dawkins

Watching my daughter choose for herself, selecting biocentrism as her philosophy long before either of us had a name for it, and rejecting all religion, provided a boost of comfort and confidence that was very healing for me.

Society tends to assume religion is either benign or good for people. It’s a Sunday morning cultural tradition most Christians don’t think too hard about so they don’t have to reconcile their cognitive dissonance.

But while my peers were in Catechism reciting rosaries I was being brainwashed with brimstone by the Assembly of God.

Certain brands of fundamentalist faith that pound the original sin/eternal damnation ideology boast the gravest grievance against religious indoctrination.

A parent or preacher doesn’t even necessarily have to pound Hell into a child’s mind repeatedly to get the intended reaction. One horrifying threat involving a lake of fire can have a profound effect on a developing mind.

Richard Dawkins:

Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?

I am persuaded that “child abuse” is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like eternal hell.

It’s not moral to lie to children. It’s not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It’s immoral.

I wish I could explain to all those kids in Sunday School that the sensational, scary stories they’re being taught are not real.

There’s no scary God up there, intent on punishing sinners.

No eternal suffering awaits anyone for anything they say or do.

And no, their ‘sins’ did not contribute to the suffering of a nice, loving man.

Related reading

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

How I lost my religious belief: A personal story from Nigeria, by Suyum Audu

From religious orthodoxy to free thought, by Tehreem Azeem

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

White Christian Nationalism is rising in America. Separation of church and state is the antidote. By Rachel Laser

The post Silencing the voice of God: the journey of an evangelical apostate appeared first on The Freethinker.

The seventeenth century did not get off to a great start in Europe. Religious conflict still simmered, and in 1618, the continent became embroiled in the bloodiest and most destructive war it would suffer before the two World Wars. The Netherlands was fighting for its independence. In Britain, the dispute between King and Parliament led to wars costing hundreds of thousands of lives in the 1640s and 1650s. Scientific progress faced massive barriers. Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for arguing that the Earth orbited the Sun and not the reverse, as Aristotle and generations of his followers had maintained. Across the continent, people remained poor, ignorant, oppressed, and victims of seemingly continuous violence.

Yet, by the end of the century, the religious wars were over, Europe had modern astronomy and physics, the Dutch had created the corporation and the stock exchange, England had established parliamentary government, and books calling for freedom of religion were openly being published and distributed. ‘In 1700 the mental outlook of educated men was completely modern; in 1600, except among a very few, it was largely medieval,’ wrote Bertrand Russell in his A History of Western Philosophy.

This shift in mindset, from the medieval to the modern, is the subject of Paul Strathern’s Dark Brilliance: The Age of Reason From Descartes to Peter the Great. Strathern covers the major figures and events of the era, painting a sweeping picture of the century and the monumental changes it brought to intellectual and cultural life in Europe. Dark Brilliance has remarkable breadth, touching on every field of knowledge from calculus to cooking. It includes the microscope and telescope, probability and statistics, gravity and motion, the Golden Age in the Netherlands and the Glorious Revolution in Britain. We meet—as we expect—figures such as Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and Newton. But Strathern pays far more attention to culture and the arts than most other writers on the Enlightenment. He also breaks down the contrast between reason and unreason running through the seventeenth century; this is the ‘Dark’ of the book’s title.

The Culture of Enlightenment

As he promises in the subtitle, Strathern begins Dark Brilliance with René Descartes, as he is developing his new philosophy in a bucolic winter scene in a Bavarian village. From Descartes, he makes an unexpected jump to the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Caravaggio would not normally feature in a book on the Age of Reason. He lived in Italy, which had been the unquestioned centre of Europe during the Renaissance but was falling into the shadows of the Netherlands and France in the seventeenth century. For all their wealth and splendour, Rome and Florence never became centres of the Enlightenment in the way that Paris, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, or London did. Not only that, Caravaggio died before the Age of Reason really began.

Still, Strathern argues that Caravaggio’s painting was a leap forward from the past, just like the works of the Enlightenment thinkers. His painting showed more depth, photorealism, and understanding of scientific topics such as anatomy and optics than the Italian Renaissance masters who preceded him. And they, in turn, painted far more lifelike scenes than medieval European artists. Like the Renaissance artists, Caravaggio drew on classical as well as Biblical inspiration, although he painted with more drama and energy. Strathern highlights, in particular, Caravaggio’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, where he painted a scene from the Bible, a conventional subject, but presented it in a way that was unconventionally violent, visceral, and shocking. Compare the painting with medieval European art, which was often without passion; even people suffering violent deaths can look only bored or vaguely annoyed.

This focus on culture is an original approach, but one which makes sense. Culture reflects society, and we can see the ideas of the Enlightenment reflected in the art of the Baroque artists. But it has limitations, and centres of culture and art were not always centres of learning, science, philosophy, or law. There was no Florentine Newton or Milanese Spinoza.

The splendour of the court of Louis XIV made France the cultural centre of Europe—even today fields like cooking and fashion are speckled with French words and phrases—but the French Enlightenment only really took off after the Sun King’s death. Strathern could have perhaps explored this further.  

