Two new books on nineteenth-century American atheism put flesh onto the dusty bones of an American intellectual and cultural movement that has received little attention in recent decades. Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Village Atheists and Bonnie S. Anderson’s The Rabbi’s Atheist Daughter thus also breathe new life into a field, using the complications and ambivalences of biography to gain new insight into American religious culture and social movements. Anderson’s biography of feminist lecturer Ernestine Rose, the eponymous “rabbi’s atheist daughter,” and Schmidt’s biographical sketches of four “village atheists” add enormously to the literature on nineteenth century American atheism and religion. They bring flesh and blood atheists to a history that has been populated by thin wisps of ghostly (and often dry) elite and intellectual analysis on the one hand, and one-dimensional hagiographies of “leading” nineteenth-century infidels on the other. Bringing us closer to the lived experience of atheism in the nineteenth century, Schmidt and Anderson extend our understanding of the value of the history of freethinking, agnosticism, atheism, and unbelief. Schmidt’s title announces his volume’s focus on the “village atheist”—a term that speaks gestures to a wide range of individuals who took on or were given titles such as freethinker, agnostic, radical, infidel, and the like in the decades following the Civil War. Espousing strict separation between church and state, rejecting biblical orthodoxy and clerical power, embracing both universal rights and humanitarianism, seeking truth in science, nineteenth-century atheists and infidels included not just academics and elites but, as Schmidt’s book makes clear, a wide middle ground of “vernacular” or “popular” who wrote, spoke, and engaged in public life in the decades between the “rustic infidels of the late Enlightenment and the romanticized nonconformists of

中文翻译：

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血肉无神论者

两本关于 19 世纪美国无神论的新书为近几十年来很少受到关注的美国知识和文化运动的尘土飞扬的骨头增添了肉。利·埃里克·施密特的《乡村无神论者》和邦妮·S·安德森的《拉比的无神论者女儿》因此也为这个领域注入了新的活力，利用传记的复杂性和矛盾性来获得对美国宗教文化和社会运动的新见解。安德森的女权主义讲师欧内斯汀罗斯的传记，同名的“拉比的无神论者女儿”，以及施密特的四位“乡村无神论者”的传记草图，极大地增加了关于 19 世纪美国无神论和宗教的文献。他们将有血有肉的无神论者带入了一段充满幽灵（通常是枯燥的）精英和知识分子分析的历史，另一方面是“领先”的 19 世纪异教徒的一维圣徒传记。让我们更接近 19 世纪无神论的生活经验，施密特和安德森扩展了我们对自由思想、不可知论、无神论和不信历史价值的理解。施密特的书名表明了他的卷的重点是“乡村无神论者”——这个词向广泛的个人表达了姿态，这些人在公民运动之后的几十年里接受或被授予自由思想者、不可知论者、激进分子、异教徒等称号。战争。支持教会与国家之间的严格分离，拒绝圣经正统和神职人员权力，拥抱普世权利和人道主义，在科学中寻求真理，19 世纪的无神论者和异教徒不仅包括学者和精英，而且正如施密特的书所明确指出的那样，