Reviewed by: Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914 by Nathan G. Alexander Stephen LeDrew Nathan G. Alexander, Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2019). Many histories of secularism have emerged in recent years, but Nathan Alexander’s Race in a Godless World is the first to focus specifically on the issue of race. Primarily by surveying a range of atheist, secularist, and freethought (the terms are all roughly interchangeable for the purposes of the study) periodicals, Alexander deftly captures the contradictions and inconsistencies within secularist culture in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States and Britain. For example, he finds a prevalent belief among atheists that white Europeans were at once more highly evolved and more civilized than other races (Thomas Huxley, a passionate defender of liberalism and the most prominent defender of Darwinism of his time, believed black people to be inherently inferior to white people since they represented an earlier stage of human evolution). At the same time, many atheists also believed that some ‘savages’ who were found to be irreligious highlighted the backwardness of a European society where Christianity was ubiquitous. Despite such inconsistencies, and despite Alexander’s sometimes overly charitable assessment, it’s clear that most atheists—at least those who wrote articles for publications read by atheists—viewed white civilization as inherently superior to all others (in fairness, most people in general held this view, though atheists had theories to support it). The same is true of much popular atheism [End Page 125] today. Indeed, the major lesson to take from the book may be how little atheism itself has evolved in the last two centuries, remaining stuck in many of the same modes of thought, ideological frameworks, and outright prejudices. The book contains many stimulating ideas and revelations concerning the relationship between racism and a scientific worldview in the minds of people who reject religion. The compelling second chapter suggests that Christianity’s monogenist view of all humans being created in the image of God and descended from Adam, and thus inherently equal, was an obstacle to racism. It was science, rather, that paved the way for modern racism to emerge by situating humans on an evolutionary tree of life, which allowed some to imagine that there were separate branches for distinct subspecies of humans called ‘races.’ Scientific racism, it turns out, is about as old as science or, certainly, Darwinism (though Darwin himself, while likely harbouring many of the prevailing prejudices of the time, was strongly opposed to slavery and racial discrimination). Evolutionary theory, in fact, figures prominently throughout the book, since it served as the major justification for racism for the atheists who were also ardent evolutionists. While science is a big part of the story, Alexander’s grander question is whether secularization facilitated racism or provided the means to challenge it. He concludes with ambivalence: white atheists largely accepted the view from racial science of the biological superiority of whites and civilizational superiority of western societies but were also skeptical of these claims because of their own marginalization within those societies (due to being atheists, but also economically since secularist organizations were largely working class). This is a fascinating tension; however, there is an incongruence between the analysis Alexander offers and the conclusions that follow from it. Though he claims that ambivalence is the key theme to emerge from his study, he tends toward a sympathetic view, even arguing that atheists were by and large progressive. This may be true of issues like voting rights and gender equality, but many of the views on race and cultural differences expressed by atheist leaders and their publications were noxious not only by today’s standards but also by those of their own time (Alexander’s own analysis suggests that modern racism rose in tandem with modern science, which was deployed ideologically both to create and reinforce racist attitudes). My own conclusion from the material the book presents would be less sympathetic. While it’s clear that there was ambivalence in attitudes about race, the evidence seems to suggest that the view of white/western superiority was...