Reason and Unreason

The other theme of Dark Brilliance is, as the title itself illustrates, the paradoxes of the Enlightenment. To Strathern, the seventeenth century was the Age of Reason and Unreason. As he points out in the introduction, the achievements of the Enlightenment ‘took place against a background of extreme political turbulence and irrational behaviour on a continental scale,’ from frenzied persecutions of supposed witches to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade.

The developers of the telescope and the microscope were achieving steadily higher levels of magnification and bringing more and more of the hidden universe into view even as Catholics and Protestants killed each other by the tens of thousands. In the first chapter of Dark Brilliance, René Descartes invents his new philosophy while in the winter quarters of the Bavarian army during the Thirty Years War. The metastatic growth of the slave trade provides another example of how the irrational and inhumane could easily grow alongside the ideals of the Enlightenment. ‘…[I]n the Age of Reason, it was slavery that produced the capital which led to the progress of western European civilization, laying the foundations upon which its empires were built,’ Strathern writes. ‘At the same time, it also prompted a few rare spirits such as Montaigne to recognize the contagious barbarity of all who took part in it—to say nothing of the absurdity of its claims regarding racial superiority’. Man’s expanding knowledge did not seem to lessen his brutality—at least not yet.

The greatest paradox of the Enlightenment was, arguably, the French Revolution itself, which led to mass killing, the establishment of a dictatorship, and a new ‘rational’ religion in the name of Enlightenment values and freeing the people of France from the oppression of monarchy, aristocratic privilege, and a corrupt and reactionary Church. As he finishes his account at the start of the eighteenth century, Strathern doesn’t cover the French Revolution, although the theme of paradox runs through the book.

Conclusions

Why should we care about the Enlightenment? Because we live in a world shaped by it, and while we enjoy its benefits, we should also be aware (and beware) of its lessons. At the start of Dark Brilliance, Strathern asks if human progress will end up destroying the civilisation it helped to create. We face a range of threats, including climate change, enabled by the scientific progress and material wealth which has made our lives so much better. At the end of the book, he has not yet answered his own question, although he concludes that ‘paradoxically, the answer would appear to be progress itself’. Admittedly, it’s hard to see what other conclusion anyone could reach. There are calls today from the far left and far right of the political spectrum to dismantle the modern economy and modern society and revert to some pre-modern ideal. But this ideal is, in all cases, as mythical as it is real.

Strathern chooses to tell his overall story as a collection of colourful little biographies. This is an accessible approach and makes the book engaging for a general audience. Anyone who reads Dark Brilliance will reach the end with a much better understanding of not just the Enlightenment but life in seventeenth-century Europe in general. As someone who has read and written much about the subject, Strathern’s account of the development of Baroque painting was still entirely new to me.

I was left feeling that some of the threads remained loose, particularly on the impact of the Enlightenment and the paradox of reason coexisting with unreason. But as a panorama of seventeenth-century Europe, Dark Brilliance is both an impressive and very readable book.

Related reading

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The post The Enlightenment paradox: review of ‘Dark Brilliance’ by Paul Strathern appeared first on The Freethinker.

As editor of the Freethinker, I would like to invite you along to Conway Hall’s Freethought History Festival, which is being held from Friday 30th August to Sunday 1st September.

On Saturday 31st August, I will be on a panel discussing the Freethinker alongside my predecessor as editor Emma Park and Professor David Nash. Other speakers will include Freethinker contributors Bob Forder, Eoin Carter, Maddy Goodall, Frances Lynch, Clare Stainthorp, and our resident radical cartoonist Paul Fitzgerald. Graham Smith, head of the campaigning group Republic, will launch the festival on 30 August, while 1 September is a free family fun day. Bob Forder will also be conducting his Books, Bones, and Blasphemy walking tour on the Sunday.

The festival is sponsored by the Freethinker, and it would be lovely to meet some of you there. You can find out more and get tickets here. Use the code FREETHINK!25 for a 25% discount.

Related reading

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’: interview with Graham Smith, by Daniel James Sharp

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

Daniel James Sharp’s Freethinker articles

Emma Park’s Freethinker articles

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

Morality without religion: the story of humanism, by Madeleine Goodall

Freethinker cartoons and articles by Paul Fitzgerald

Megan Manson’s Freethinker articles

Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch

The post Invitation to the Freethought History Festival at Conway Hall, 31 August – 1 September appeared first on The Freethinker.

The transformation of the Roman Empire from the classical period to a Christian society has been well studied. One estimate is that ten per cent of the Roman world was Christian by AD 300, although what it meant to be a Christian at this date is impossible to ascertain. The communities were scattered and each had a different relationship with sacred texts and Judaism, while their understandings of Jesus Christ were diverse.

