Liberal Religion and Free Love: An Undiscovered Afro-American Novel of the 1890s

Abstract

During the last decade of the nineteenth century, church-going America underwent a crisis of faith which had been mounting since the start of the Gilded Age. Evolutionary thought, comparative religious study, the Higher Criticism of the Bible, and the secularization of American society all threatened the vital theological core around which Protestantism had grown in the ante-bellum United States. Traditional concepts of God as actively supervising the affairs of creation, of Jesus as divine agent of human salvation, and of man as intrinsically sinful and only redeemable through the action of God through Christ were all thrown into question. The writings of Herbert Spencer and John Fiske made impersonal natural law seem more benevolently disposed toward humankind than the jealous Jehovah of conventional Christianity. Theistic evolutionists could not reconcile the notion of the depravity of man to the evidence Spencer had introduced in favor of the steady progress of man on spiritual, moral, and material fronts. Readers of books like David Strauss's Life of Jesus (1846) and Mrs. Humphrey Ward's Robert Elsemere (1888) did not have to consult the Christological theories of Friedrich Schleiermacher or Albrecht Ritschl to believe in a Christ whose humanity was no longer burdened by the doctrines of the Incarnation, the Trinity, or the Second Coming. Liberal revaluation of the role of institutions in religious life reduced the importance of traditional theology, sectarian organization, and church discipline. Even among conservative denominations like the Methodists, clergymen could be found who welcomed science's demolition of the supernaturalism and outworn theologies of old-fashioned orthodoxy. Rev. J. F. Chaffee of Minneapolis was but one of many in the Protestant community who called for liberty of thought and speech in the turn-of-the-century church, for freedom from outmoded authority and myth.1 Many Americans took the new liberalism at its word, exchanging their pastors and priests for a gaggle of latter-day prophets and utopians who led them