The Great Agnostic (12 page)

The result, in nineteenth-century America, was a union of religion and law in which women were expected to stay in a marriage even if they were regularly beaten and maimed by their husbands. In 1888, the
New York World
published a remarkable interview with Ingersoll in which he linked the right of a woman to divorce, and to obtain support for her children, with a case of domestic violence considered shocking even in a society where marital violence against women was rarely considered worthy of a headline. It seems that a man in the New York City borough of Queens had torn one of his wife's eyes out of its socket and then, a year later, returned home in a drunken rage and tore out the other eye. The blind wife could leave her husband and live separately from him, Ingersoll noted, but she would still be forced to stay legally married to her assailant and would “remain, for the rest of her days … a wife, hiding, keeping out of the way, secreting herself from the hyena to whom she was married.” (From 1787 until 1967, adultery was the only ground for divorce
in New York State—a policy upheld in the twentieth century largely as a result of strong lobbying by representatives of the powerful Catholic archdiocese of New York). In a forceful statement that sounds very much like the 1970s' feminist critique of male domestic violence, Ingersoll asked, “Must a woman in order to retain her womanhood become a slave, a serf, with a wild beast for a master, or with society for a master, or with a phantom for a master? Has not the married woman the right of self-defence? Is it not the duty of society to protect her from her husband? … She may not remain in the same house with him, for fear that he may kill her. What, then, are their relations? Do they sustain any relation except that of hunter and hunted—that is, of tyrant and victim?”
17
Ingersoll did not hesitate to talk about other threats to women, such as rape, that were unmentionable in polite society. “It is hard to appreciate the dangers and difficulties that lie in wait for woman,” he said. “Even in this Christian country of ours, no girl is safe in the streets of the city after the sun has gone down.
After all, the sun is the only god that has ever protected woman.
In the darkness she has been the prey of the wild beast in man” (italics mine).
18

In the late nineteenth century, there were few women who dared to say, even if they thought, that patriarchal religion was a major obstacle to the full development of their sex. Stanton and Gardener were the exceptions, and
Stanton herself was pushed aside by the suffragist movement in the early 1890s after publishing her
Woman's Bible,
a strongly worded collection of essays by female scholars who criticized and reinterpreted the endless biblical passages claiming divine sanction for the inferiority of women. The suffragist movement began to make real headway in public opinion only when it discarded any broader critique of women's position in society and merged with the devoutly religious, female-led temperance movement, embodied by the Women's Christian Temperance Union. In the temperance movement, both women and men portrayed alcohol consumption as the only source of male violence against women and children.
*
Ingersoll, by contrast, viewed the connection between alcohol and violence within the home as only one more manifestation of the failure of both religion and government to uphold women's rights. Ingersoll was unimpressed by the argument that Christianity had elevated the status of women. He noted that Jesus “said not one word about the sacredness of home, the duties of the husband to the wife—nothing calculated to lighten the hearts of those who bear the saddest burdens of this life.”
19
Jesus' first recorded miracle, turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana
in response to his mother's request, impressed Ingersoll less than his insistence, while gathering his apostles, that men were obliged to forsake their earthly obligations, in the form of wife and family, to follow an itinerant preacher in the hills of Galilee.

Ingersoll was unusual in that he combined a basic belief in the intellectual equality of women and men with a romantic chivalry that owed more to his love of Shakespeare, Burns, Byron, and Keats than it did to contemporary social attitudes that placed women on a pedestal and required them to stay there. He often said that his favorite line of English verse was Shakespeare's “love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.” In his most popular and frequently delivered lecture, “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child,” Ingersoll followed up an ardent defense of equal rights for women with a reflection on love that expressed his romantic side and his feelings about his wife. “And do you know,” he told his audiences, “it is a splendid thing to think that the woman you really love will never grow old to you. Through the wrinkles of time, through the mask of years, if you really love her, you will always see the face you loved and won. And a woman who really loves a man does not see that he grows old; he is not decrepit to her; she always sees the same gallant gentleman who won her hand and heart.”
20
That mutual, lifelong love was Ingersoll's ideal did not prevent him from
understanding that for millions of women, real life bore no resemblance to the ideal and that women's subsistence wages prevented most from exiting an intolerable marriage. Ingersoll viewed suffrage not as an end in itself, and not as a way to write puritanical religious concepts of “woman's place” into law, but as an essential first step toward the vastly needed improvement of wages and working conditions for women. “The question of wages for women is a thousand times more important than sending missionaries to China or to India,” he said. “There is plenty for missionaries to do here. And by missionaries I do not mean gentlemen and ladies who distribute tracts or quote Scripture to people out of work. If we are to better the condition of men and women we must change their surroundings.”
21
Ingersoll also anticipated a major theme in the feminist revival of the 1970s—the degree to which conventional morality had been used to justify the circumscription of all opportunities for women:

There are so few occupations open to woman, so few things in which she can hope for independence, that to be thrown upon her own resources is almost equivalent to being cast away. Besides, she is an object of continual suspicion, watched not only by men but by women. If she does anything that other women are not doing, she is at once suspected, her reputation is
touched, and other women, for fear of being stained themselves, withdraw not only the hand of help, but the smile of recognition. A young woman cannot defend herself without telling the charge that has been made against her. This, of itself, gives a kind of currency to slander. To speak of the suspicion that has crawled across her path, to plant the seeds of doubt in other minds; to even deny it, admits that it exists. To be suspected, that is enough. There is no way of destroying this suspicion. There is no court in which suspicions are tried; no juries that can render verdicts of not guilty. Most women are driven at last to the needle, and this does not allow them to live; it simply keeps them from dying.
22

The common thread in all of Ingersoll's thinking about social issues was secular humanism and its emphasis on the promotion of happiness in this world. Humanism distinguished him from the social Darwinist business leaders who shared his low opinion of religion but not his respect for workers and unlettered immigrants. “Secularism teaches us to be good here and now,” he said. “I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just.”
23
Just as Ingersoll was content to be called an atheist as well as an agnostic, he was perfectly happy to call secularism a
religion—but it was a religion that he defined as the polar opposite of conventional faith, a system of thought that “trusts to individual effort, to energy, to intelligence, to observation and experience rather than the unknown and the supernatural. It desires to be happy on this side of the grave.”
24

Ingersoll defined secularism in a precise, down-to-earth fashion that eschewed broad philosophical generalizations—a tendency that led some later biographers to denigrate his abilities as a thinker even as they conceded his effectiveness as the greatest American popularizer of free-thought, agnosticism, and evolution. He defined secularism as a way of life that “means food and fireside, roof and raiment, reasonable work and reasonable leisure, the cultivation of the tastes, the acquisition of knowledge, the enjoyment of the arts, and it promises for the human race comfort, independence, intelligence, and above all, liberty.” A secularist society would mean “living for ourselves and each other; for the present instead of the past, for this world rather than another. … It is striving to do away with violence and vice, with ignorance, poverty and disease. … It does not believe in praying and receiving, but in earning and deserving.”
25
A man who professed this humanistic secular creed could hardly have agreed with Spencer, who frequently said of the poor, “If they are sufficiently complete to live, they
do
live, and it is well that
they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best that they should die.”
26

Ingersoll's philosophy was also rooted in the rapid, visible progress of technology and science, which had produced a general optimism about the future in late nineteenth-century America. He was not foolish enough to think that technology and science could do no wrong, but he did believe that only science, in its best forms, offered real alternatives to time-honored oppressive practices. This powerful strain in nineteenth-century American freethought impelled Ingersoll to predict that science would eventually break the chains that compulsory childbearing imposed on women of all social classes. But the underlying idea that women had a
right
to control of their own lives and bodies derives from the older Enlightenment value of universal human rights. Ingersoll was a proud heir to an Enlightenment tradition that, by the late nineteenth century, had been expanded by science beyond the material constraints of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century possibilities. He understood Darwin's theory of evolution not as a replacement for but as an addition to the Enlightenment philosophy of natural human rights: God need not be the father of all men for all men to be brothers. For Ingersoll, the common ancestry of human beings could never be reconciled with the social Darwinist conviction that the mighty were mighty and the serfs
were serfs because they deserved to be so. And so he set out to reeducate his countrymen in a broader but entirely recognizable version of the Declaration of Independence's assertion that all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. This time, unalienable rights were not limited to men, or to whites, or to those at the top of the economic pyramid. And the Creator was replaced by creation itself.

I deny the right of any man, of any number of men, of any church, of any State, to put a padlock on the lips—to make the tongue a convict. … Blasphemy is the word that the majority hisses into the ear of the few.

—RGI, May 19, 1887, at the New Jersey blasphemy trial of C. B. Reynolds

The propinquity in time of America's revolutionary generation to the worst manifestations of theocracy in the Old World is utterly ignored today by the historical revisionists of the religious right, who claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. But the power of religion-based law, as enforced by the state, was very much on the minds of the framers of the world's first secular constitution. When the Constitution was being written in Philadelphia in 1787, only two decades had passed since the horrifying execution in France of nineteen-year-old Jean-François Lefevre, Chevalier de la Barre, for blasphemy—a case, publicized by Voltaire, that shocked the educated world. This famous case was tried—if the word “trial” even applies—in Normandy, in the town of
Abbeville. A crucifix had been defaced, and the chevalier, who was known in the area for a certain wildness and propensity for singing bawdy anti-clerical songs, was charged with blasphemy. An important piece of evidence against him was his possession of a copy of Voltaire's
Dictionnaire Philosophique Portatif,
an anthology including many articles attacking the Catholic Church.
*
The young nobleman was sentenced to the customary punishment—being burned—after having his right hand cut off and his tongue cut out; Voltaire's book was burned along with him. The defendant refused to confess or name any other young men who had participated—even after being tortured for the final hour before his execution (again, as mandated by law), and the sentence was then carried out. The clerics and government magistrates, after cutting off the hand as specified in the sentence, showed unexpected mercy by not cutting out the young nobleman's tongue before the auto da fé.
†

The men who framed the Constitution were mindful
and fearful of the history of state-enforced religious power in Europe and were determined that the blueprint for the new national government would provide no sanction for such actions—even though most state governments did have laws privileging particular religious denominations. But the framers made no mention of God, even the deistic “providence,” in the preamble and explicitly prohibited religious tests for federal office in Article 6, Section 3—although numerous states retained such prohibitions in their laws into the 1840s. Many states also had blasphemy laws, dating from the early 1800s, on their books, but such laws were rarely enforced. If local defenders of the faith became agitated, however, they could invoke the old laws and try to enforce them. That is what brought Robert Ingersoll to court in Morristown, New Jersey, to defend freethinker C. B. Reynolds, who had distributed a pamphlet denying the infallibility and divine authorship of the Bible, as Thomas Paine had (with greater literary skill) more than a century earlier.