An unexpected turning point came in 312-13 when the emperor Constantine used state authority to privilege his own understanding of Christianity above others (this was at a time when the majority of his subjects still followed traditional beliefs). At a council held at Nicaea in 325, there was the first formulation of a creed (a preliminary version of the Nicene Creed), although it was only in the reign of Theodosius (ruled 379-395) that Christianity became the state religion based on a Trinitarian doctrine in which Christ, the Holy Spirit, and God were seen as one. In 380, Theodosius declared that those of other Christian beliefs were ‘demented and insane’ heretics. This was what the historian Peter Heather calls ‘the Romanization of Christianity’ and it made Christianity an authoritarian religion entwined with the authoritarian Roman state. Yet recent scholarship has confirmed the weakness of the state in enforcing compliance. It was all very well issuing fearsome imperial decrees but ‘pagan’ and ‘heretical’ cults survived for decades. Recent works by Heather (Christendom, 2022) and Edward Watts (The Final Pagan Generation, 2015) chart the transformation.

After AD 380, a hierarchy of orthodox bishops attempted to enforce a canon of texts and doctrines such as the Trinity. Independent reasoning waned as the structure of Christian authority gradually emerged. In this sense, there was a true Closing of the Western Mind (the title of my study, published in 2002), though Christian theologians such as Augustine and Ambrose, the formidable bishop of Milan, still drew on ‘pagan’ texts for support. Basil of Caesarea went so far in the 360s as to argue that ‘young men’ should master these texts before embarking on biblical studies. Platonism, rather than being suppressed, provided the intellectual backbone of theology. Christians adopted Plato’s Timaeus with its ‘craftsman god’.

The spread of Christianity through Europe was a complex process, with some Christianities infiltrating peacefully (Ireland) and others succeeding by violent coercion (Saxony at the hands of Charlemagne). The late Valerie Flint in her The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (1991) showed how Christianity was forced to compromise with traditional pre-Christian customs to become embedded. It might not have been until 1215, with the Fourth Lateran Council, that Christian uniformity was fully imposed on Europe.

In The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (2017), Catherine Nixey provides a vivid and passionate narrative of this transformation. She has little time for the political transformation from above—there is hardly a mention of Theodosius, who imposed the Trinity and completed the ‘Romanization of Christianity’. She bypasses the links between traditional Roman authority and the coming of the new religion.

Instead, her Christians appear to come from nowhere, like some fanatical sect emerging from across the Steppes. (Chapter One is aptly titled ‘The Invisible Army’.)  These Christians are tormented by demons. They destroy statues, burn books, and dismantle temples. Nixey highlights the minority of those dedicated to this destruction. ‘Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers’.  Monks were ‘vulgar, stinking, ill-educated and violent’. In Chapters Fourteen to Fifteen, Nixey portrays the joyless and aggressive behaviour of monks as if they all shared a commitment to overthrow the classical world. There are several passages in which Saint Martin of Tours burns ‘pagan’ shrines. In contrast, the influential Gregory the Great (pope 590-604) gets no acknowledgement for his advice to sprinkle holy water on ‘pagan’ shrines and reuse them.

In true journalistic style, Nixey dwells emotively on the destruction of ‘paganism’, muddling Latin and Greek Christianities and pre-and post-Constantinian Christianity. (There are very few dates she provides to establish any context, but her examples range from the second to the sixth centuries and across a variety of Christianities.) She assumes that the empire with its longstanding traditions and structures of authority was fragile, so that, by the sixth century, ‘an entire religious system [‘paganism’] had been all but wiped from the face of the earth’. Violence was part of everyday life in the late empire, so the activities of the more obsessive Christians have to be seen within that context. Papyrus scrolls are vulnerable to dampness and fire but the loss of classical literature is attributed by Nixey largely to the Church: ‘What ensured the near total destruction of all [sic] Latin and Greek literature was a combination of ignorance, fear and idiocy.’  Nixey assumes the Christian destruction of the library at Alexandria, even though it is probably mythical.

Recent scholars of late antiquity have been disturbed by Nixey’s polemic. Yet The Darkening Age has also received rave reviews from those who enjoy feisty dissent from conventional views. The book is seen as challenging a still-rosy picture of Christianity spreading peacefully throughout the Roman Empire and beyond and some reviewers have drawn comparisons between Nixey’s Christians and religious fanatics of the twenty-first century. Yet, other than Julian, emperor for a short time (361-63), all emperors after Constantine were professed Christians and upheld Roman authority. As the works of Peter Brown have shown, a much more nuanced narrative of the narrowing of Western thought is possible.

To be sure, there were dour ascetics among the Christians, but others enjoyed married life and employed slaves. Fifth-century aristocrats such as Sidonius Apollinaris, later to be bishop of Clermont, decried the loss of Latin learning. There is very little of this in Nixey’s narrative and there is no distinctive treatment of the very different fate of the Greek East. I know many of the texts she quotes, and I used some of them in my The Closing of the Western Mind, but they ignore the gradual process by which most of the subjects of the empire accepted Christianity.

