Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850-1914, by Nathan G. Alexander

Abstract

Reviewed by: Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914 by Nathan G. Alexander Michael Ledger-Lomas (bio) Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914, by Nathan G. Alexander; pp. ix + 290. New York: New York University Press, 2019, $39.00. God "hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth" (King James Version, Acts 17:26). The New Testament's ringing declaration explains why historians have often viewed Christianity as an intellectual sheet anchor against the Victorian drift to racism. Acts, when read alongside the Book of Genesis, seemed to teach monogenesis and so to promote Christian universalism: all humans were descended from Adam and Eve; all shared in the Fall and could be saved by Christ's sacrifice. Colin Kidd therefore argued in The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (2006) that it was the Protestant freethinkers who inadvertently enabled the rise of modern racism by claiming that humans may have existed before Adam. The growing insistence on entrenched racial differences by philology, anthropology, and the biological natural sciences further displaced the authority of the Scriptures as a guide to human origins and in turn created racial spectacles through which to read them. The intellectual decomposition of Christianity was thus the mulch in which racism and the settler subjugation of colonized peoples took root. As John Stenhouse notably showed, for instance, the freethinker Charles Southwell, after emigrating to New Zealand, had a second incarnation as the champion of land-hungry settlers, ridiculing Anglican arguments for honoring the rights of the Christianized Māori. In Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914, Kidd's former student Nathan G. Alexander proposes major qualifications to this picture, in a book which aims to absolve "secularization" from the charge of fostering racism—not just at the apogee of Anglophone imperialism, but also in the present day (3). He does so through a fine-grained exposition of the racial attitudes of an array of British and North American freethinkers (though commendably transatlantic, his monoglot research is reticent on Europe). Although interested in discreet freethinkers such as Charles Darwin, Alexander devotes more attention to paid-up members of the secularist movement and their periodical journalism. In this sense, his book does not offer a rounded account of so-called secularization—a phenomenon whose disputed causation and chronology continue to generate a weighty historiography. Nor does it unpack the connections between an abstract "atheism" and racial thought (13). Some of his most interesting actors were not, or did not remain, programmatic atheists. Annie Besant ended up a theosophist; James Morton joined the Baha'í faith; Moncure Conway preached a crusading Hegelian struggle for human betterment in London's South Place Chapel. This is instead a study of an awkward squad of activists who were united by an obsessive hostility to organized Christianity, which they regarded as not just a false religion but also one fraught with social evils. Not the least of these was racial subjugation. Freethinkers repeatedly attacked Christian missionaries for harassing non-European peoples with beliefs and demands—such as the adoption of Western clothes in unsuitable climates—which harmed them and enabled their colonial exploitation. Alexander shows that the marked enthusiasm of freethinkers both for polygenesis and for evolutionary theories of human development did less to impede this defense of nonwhite others than we might imagine. One did not need to preach polygenesis to practice or benefit from racism: as freethinkers pointed out, most slaveowners in the antebellum [End Page 520] American South were orthodox Christians. Similarly, polygenesis often mattered to polemicists such as Charles Bradlaugh mainly as a stick with which they could poke holes in Genesis. That belief did not weaken, but might actually have supported, a relativist defense of the right of distinct races to live free from interference or oppression. As a Member of Parliament, Bradlaugh became the crusading "member for India" (127). Moreover, the racial payoff of theories of human evolution was hardly straightforward: Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley were abolitionists and committed to monogenesis, but in describing the gradations...