The Great Agnostic

Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, says he promoted Darwin's theory of evolution and fought publicly against government interference in religion. Ingersoll actually gave up his public career, Jacoby says, because "he thought it was more important to talk about the ways in which fundamentalist religion was a bad thing. Author Susan Jacoby says Robert Ingersoll "was probably the first person who said, 'I don't believe in a God,' that a lot of people had ever seen.

It was a controversial message. Ingersoll's father was actually a Presbyterian minister, who kept a library "of all of the things that Ingersoll came not to believe," Jacoby says. And he was public about those questions. Read an excerpt of The Great Agnostic. Men like Ingersoll would have been astonished, Jacoby says, by the survival of fundamentalism in our era. I think they would have been very surprised that anybody, by the end of the 20th century, would have been running for office on the platform that the Bible is literally true.

Accessibility links Skip to main content Keyboard shortcuts for audio player. Biographer Susan Jacoby says Ingersoll argued against religion in public life and said "There is nothing like reading the Bible literally to make you question it. Another explanation can be traced to the criticism of Ingersoll, both before and after his death, on grounds that he was not an "original thinker" but merely a synthesizer and popularizer of other people's ideas.

He was certainly not a scientist, a philosopher, or a historian recognized by scholarly institutions. But that was precisely Ingersoll's strength: He believed that reason was available to and attainable by the many and not restricted to the educated few. He saw the writings of Shakespeare, Spinoza, Voltaire, Paine, Jefferson, and Humboldt as comprehensible to all; a degree in the natural sciences, philosophy, or literature was not required to enter Ingersoll's house of reason.

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This is hardly a moot argument today, given that a continuing feature of our political culture is the denigration of reason itself as an "ivory tower" phenomenon that could not possibly be important to anyone but a professor in his or her study. There is no "merely" about Ingersoll's role as a popularizer of freethought, because when the cause is reason itself, and the capacity of reason to alter human lives for the better, nothing can be accomplished without widespread dissemination among members of the public from diverse educational backgrounds and social classes.

Ingersoll left a priceless legacy not only to committed atheists but to secularists who — like many of the American founders — may believe in some form of Providence but are convinced that any universal spirit has left it up to humans to solve earthly problems through our own reason. Ingersoll labored mightily to cut through the layers of religious treacle that separated Americans of his country's second century, for all their more advanced technology, from the Enlightenment rationalists who wrote a founding document beginning with the words "We the People" rather than with acknowledgment of gratitude and servitude to some divinity.

He was the missing link between the revolutionary generation and millions of late nineteenthcentury Americans, whether born in the New World or the Old, who had forgotten or never knew that their nation was built on the premise of human, not divine, authority.

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None of this history is far removed from the task of twenty-first-century atheists and secularists. The audience for the new-old atheists includes a good many Americans in their thirties whose great-grandparents might well have heard Ingersoll invite them to join him and other freethinkers in "laying the foundations of the grand temple of the future — not the temple of all the gods, but of all the people. Does his interest in one of the two greatest freethinkers in American history have anything to do with the fact that I, and my two nieces in their twenties, are atheists?

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I cannot be certain, but I do know that doubt, like faith, is generally transmitted over generations; there is rarely a single moment, the equivalent of Saul falling off his horse on the road to Damascus, in which people slap their heads and say, "Eureka, Christ is the Lord! Ingersoll was one of the grand doubters who labored to clear the environment of poisonous certitude for future generations. First, he explained the true meaning and value of science as a system of inquiry whose tentative conclusions were always open to modification by new evidence.

He explained this in a more understandable fashion than any scientist, even the brilliant popularizer Thomas Henry Huxley, did at the time and in more lucid fashion than any scientist, with the possible exception of Dawkins, is doing right now.

The Great Agnostic

It may even have been better that Ingersoll was not a scientist, because the notion that there is some vast divide between the "mysteries" of science and ordinary human intelligence, that science and religion or, for that matter, science and the humanities, must occupy "separate magisteria" was one of the most pernicious intellectual fashions of the second half of the twentieth century. In Ingersoll's time, specialization had not yet triumphed, and the idea that one had to be a scientist to understand the scientific method, or to talk about it, was considered highly suspect by most Americans.

Science is not a mystery, Ingersoll told his audiences, and scientists are not priests, bishops, or popes. The latter half of the proposition was arguably as important as the former, because some in his generation were led by their passion for science into pseudosciences that took on some of the characteristics of religious orthodoxy. These late nineteenth-century scientific- seeming byways ranged from the prevailing social Darwinism of many Gilded Age intellectuals and business leaders to the arrogance of the vivisectionists, whose claims that they had a perfect right to torture lower animals in the name of science were not all that far removed from the biblical assertion that God had created man with dominion over the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.

Second, Ingersoll made the connection between repressive religion and everyday burdens and injustices as no one had before him. The Enlightenment rationalists, especially Paine and Voltaire, understood and excoriated the role of religion, coupled with state power, in large issues that included slavery, torture, and capital punishment. Ingersoll spoke out on the same issues but moved farther and deeper into the most intimate injustices sanctioned by society. As far as he was concerned, there were no social injustices in which religion did not play a major role — from the prevalent belief, well into the nineteenth century, that God had created the poor for a reason and that only those who could pay deserved to be educated, to the religiously based laws and customs that sanctioned marital violence, deemed it a moral disgrace for a woman to leave her husband for any reason, and denied women access to education and the means of making a living.

Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought

Debtors' prisons, cruelty to children and animals, inhumane treatment both of the insane and of criminals: All were justified by biblical precepts that formed the original basis for mistreatment of the powerless by the powerful. Ingersoll did not live to see twentieth-century totalitarianism, but there is little doubt, given his contempt for the idea that "tooth and claw" should be the rule for man in a state of civilization, that he would have had equal contempt for secular ideologies that took on the anti-rational, anti-evidentiary characteristics of orthodox theology.

Finally, Ingersoll's primary civic aim was the restoration of the historical memory of a founding generation that had explicitly rejected theocracy as the basis for a national government.



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His American patriotism was inseparable from his valorization of the separation of church and state. To him, the glory of the founding generation was that it did not establish a Christian nation. There is no establishment figure who says anything of the kind in America today. Even though Ingersoll was denied the opportunity for public office because of his antireligious beliefs, he was nevertheless very much a part of the social and political establishment.

Yet he placed his principles, and his determination that Americans not forget the secular side of their own history, above his considerable political ambitions — something that no aspirant to high office has been willing to do in the United States since. There ought to be some sort of Atheist Hall of Fame — it would not be large — for those who refuse to engage in religious hypocrisy to further their political ambitions.

Eliminate a few Victorianisms, and everything he had to say in his time is just as relevant to a nation in which religious censors are still trying to eliminate the very idea of the separation of church and state from school history texts and a world in which radical Islamist theocrats still want blasphemers to die for their "crimes.

Like atheists of this generation, Ingersoll was constantly charged by his religiously orthodox contemporaries with the crime of attempting to destroy comforting beliefs in divine guidance while replacing them with nothing, leaving forlorn men and women to roam the earth in a state of fear because nothing can make this life worthwhile in the absence of faith in an afterlife. To this Ingersoll replied, as atheists do today, that nothing in a putative eternity could possibly justify suffering in this world and that the reduction of suffering in one, finite lifetime is a high goal for any human being.

Given the existence of evils long attributed to gods, Ingersoll saw no reason for humans to be intimidated by the idea that they were on their own in the task of building a better future. Let the ghosts go. We will worship them no more.