Emboldened by her success, Nixey has now written Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God. This book is primarily an analysis of early tales about Jesus. As in The Darkening Age, Nixey too often assumes that she is breaking new ground, but I have a score of books on my shelves (notably those by Bart Ehrman) which contain similar, if less polemical, analyses.  (And, to give her credit, she does mention William Hone, who, in the nineteenth century, discovered many of the apocryphal gospels.) Despite her wide reading, Nixey has again failed to realise how Christianity was integrated within the Roman state. There is not a mention of Theodosius, who finalised and imposed the doctrine of the Trinity in 381 and attempted to ban ‘pagan’ practices in the 390s. Chapter Twelve, ‘On Laws’, discusses the late (438) Theodosian Code, a compilation of imperial laws since the reign of  Constantine over a hundred years earlier, but the relevance of this to her argument is unclear.

Without the impositions of emperors and the privileges it brought, Christianity was unlikely to have become as dominant as it did. Through councils over which they presided, the emperors brought order, and thus orthodoxy, to the religion. In fact, there were some previous attempts to consolidate the sacred texts, as in Irenaeus’ influential Adversus Haereses of c. 180 (which is mentioned by Nixey), which highlighted the four gospels as canonical, primarily because they were so early.  One cannot have it both ways. If Heresy is about the sheer variety of tales about Jesus and other ‘holy men’, one cannot complain about attempts to define which of these tales were orthodox and which were not. Nixey quotes Celsus’ second-century attacks on Christianity but she never mentions that these quotes are reproduced by the brilliant biblical scholar Origen, who also responds to many of them.

Nixey has a knack for evoking atmospheres and Heresy is full of lively images. She writes very well and many readers will enjoy her book. Heresy is more nuanced than The Darkening Age: there is a greater awareness of alternative views and she draws on more varied sources. However, this makes the book unstructured. Each chapter deals with a different theme. Rome, and Roman authors, are often described but there is little attempt to distinguish between the Greek world (of the New Testament texts) and the Latin West, where definitive translations of the scriptures had to wait until Jerome’s Vulgate in the fourth century. In Chapter Eight, ‘Fruit from a Dunghill’, there is a well-written discussion of travel in the Roman Empire but, other than linking this diversion to the travels of Paul, it does not make any contribution to the argument. Chapter Nine, ‘Go into the World’, continues the theme with travel to the East. There are other diversions, too, for example with the historian and philosopher Plutarch’s account of the afterlife of Thespesius and the discovery by George Smith in the nineteenth century of part of The Epic of Gilgamesh in the cuneiform tablets he was deciphering. It often feels as if Nixey has exhausted her main theme and is resorting to padding.

In the final chapters of Heresy, Nixey returns to the main themes of The Darkening Age: Christians extirpating ‘paganism’ and committing violence between themselves. Her books are more journalistic than scholarly. They will appeal to those who have suffered an unhappy experience with Christianity but they risk being historically unbalanced, and even misleading. There were extremists who took delight in attacking the symbols of traditional Roman and Greek religion, but most conversions happened gradually and there were compromises with traditional values in which Christianity made little difference to social life—even to the continuing ownership of slaves (as Nixey acknowledges).

I felt that Heresy, in particular, failed to establish a coherent argument. If Jesus made an impact within the Greek world, it is not surprising that many sources elaborated on the legends that had accumulated around him. It was right that Irenaeus sought to establish orthodoxy from the earliest gospel texts, for Christianity would never have survived if it had not brought order to its theology—even if, to this writer at least, it also brought a closing of the Western mind. It is just that this narrowing was a much subtler process than Nixey would have it.

Related reading

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

Image of the week: Filippino Lippi’s ‘Triumph of St Thomas Aquinas over the Heretics’, by Daniel James Sharp

The Enlightenment and the making of modernity, by Piers Benn

New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity, by Jack Stacey

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

The post How the Roman Empire became Christian: Catherine Nixey’s ‘The Darkening Age’ and ‘Heresy’ reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

Of all the items in my library, one of those I prize most is a bound volume of the first twenty issues of Richard Carlile’s The Republican, a radical journal which appeared weekly from 27 August 1819. It thrills me that I can peruse the original leaves of a journal edited and largely written by one of the bravest and most steadfast freethought heroes in British history. At a time of ferocious oppression in the wake of the Peterloo massacre, Richard Carlile dared to challenge the authorities and their arbitrary power in the most outspoken terms—all while he was being tried for blasphemous libel for publishing Thomas Paine’s works, including Rights of Man and The Age of Reason (the subjects of the first two articles in this series).

Richard Carlile was born the son of a shoemaker on 8 December 1790 in Ashburton, Devon. From the age of twelve, he served an apprenticeship as a tinsmith. By 1813, Carlile was in Gosport and probably worked in the nearby Portsmouth Dockyard. On 8 December of that year, he married Jane Cousins. At this time, he was attending David Bogue’s academy and was in training to be a missionary (Bogue was a Congregationalist and from his academy sprang the London Missionary Society). Of course, Carlile was to change his mind about the virtues of Christianity, but his theological training was to stand him in good stead.

Soon after their marriage, the Carliles moved to London and, after struggling to make a living as a tinsmith, Carlile began to sell pamphlets on the streets, including those of Thomas Paine. By 1817 he was reprinting cheap editions of Paine’s works, including The Age of Reason, which had not been sold legally in Britain since 1797.

