Long before New Atheists stalked the earth, the cause of secularism possessed a peculiar missionary zeal. In part, this was thanks to the broader mood of social uplift that accompanied the rise of modern skepticism: Loosing the surly bonds of superstition and myth was, by the lights of rationalist dogma, all but certain to deliver humanity into a golden age of liberty, equality, and sober self-improvement. With this sort of serene confidence propelling the great cause of secularism, it’s little wonder that its apostles cribbed a pronounced millennial fervor and evangelical certitude from their Christian foes.
But as historian Leigh Eric Schmidt shows in his lively tour through the expansionist heyday of the secular creed, the longed-for golden age never really got off the ground. The initial cohort of secularists overestimated their own world-transforming powers, while also dismissing the endurance of believers. And more pressingly, as Schmidt observes, the brave new rationalists didn’t produce very much in the way of coherent doctrine or ritual observance. “Even in the hands of its most illustrious proponents,” he writes, “the religion of humanity was often little more than pleasant bromides, refined in tone and short on detail.” Take, for example, the secular movement’s most widely quoted (and misquoted) maxim, Thomas Paine’s signature aphorism that “the world is my country, and my religion is to do good.” Global citizenship and universal goodwill are far easier to proclaim in the abstract than to pin down in the world; there’s a reason, after all, that the freethinking Paine himself died far from his English homeland, a thinker widely (and unfairly) dismissed as a naïve-at-best adherent of the most rigid and Olympian brand of Enlightenment rationalism.
With its Sunday School lesson plan so short on specifics, the religion of humanity was wide open to entrepreneurial innovators. The doomed labors of its prophets furnish Schmidt’s narrative. It all starts, fittingly enough, with the legacy of Paine himself—and more precisely, his mortal remains. The never-resolved quest to find the exhumed contents of Paine’s casket marked the secular cause’s first major movement toward something like cultic observance.