Indisputably Made In America
Friday, March 27th, 2009Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
by Susan Jacoby
… The connection between the nineteenth-century women’s movement and the abolitionist movement is well known, but the relation between both movements and anticlericalism has received much less attention from historians. Yet, the moral authority of churches — their claim to preeminence in determining the proper approach to the great moral question of the day — was challenged both by radical abolitionists and by the early advocates of women’s rights. Although many of the radical abolitionists, mostly notably Garrison, the editor of the Liberator, were deeply religious — as were early proponents of women’s rights such as the Grimké sisters and Lucretia Mott — they were also deeply anticlerical. “Truth for authority, not authority for truth” was the motto of Mott, a Nantucket-born Quaker lay minister, abolitionist, and feminist. What made radical abolitionists radical was their demand for an immediate rather than a gradual end to slavery. Beecher once argued that if everyone would only stop arousing public passions on the slavery question, white Christian benevolence would ensure that the system would disappear of its own accord — in another two centuries. This “solution” to the problem of slavery was seen as not only immoral but ludicrous by abolitionists, who were repelled by the contention that one group — whites — deserved the power to restrict the natural human rights of others. In parallel fashion, the nation’s first generation of feminists rejected the received opinion that male authority should determine the extent of women’s rights. The conjunction of radical abolitionism with early feminism is an important chapter in the history of American secularism because those who came of age in the 1820s and 1830s were the first generation of American social reformers to make the connection between reactionary religion and reactionary domestic social institutions. Unlike the grievances of the eighteenth-century colonists, nineteenth-century injustices could not be blamed on a tyrannical Enligh king but were indisputably made in America.
The religiously correct version of American history has never given proper credit to the central importance of the Enlightenment concept of natural rights — or to the anticlerical abolitionists who advanced that concept before the public — in building the case against slavery. Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who frequently trotted out the specter of the French Revolution and even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot. In 1850, the slavery-exalting Presbyterian J. H. Thornwell, who was about to be named president of the College of South Carolina, declared that “the parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders — they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground — Christianity and atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity the stake.” … While most abolitionists were neither atheists nor Jacobins, te defenders of slavery were right to make the connection between the revolutionary freethought of Paine and the radical wing of the antislavery movement. Religious conservatives today are the ones who are mistaken in their insistence that the antislavery movement had nothing to do with Enlightenment values — values that would, in turn, be adopted and adapted by abolitionist women who wished no less for themselves than they wished for slaves.
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