Peterloo

On 16 August 1819, the then-biggest-ever meeting of working-class people was held in Manchester. Carlile travelled with the main speaker, Henry Hunt, to St Peter’s Field and was on the platform when the yeomanry charged, killing eighteen and wounding many others. Carlile avoided arrest and returned to London to publish one of the first accounts of what he termed the ‘Manchester Massacre’ in the journal he edited, Sherwin’s Political Register. The following week the journal’s title was changed to The Republican, thus upping the stakes. Carlile did not mince his words: in the first issue of the retitled journal, in an article entitled ‘The Crisis – No. 1’ (clearly, he was mimicking his hero Thomas Paine), he wrote:

‘The massacre of the unoffending inhabitants of Manchester, on the 16^th August, by the Yeomanry Cavalry, and Police, at the instigation of the Magistrates, should be the daily theme of the press, until the MURDERERS are brought to justice by the Law Officers of the Crown, under the instruction of the executive, or in default thereof, until the People have obtained their proper rank and station in the legislature…’

To Dorchester Gaol

This was all too much for the authorities, and Carlile was soon on trial for blasphemous libel, as well as for publishing two classic deist texts: Paine’s The Age of Reason and Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature (1801). He referred to this as a ‘mock trial’ because he refused to accept that the law could suppress free discussion and because the judge refused to allow him to call the Archbishop of Canterbury and Chief Rabbi as witnesses. He did, however, grasp the opportunity of reading the whole of The Age of Reason to the court so that it was published as part of the record.   

Carlile was convicted in October 1819, sentenced to a total of three years in prison, and fined £1,500 but, as he refused to pay the fine, he was not released until November 1825.  He was sent to Dorchester Gaol, well away from his radical colleagues and sympathisers in London, and placed in solitary confinement for fear he would contaminate other inmates. He was supposed to be taken from his cell for half an hour each day for exercise, but he objected because this would have meant his being paraded before the other inmates. As a result, he didn’t leave his cell for three years.

On the other hand, his cell was light and airy and he had his own sofa, sink, water closet, and bath. There was also a writing desk from which he continued to contribute to and edit The Republican, now published by his wife Jane. This writing desk is currently in the Conway Hall Library. In those days, prisoners could pay for better food and accommodation and Carlile had some well-heeled supporters, including Julian Hibbert, a wealthy Caribbean sugar plantation owner. One thing that the authorities seem to have missed was that the Dorchester to London stagecoach passed both Dorchester Gaol and the Carliles’ premises at 55 Fleet Street, thus providing a convenient service which Carlile used to deliver copy to London. The Republican sold well due to the notoriety of its editor and he produced twelve volumes while in prison. It was during this period that he pronounced himself an atheist (rather than a deist), the first person in England to do so during his own lifetime.

In 1820 it was Jane’s turn to be tried. She stood in the dock with her baby, Thomas Paine Carlile, in her arms. She was sentenced to two years and shared her husband’s cell. When in prison, Jane gave birth to a daughter whom she named Hypatia, after the pagan philosopher who was torn to pieces and burnt by a Christian mob in the fifth century CE. Jane’s place in Fleet Street was taken by Richard’s sister, Mary, who in turn received a sentence of six months and joined Richard and Jane in the same cell in Dorchester. Meanwhile, more than 150 men and women, Carlile’s ‘shopmen’, were sent to Newgate Prison for selling The Republican.

Despite all this, Carlile’s freethought books continued to sell. To make the authorities’ task more difficult, they were sold from behind a screen. On the customer’s side was a clock face bearing the names of the items on offer with a hand that could be pointed at the relevant title, whereupon a hidden shop assistant pushed the book through a hole in the screen, thus avoiding identification. Carlile called it ‘selling books by clockwork’.

By 1825 it had dawned on the authorities that their actions were merely promoting the Carliles’ publications. Carlile was suddenly and unconditionally released. He returned to London, took out a lease on larger premises at 62 Fleet Street, and expanded his business.  These premises are still standing today—although fast food, rather than books, is now sold from them.

Every Woman’s Book

In 1826 Carlile wrote and published Every Woman’s Book, the first book to advocate birth control, provide contraceptive advice, and advocate free love in Britain (it had been preceded by an article in The Republican entitled ‘What is Love?’). For Carlile, contraception served two purposes: it helped prevent conception and facilitated…pleasure!

‘See, what a mass of evil arises from bastard children, from child-murder, from deserted children, from diseased children, and even where the parents are most industrious and most virtuous, from a half-starved, naked, and badly housed family, from families crowded into one room, for whose health a house and garden is essential. All these matters are a tax upon love, a perpetual tax upon human pleasure, upon health, a tax that turns beauty into shrivelled ugliness, defaces the noble attitude of mankind, and makes its condition worse than that of the cattle of the field.’

Carlile was appalled by the practices of abortion and infanticide, both common at the time. He suggested that no married couple need have more children than desired and maintained that no unhealthy woman need endanger her life through childbirth. He believed that there need be no illegitimate children and that sexual intercourse could be independent of the dread of conception.

