Where Are the Histories of American Irreligion?
June 1, 2013
Posted by Lincoln Mullen
Robert Owen and Alexander Campbell squared off against one another in a public debate on April 13 and April 21, 1829. The debate packed out a Methodist meeting house in Cincinnati, where the European traveler Fanny Trollope thought a thousand people were in attendance. The crowd had gathered to hear a debate on the merits of Christianity versus infidelity. Robert Owen was a religious skeptic and the founder of New Harmony, a social experimental community in Indiana; his role in the debate was to represent skepticism against all forms of Christianity. His opponent, Alexander Campbell, was a minister engaged in restoring the Christian churches to the purity of the New Testament; his role was to defend Christianity, and in particular his form of Bible Christianity. The audience sat through fifteen sessions which, when printed, filled two volumes. At the end of the debate, over Owen’s protest, Campbell determined the outcome by popular acclaim. In revivalist fashion Campbell asked the crowd to rise if they believed in Christianity, and most stood up. Only three people—“a few gentlemen, and one lady,” according to Trollope—rose for Campbell’s second challenge:
The Owen-Campbell showdown was just one time of many when nineteenth-century Christians and skeptics formally debated one another, let alone all the times when they merely declaimed rather than debated. But to judge by the writings of American historians of religion, the triumph of religion over free thought and skepticism in nineteenth-century United States was as lopsided as in the Owen-Campbell debate. For all the hundreds of books on American religion, you would be hard pressed to find three good books on American irreligion.
I want to argue that to understand the religion that Campbell defended, we must also understand the irreligion that Owen argued for. Before I get to that point, though, let me substantiate the claim that there are few good histories of American irreligion, if that’s what we should call it. I’m uncertain which umbrella name to give this phenomenon, which encompasses at least Deism, skepticism, agnosticism, rationalism, Free Thought, Ethical Culture, atheism, secularism, and infidelity. Then there are the “nones,” that is, people who did not claim a particular religious identity. I’ve chosen the term “irreligion” until someone proposes a better one.
http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2013/06/where-are-histories-of-american.html
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