Reviews in American History

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 [End Page 101] the 1920s and 1930s" (p. 16). Schmidt's chapters feature four village atheists: secular "pilgrim," writer and lecturer Samuel Porter Putnam, noted illustrator Watson Heston, the "secular preacher" Charles B. Reynolds whose 1886 trial on ground of heresy was widely publicized, and women's health proponent and novelist Elmina D. Slenker who was put on trial and convicted of obscenity.

Among the virtues of Village Atheists is Schmidt's attention to the networks among the village atheists. As one reads through the chapters, we learn how like-minded people, often geographically distant, were linked through correspondence, similar reading habits and subscriptions, and at times through movement organizations and congresses that rose and fell in popularity. American atheists in this period are a real minority—a tiny fraction of the population—but they gathered together in reading and contributing to journals such as New York's the Truth Seeker and the Boston Examiner, and learned of legal and community victories and setbacks in their pages. One arrives at the end of Schmidt's volume with a sense of four individuals and a wider, deeper social milieu with numerous other figures, figures that one suspects would make equally good figures in this book. In both paying close attention to the twists and turns of the village atheists' lives and making their networks visible, Schmidt brings us an image of the world of atheism in the nineteenth century that challenges the commonplace (and partisan) vision of the nineteenth-century American atheists as unsung heroes or secular saints.

One of Schmidt's primary objectives is to identify his figures as inhabiting a robust American secular vernacular culture that is marked by its participants' "zigzagging" commitments, ambivalences and ongoing self-scrutiny. Reynolds eventually abandons atheism, and returns to a life of belief—a not uncommon turn of events as Schmidt notes. Putnam similarly inscribes his biography—a secular pilgrimage—within an idiom and narrative that equally challenges and acknowledges the thin line between deism and atheism. These gaps...