Carlile’s feminist views were rooted in his experience at Peterloo, where many peaceful women were present, and in witnessing the sacrifices made by his female shop workers, particularly Jane and Mary. Now he went a step further, arguing that Christian sexual morality was a constraint on female emancipation and reduced women to subservience. He accused Christian marriage of causing men to treat their wives ‘with as much vulgarity as he treats any other chamber utensil’ and for placing women under a form of ‘legalised slavery’.

To hammer his point home, Carlile included a frontispiece illustration to his book showing Adam and Eve without the usual fig leaves. He was making the point that, in his opinion, aspects of the Bible were obscene—far more obscene than his endeavours to improve people’s lives.

For Carlile, lovemaking was physically and mentally healthy, and he challenged still more taboos by claiming that women found sex as pleasurable and satisfying as men. His favoured contraceptive method was the sponge, although he also mentions ‘the glove’ (or condom) and withdrawal.

Carlile must have been disappointed by the reaction to his book. Many of his female followers turned against him and William Cobbett branded him ‘the grand pornographer and pimp’who planned to lure into prostitution the maidenhood of England. Nevertheless, the book sold steadily.

Lecture tours

When Carlile was released from gaol he went on four lecture tours, two in 1827 (totalling eight months), one in 1828 (six months), and another in 1829 (also six months). Although these had mixed success, they did help to establish a national network of reformers. He was always particularly well-received in Portsmouth and Manchester, although he had substantial support in many other industrial towns. He was not a particularly forceful speaker, and his most successful tour was the 1829 one, when he teamed up with Robert Taylor, the ‘Devil’s Chaplain’, and launched an ‘infidel…missionary tour’.¹ Taylor was a Cambridge-educated former Anglican Minister who had served a prison sentence for blasphemy. His oratorical skill greatly exceeded Carlile’s.

Eliza Sharples

Sadly, Richard and Jane were now falling out of love, and Richard took up with Eliza Sharples in 1832. Sharples became, in his words, his ‘moral wife’. She was a formidable character and campaigner in her own right, an effective platform speaker who edited her own feminist journal, The Isis. Years later, after Carlile’s death, a young Charles Bradlaugh was to briefly find a home with Sharples when his relationship with his father broke down.

The Rotunda

In 1830, Carlile opened the Blackfriars Rotunda on the banks of the Thames, near Blackfriars Bridge. This was a substantial building with two lecture theatres, one of which could accommodate up to 1,500. The Rotunda became infamous as the centre of reformers’ activities at a time of mounting discontent.

In 1831, Carlile was incarcerated again, this time in London, for defending the ‘Swing Riots’, uprisings by agricultural workers demanding better working conditions. Now it was Sharples who visited him in prison. During one of her visits, they conceived a child, the first of four.  While he was imprisoned, Sharples took over management of the Rotunda. 

Final years

After this second imprisonment, Carlile’s career declined. Financially bereft thanks to government fines, he had also lost a lot of support due to his abandonment of Jane, though he had granted her an annuity of £50 per year. He also made himself unpopular with many former supporters by adopting the title Reverend. His atheism was unwavering, but he thought Christianity provided a sound moral code.

Carlile’s end was probably hastened by his belief (shared by others) that swallowing a small amount of mercury each day improved health. He died on 10 February 1843 and his body was taken to St Thomas’s Hospital where, in accordance with his wishes, his brain was dissected for research. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.

The Republican provided a foundation on which Richard Carlile built his reputation and following. His punchy, colourful, sometimes outrageous writing reflects his audacious and extraordinarily courageous war against arbitrary authority in the cause of liberal, democratic, and Enlightenment ideals. Can you blame me for gently handling my bound volume with awe—and a misty look in my eye?

Main sources

Joel H. Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain.  The Life of Richard Carlile.  Greenwood Press, 1983.

Michael L. Bush, The Friends and Following of Richard Carlile.  A Study of Infidel Republicanism in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain. Twopenny Press, 2016.

Michael L. Bush, What is Love? Richard Carlile’s Philosophy of Sex. Verso, 1998.

1. Editor: I can’t resist adding a little more about Taylor’s nickname. One of Carlile and Taylor’s stops on the infidel tour was Cambridge, where a young Charles Darwin witnessed the controversy stirred up by the two infidels. Perhaps this was what made him fearful, years later, of stirring up controversy by publishing his theory of evolution by natural selection. He certainly remembered Taylor’s nickname, writing in 1856 ‘What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of Nature!’. In 2003, a latter-day missionary of Moloch, Richard Dawkins, was inspired by Darwin to entitle an essay collection A Devil’s Chaplain (albeit erroneously crediting Darwin with coining the term—which, in fact, goes as far back as Chaucer). ~ Daniel James Sharp ︎

Related reading

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

From the archive: ‘A House Divided’, by Nigel Sinnott

Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as Secularists and Radicals, by Edward Royle

Britain’s blasphemy heritage, by David Nash

Freethought and birth control: the untold story of a Victorian book depot, by Bob Forder

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Review of ‘A Dirty, Filthy Book’ by Michael Meyer, by Bob Forder

Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker attracted the public’s attention, by Clare Stainthorp

On trial for blasphemy: the Freethinker’s first editor and offensive cartoons, by Bob Forder

What should schools teach young people about sex? by Peter Tatchell

The post Books from Bob’s Library #3: Richard Carlile’s ‘The Republican’ and ‘Every Woman’s Book’ appeared first on The Freethinker.

