Dr. Herb Silverman is the Founder of the Secular Coalition for America, the Founder of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, and the Founder of the Atheist/Humanist Alliance student group at the College of Charleston. He authored Complex variables (1975), Candidate Without a Prayer: An Autobiography of a Jewish Atheist in the Bible Belt (2012) and An Atheist Stranger in a Strange Religious Land: Selected Writings from the Bible Belt (2017). He co-authored The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America (2003) with Kimberley Blaker and Edward S. Buckner, Complex Variables with Applications (2007) with Saminathan Ponnusamy, and Short Reflections on Secularism (2019).
Here we talk about the British and the Americans, and the American Revolutionary War.
Scott
Douglas Jacobsen: The British Empire produced some of the prominent Western
philosophers, empiricists, and others. Obviously, the Americans and the British
had a strained relationship for some time. What were some of the statements and
ideas of the freethinkers on the American and the British sides during the
American Revolutionary War? What were the different reactions to the American
Revolution of the 13 colonies and the British Empire? What happened to the
secular, men and women, during this time of war – common in American history?
Dr. Herb Silverman: The term freethinker emerged towards the end of the 17th
century in England to describe people who stood in opposition to Christian churches and literal belief in the Bible. These
people believed that they could understand the world through consideration of
nature. In the United States, freethought
was an anti-Christian and anti-clerical movement
to make an individual politically and spiritually free to decide for himself on
religious matters.
John Toland, an Irish philosopher and freethinker
in the 18th century, was the first person called a freethinker (by George Berkeley, a Bishop in Ireland). Toland
wrote over a hundred books, mostly dedicated to criticizing ecclesiastical
institutions. In Christianity
Not Mysterious, the book for which he is best known, Toland challenged not
just the authority of the established church, but all inherited and
unquestioned authority. Because of this book, he was prosecuted by a grand jury
in London. The Parliament of Ireland proposed that he should be burnt at the
stake, and in his absence three copies of the book were burnt by the public
hangman.
British deists and freethinkers including John Toland, Anthony Collins, and Matthew Tindal focused on the human roots of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and ancient Paganism. They advocated tolerance and freedom of thought and fought against the influence of Christian doctrine on political and social life. They also denied the supernatural foundations of Christianity and analyzed the Bible with the aim to promote the free search for truth. They helped bring about Enlightenment views of religion and the secularization of Europe.
John Locke, who
was British, inspired both the American and French revolutions. His arguments
concerning liberty and the social contract motivated
written works by Alexander Hamilton,
James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other founding fathers of the United
States. One of Locke’s passages is reproduced verbatim in the
Declaration of Independence, the reference to a “long train of abuses.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Bacon, Locke, and Newton. I consider them as the three
greatest men that have ever lived.”
Locke’s theory of the “social contract” influenced the belief of
many founders that the right of the
people to overthrow their leaders was one of the “natural
rights” of man. He also argued that all humans were created equally free,
and governments therefore needed the “consent of the governed.” Many scholars
trace the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the American
Declaration of Independence to Locke’s theory of natural rights. At the
time of the American revolution, the belief that rights came from God was
widespread. British citizens believed in the divine right of kings.
Unlike
many American founders, Locke was not a deist or a freethinker. He was a theist
who accepted the cosmological (first cause) argument for the existence of God.
Had Locke been born in our time, he might well have been an atheist.
Locke also had a
strong influence on the French deist Voltaire, who called him “le sage Locke.”
Voltaire’s major contribution to our founding fathers
was his tireless quest for civil rights and his support for freedom of religion
as well as separation of church and state. Voltaire’s reasoning may be summed up in his
well-known saying, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you
commit atrocities.” But my favorite quote of Voltaire is, “I have never made
but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.’
And God granted it.”
Many Americans at
the time of the Revolution were attracted to “secular millennialism,”
a belief that we would someday be transformed into a utopian world of peace,
justice, prosperity, and fellowship. The focus is on “worldly” transformation
as opposed to “other-worldly” promises of spiritual salvation after death. Such
predictions of America’s destiny came from people like Thomas Paine and his enormously influential pamphlet Common
Sense. The pamphlet’s millennial-style passages include “We
have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Paine added, “The
birthday of a new world is at hand.” In Paine’s view this new world would
be far from theocracy, grounded not on ecclesiastical authority, but on the
principles of a democratic republic and equal rights.
While religious
ideology was an important inspiration for many Americans, the military of the
new American nation had no religious policy. Soldiers mostly appeared to have
been indifferent to the religious consequence of the Revolutionary War. The war
was over the birth of a new nation, rather than a new nation-with-church. Both
the British and American sides tried to recruit Americans from every background
for their cause. For many Americans, the ecclesiastical tyranny of
tax-supported religious establishments was another form of oppression they were
fighting against
The American
Revolution hurt the Church of England in America more than any other
denomination because the King of England was the head of that church. Anglican
priests in America swore allegiance to the King. The Book of Common Prayer offered prayers asking God to give the
king victory over all his enemies. In 1776, the King’s enemies were American
soldiers and loyalty to that church could be construed as treason. So,
Anglicans in America revised The Book of
Common Prayer to conform to political realities, eliminating allegiance to
the king.
The
Franco-American Alliance brought thousands of French troops onto American soil,
exposing American soldiers to advanced forms of freethinking and
anticlericalism. The American Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, and
Constitution of the United States also inspired the French revolutionaries of
1789, offering an example of liberty for the world and an example for modern
constitutional democracies. The French Revolution motivated people to
put irreligious ideas of the Enlightenment into practice and later extended
beyond France to other European countries, and to the American colonies. For
Americans at that time, irreligion more often took deistic rather than an
atheistic form.
Jacobsen: Thank you for the opportunity and your time, Dr. Silverman.
Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash
