Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In the spring of 1839, Abner Kneeland left Boston for good. The infamous freethinker, a former Baptist and then Universalist minister who had renounced Christianity, had spent sixty days in jail for blasphemy the previous summer. In that same year William Miller, formerly a skeptical deist and now a Baptist preacher, gave his first Boston lecture, arguing that Christ would return to earth in 1843. As Kneeland shook the dust of Boston from his shoes and Miller proclaimed that the end was near, Boston lawyer and politician Horace Mann extended his public crusade for education reform and struggled privately with religious doubt. By 1839, another Bostonian, Orestes Brownson, had already been a Presbyterian, a Universalist, and a freethinking socialist. The thirty-six-year-old editor of the Boston Quarterly Review was by now a staunch Democrat in a Whig city and a Unitarian in the orbit of New England Transcendentalism. Few writers of the period wrote with more sustained attention to the problem that concerned all four men: the challenge of religious skepticism to the grounds of American faith.1 In an era we have come to associate with evangelical revivalism, religious reformers, Emersonian optimism, and the consolidation of the Bible belt, Brownson argued that is not much open skepticism, not much avowed infidelity, but there is a vast amount of concealed doubt, and untold difficulty. Those religious doubts have remained hidden because of the stories we tell about the country's religious past. Scholars who have applied the secularization thesis to American religious history, a model that often assumes a waning significance of religion in the modern world, have always struggled with the American case, where religious affiliation and belief in God have remained very high compared to other industrialized nations. Secularization in the United States, some scholars explain, has been structural rather than psychological. Non-religious institutions and discourses have taken over functions once performed by churches and God talk, but this has not been accompanied by a significant rise in the proportion of the population that doubts or rejects religious truth claims. According to this modification of the secularization thesis, religious belief and practice have not withered away in the face of modem rationality and secular agnosticism; religion instead has been privatized. Structural change, not religious skepticism, is at the center of this story.2 Since the early 1980s, other scholars have moved from the secularization model to narratives stressing American religious vitality. The religious doubts of people like Brownson, Miller, Kneeland, and Mann are not especially important to these interpretations either. By the 1830s, most religious histories tell us, the radical implications of Enlightenment thought had been discredited by the French Revolution, David Hume's skepticism had been answered by Scottish Common Sense Realism, and the popular religious infidelity of rabble-rousers like Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, and Elihu Palmer had been crushed by Christian polemics and evangelical activism. Visionary freethought reformers like Robert Owen and Frances Wright were foreign hothouse plants unable to bear fruit in God's American Canaan. If the origins of later unbelief can be found in some of the religious debates of this period, the great age of religious doubt lay ahead, in the post-Darwinian era of William James and Henry Adams. From this perspective too, it is not surprising that the few skeptics and freethinkers who did speak out earlier in the nineteenth century are consigned to the footnotes in studies of revival and reform.3 To pay more attention to both open infidelity and concealed doubt is not to argue that either is more important than the surging, protean religiosity in early nineteenth-century American life. Perhaps critical deists like the early Miller, closet skeptics like Mann, and vocal freethinkers like Kneeland and (briefly) Brownson do not deserve more space in surveys of American religious history. …