I was born to an Indian Bengali Hindu family. My childhood was drenched in the rich embroidery of customs, ceremonies, and convictions; my perspective was moulded by the strict social standards that were imposed upon me. But I ended up scrutinising the doctrines that characterised my reality, and now I consider myself a seeker of truth rather than a follower of custom. I have travelled from unbridled religiosity to reasonableness.

My childhood in a Hindu family imparted to me a profound veneration for the heavenly. Narratives of divine beings were woven into the texture of my life. I believed in a world full of divine powers. My grandmother used to recount these exciting stories to me, from Prince Rama killing the demon Ravana and winning the beautiful Sita back to how Narasimha (an exceptional blend of human and lion and the fourth avatar of Vishnu) killed the evil king Hiranyakashipu and protected the king’s faithful son Prahlada.

However, as I grew up, I started to understand that these stories were simple legends. The seeds of uncertainty were planted in me as I took note of the irregularities and inconsistencies of the holy texts and lessons that I had once accepted unquestioningly. Questions emerged: How could a considerate god support unfairness and suffering? What objective reason was there for considering some practices sacrosanct and others not? Why should a husband be seen as a god by his wife? Why should the wife not be treated equally?

These and many other questions drove me to investigate what I had been taught, and eventually I broke free from the shackles of religiosity that had been imposed on me from birth. This was an overwhelming experience of liberation, but it caused conflict between me and my family and others who lived nearby. They could not let go of dogma and custom and were unable to engage with different viewpoints. My family made me practice absurd rituals like not oiling or shampooing my hair, not cutting my nails, and not having non-vegetable foods for 13 days between my grandmother’s death and funeral. But I was undaunted, still desperate to find my own way based on reason and evidence rather than blind adherence to antiquated traditions.

The situation between me and my family was like a cold war initially, but as time went on, they realised that forcing me to adhere to dogmas would not only hamper my personal growth but strain my relationship with them. With time, we both understood that to maintain a healthy relationship, we had to desist from discussing religion openly and respect each other’s choices.

The Hindu misogyny I experienced played a major role in my rejection of dogma. Disallowing menstruating women from entering temples, decreeing that widows are not allowed to participate in wedding rituals, preventing infertile women from taking part in baby showers, and various other misogynistic practices emboldened me to raise my voice against injustice.

I decided to embrace sanity. I recognised that the world was not generally as it appeared and that the search for truth was a progressive and always-evolving endeavour. Many books helped me in my journey towards rationality, starting with the Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh’s 1930 Why I Am an Atheist, which Singh wrote in jail just months before his execution. Singh left certain logical questions—like ‘Why doesn’t God create a better world for humans?’ and ‘Why doesn’t God stop humans from committing sin?’—unanswered in my mind. Later, books like The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christopher Hitchens, and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) by Daniel Dennett helped me in my path to enlightenment.

So far, my experience as a secular person has been exciting, diverse, and full of challenges. On the one hand, I have faced questioning and judgement from people opposed to my views, and on the other, I have found comfort and backing in networks of similar people who shared my feelings and gave me a sense of fellowship that rose above the limits of religion, nationality, and culture. As I continued my journey, I felt I was in the right kind of company.

As I look back, I feel great appreciation for all the encounters I have had, both positive and negative, for they have moulded me into the person I am today. While the journey to reason was full of difficulties, it was also full of epiphanies, understanding, and personal development. Each step forward gives me a more profound knowledge of myself and the world I find myself in. It has provoked me to scrutinise the convictions and suspicions that once characterised my reality and to embrace vulnerability and uncertainty with boldness and interest. As I continue to explore the intricacies of life, I’m inspired by the thought that the pursuit of truth is an undertaking motivated by our most elevated desires, and I know that by rocking the boat and thinking freely we can make ourselves, and our world, a happier and better place.

Related reading

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The rise and fall of god(s) in Indian politics: Modi’s setback, Indic philosophy, and the freethought paradox, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Image of the week: Ajita Kesakambali, ancient Indian materialist and one of the Six Heretics, by Daniel James Sharp

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan, by Emma Park

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel, by Emma Park

The post Why I am no longer a Hindu appeared first on The Freethinker.

Books sometimes have a way of turning up at opportune times. In mid-2022 a collection of essays on the themes of blasphemy and violence in Europe, Demystifying the Sacred: Blasphemy and Violence from the French Revolution to Today, went off to the printers. According to the publisher, De Gruyter, the book ‘offers a much-needed analysis of a subject that historians have largely ignored, yet that has considerable relevance for today’s world: the powerful connection that exists between offences against the sacred and different forms of violence.’

‘Considerable relevance’ would shortly prove a massive understatement. On 12 August 2022, a month before the book’s publication, author Sir Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked as he was preparing to deliver a lecture in New York. Repeatedly stabbed, Rushie only narrowly survived, although he has lost sight in one eye. A New Jersey man of Lebanese background, Hadi Matar, is currently awaiting trial for attempted murder. All the facts will come out then, but from what we know, it is safe to say the attack was a violent response to blasphemy.

Rushdie has been living with the threat of such an attack since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the ailing Iranian theocrat Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed that his novel The Satanic Verses was ‘a text written, edited, and published against Islam’ and its author deserved death. This fatwa still stood in 2022, although amidst the tumult of COVID-19, the 2020 United States presidential election, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine it was hardly front of mind for most people. The attack on Rushdie reminded us that, whatever else is happening in the world, the threat of zealous violence against those who fail to treat the sacred with the level of reverence the zealots consider to be its due has not gone away. The fatwa still stands today.

Demystifying the Sacred is an academic work, or a collection of academic works, exploring the connection between blasphemy and violence in Europe over the last two and a half centuries. Each chapter has a theme, usually a particular time and place. For example, one essay by Julio de la Cueva looks at blasphemy and violence in the Spanish Civil War. David Nash, one of the book’s editors (the other is Eveline G. Bouwers), contributes a chapter on blasphemy in English law, in which early editions of the Freethinker make an appearance. The final chapter, by Manfred Sing, covers the Rushdie affair.

A Conceptual Chameleon

‘Words are not violence’ is a long-running catchcry of the defenders of free speech. There are those, like Khomeini, who disagree, and Demystifying the Sacred can give some insight into their thinking. To them, blasphemy itself is violence, and blasphemers are themselves the instigators. The book does not just deal with violence against people, but violence against property. It starts, in fact, with the vandalism of an artwork.

It’s easy to assume that a book on blasphemy and violence will tell the story of the struggle against book-burning fanatics by the advocates of tolerance, reason, and Enlightenment. But the themes of Demystifying the Sacred are much broader. According to the book’s editors, blasphemy is a ‘conceptual chameleon’, related to but distinct from heresy, apostasy, and sacrilege. It has been criminalised in both religious and secular law, albeit often for different reasons, and at times it has even been treated as the symptom of a mental illness.

Each chapter can be read on its own, and I will not go into them all in detail. But a few themes run across them. One is the long-running connection between blasphemy and politics, where authorities have prosecuted blasphemy in the name of upholding public order and protecting the nation from its internal or external enemies.

More Politics than Religion

In his chapter on blasphemy in English law, Nash cites the 1911 blasphemy case of a man named T. W. Stewart. Stewart had taken to giving public lectures criticising the morality of the Bible, concluding in delightfully Edwardian fashion that ‘God is not fit company for a respectable man like me’. The Leeds Chief Constable concluded that these addresses were ‘most offensive and distressing to respectable persons passing by’ and had him hauled before Justice Thomas Gardner Horridge.

Justice Horridge did not criticise Stewart for the substance of what he said. Rather, maintained the Judge, ‘there was a difference between the drawing room and the street’, and while it might be acceptable to ridicule Christianity in private among friends, making the same claims before a crowd was a threat to public order. Stewart was convicted, which, as critics of the case pointed out, seemed to make a lapse of good taste a criminal offence.

Manfred Sing’s chapter on the Rushie Affair looks at the topic of blasphemy and politics from a different angle. Reading the chapter, I was surprised by the lack of clarity around many of the key facts of the episode. It was unclear what, if anything, was actually blasphemous about The Satanic Verses. It was unclear what, if any, actual legal effect Khomeini’s decree had in either Islamic or Iranian law (as Sing explains, it was not formally a fatwa, although the Western media ran with the term). And while commentators in the West saw the fatwa as a broadside against Western secular values, Khomeini’s attention might have been much closer to home. In 1989, Iran was in the midst of a political and constitutional crisis in the wake of the bloody war against Iraq, the regime’s domestic critics were becoming more vocal than the Ayatollahs were comfortable with, and its elderly and frail leader was well aware his time was coming to an end and that thoughts both inside and outside the country were turning to succession. According to Sing, it is likely that Khomeini issued the fatwa, or decree,to buttress his authority as both Iran’s temporal and spiritual head.

Of course, radical Muslims in Western countries had a simpler view. Sing quotes British Muslim intellectual Shabbir Akhtar, who argued at the time of the Rushie Affair that without ‘an internal temper of militant, but constructive wrath’ Islam would, like Christianity, fade away in an increasingly secular world. In this worldview, violence in response to blasphemy becomes almost a type of collective self-defence.

Demystifying the Sacred is an academic book which will be of more interest to those researching its subject than general readers. But it brings together a huge amount of scholarship about its subject in an accessible volume, and the electronic version is available for free download, making it a great resource for writers to reference. The subject, sadly, is unlikely to become unimportant any time soon.

Further reading

The Satanic Verses; free speech in the Freethinker, a collection of Freethinker articles compiled by Emma Park

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

Three years on, the lessons of Batley are yet to be learned, by Jack Rivington

The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Rushdie’s victory, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Blasphemy and violence: review of ‘Demystifying the Sacred’ appeared first on The Freethinker.