Leigh Eric Schmidt, the eminent historian of American religious liberalism, has published what is now the best history of nonbelievers in the United States. Entitled Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation, the book rewards a careful read. In four biographical sketches, Schmidt recovers four 19th-century nonbelievers of varying importance. Observing rightly that most histories of atheism have focused on the ideas of intellectual elites, Schmidt has uncovered “the quotidian qualities of American unbelief,” and aimed for “the grassroots” rather than the “universities and literary bohemias.”
Schmidt describes the family lives that shaped these nonbelievers and the hardships they faced for avowing atheism. Though relatively few in number, 19th-century nonbelievers were diffuse, and there seemed to have been at least one or two in every county. These “village atheists,” as Schmidt calls them, were a persistent thorn in the side of America’s Christians.
Schmidt’s first chapter focuses on Samuel Porter Putnam, the best known and most influential of the four. Putnam was an itinerant lecturer and one-time president of the American Secular Union, as well as editor of a freethought journal and the author of many books and pamphlets. Raised in an evangelical Calvinist home, Putnam’s religious exploration led him out of the Congregational Church of his youth and into its liberal offshoot, Unitarianism. Later, Putnam joined with the Unitarians who espoused Free Religion, a name for the right to pursue any and all religions at once. Though he explored Buddhism, Theosophy, and Spinozan pantheism, he eventually settled on scientific materialism, making him an atheist. For Schmidt, Putnam is the quintessential “secular pilgrim,” whose spiritual peregrinations led him down “The Freethought Road” and away from religious faith.
Well-traveled, well-read, and well-spoken, Putnam makes for an odd sort of “village atheist.” Better fits are the subjects of Schmidt’s second and third chapters: the cartoonist Watson Heston and the freethought lecturer Charles B. Reynolds. Populist and pulling few punches, Heston’s illustrations “made secularism visible” while taking aim at evangelical preachers like Dwight Moody and moral enforcers like Anthony Comstock. Picking so many fights took its toll on Heston, and he died in poverty in 1905 after a decade of illness.
Clever and skillfully drawn, Heston’s cartoons established an unlikely iconography for organized atheists, who still today favor iconoclasm and avoid decoration. Schmidt’s analysis of these cartoons is deeply insightful. Their visual polemics addressed nearly all of the issues that concerned late 19th-century secularists, and they provide Schmidt with grist for discussing everything from slavery and antisemitism to chaplains in the military.