During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were a number of European scholars who felt confined by the traditional dogma and began to ask questions about it. This marked the beginning of a philosophy of freethought.
In general, there are five basic characteristics of freethought: (1) no party line, (2) no absolutes, (3) no censorship, (4) no sacred books, and (5) no sacred names. From the viewpoint of the doctrinal religions, each one of these characteristics encouraged heresy and blasphemy. In many theocratic nations, freethought was outlawed and those advocating it were punished.
During the century following the establishment of the United States, freethought challenged traditional beliefs about two strongly held views regarding society: slavery and the rights of women. In her book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, Susan Jacoby writes:
“The great nineteenth-century American freethinkers would be nourished not in the soil that had given birth to Virginia’s landmark religious freedom act but in the Northeast and in the new states joining the union as the frontier moved westward. Those dissenters would shape, and be shaped by, two movements—abolitionism and women’s rights—that could not exist in a southern society based on the ownership of men by other men and on the infantilization of women by the same owners.”
The history of freethought and the struggle for women’s rights can be seen as originating in late eighteenth-century England when a young woman, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), who identified herself as a deist, became involved with a group of London freethinkers, including Thomas Paine. In 1792, she published her book A Vindication of the Rights of Women. In her biographical entry on Wollstonecraft in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Lois Porter reports:
“Here she clearly put forth her belief that the nature of humans, male or female, and their capability for happiness rested on reason, virtue, and knowledge.”
In nineteenth-century America, women were subservient to men and married women had fewer legal rights than did prisoners and slaves. In her entry on women’s rights in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Melinda Grube writes:
“Christian belief based on an interpretation of the Pauline epistles forbade women from speaking publicly to mixed-sex audiences.”
Therefore, when Francis Wright (1795-1852) began her lecture tour in 1828, she shocked the established religious believers both by speaking to mixed-sex audiences and by criticizing religion and advocating women’s education. Melinda Grube writes:
“To many, she was a model of courage. For most others in the highly charged Protestant atmosphere of the fledgling United States, she was simply monstrous.”
In 1828, she took over the editorship of the New Harmony Gazette and renamed it the Free Enquirer. In this journal, Wright wrote about the importance of equal rights for women. In her biographical entry on Wright in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Carol Kolmerten reports:
“Wright’s frank discussion of the ‘unnatural’ sexual restraints upon women and the unnatural social limitations upon blacks inspired fury throughout the United States.”
Carol Kolmerten sums up the life of Frances Wright this way:
“Wright never stopped writing and speaking for women’s equality and never stopped criticizing the society that created and perpetuated secondary citizenship for women.”
Following the Civil War, the women’s movements in the United States were taken over by evangelicals who viewed the movements as a way of promoting Christian influence in American politics. Freethinkers, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) and Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), were basically expelled from suffrage organizations.
In 1878, Stanton, Gage, and other feminists attended the Freethought Convention in Watkins, New York. This convention inspired both the Woman’s Bible (edited by Stanton) and Woman, Church, and State (written by Gage). With regard to The Woman’s Bible, Tom Flynn, in an article on freethought history in Free Inquiry, writes:
“Stanton fashioned a devastating indictment of traditional Christianity for its oppression of women.”
After Stanton published her Woman’s Bible in 1895, the National American Women Suffrage Association disavowed any connections with her. Tom Flynn writes:
“From 1898 (when the second volume of The Woman’s Bible was published) until her death in 1902, suffrage activists and organizations shunned her.”
In her biographical entry of Stanton in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Melinda Grube writes:
“Stanton was the primary contributor to this controversial biblical commentary, but she benefited from the skills of a team of authors, most of whom supported suffrage and all of whom would be marginalized by the mainstream women’s movement.”
Commenting on Stanton’s thoughts on religion and women, Melinda Grube reports:
“…she believed that religion played a primary role in maintaining women’s inferior status. With other humanists in the women’s movement, Stanton consistently challenged religious authority. Her condemnation of the illiberal dogmatism of organized religion and its followers led to ongoing controversy among rank-and-file suffragists.”
Melinda Grube goes on to write:
“Finding suffrage too narrow for her great intellect, Stanton spent more and more time engaged in the intellectual conversations circulating among freethinkers.”
Another freethinker who had been instrumental in organizing the women’s rights movement in the United States and who was later expelled from the movement was Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898). Gage viewed the attempts by Christian feminists to place their god in the Constitution and their prayers in public schools as a great danger. In 1893, Gage published Woman, Church, and State which documented the role of the church in suppressing women’s rights.
In her biographical entry of Gage in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Sally Roesch Wagner writes:
“A powerful indictment of the church’s primary role in the oppression of women, the book documented the gynocidal witch burnings (9 million women, Gage estimated, murdered by the church and later the state) and the institutionalized sexual abuse of women and children by the priesthood.”
In the 1878 Freethought convention, Gage charged that the belief that woman had brought sin and death into the world, one of the foundations of the Christian creation story, had led to the subordination of women to men as punishment. Gage argued that the church had removed the female in the godhead in order to worship the masculine. Sally Roesch Wagner writes:
“Making marriage a sacrament the church required women to pledge obedience to their husbands in the marriage ceremony. When canon law became the foundation for common law, married woman’s subordinate position rendered her legally nonexistent.”
During the twentieth century, the use of the terms freethinker and freethought fell into disuse as those who engaged in freethought—that is, challenging and questioning traditional beliefs, particular beliefs stemming from Christianity—became more comfortable with labels such as atheist and agnostic. In the twenty-first century, people who question biblical and religious absolutes, people who would have been called freethinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continue to inspire fear and animosity from those who unquestioningly accept religious beliefs which seem counter to reality.
Religious Freedom Day
This essay is the third in a three-part series celebrating Religious Freedom Day. Here are the links to the first two essays in this series:
Religion 101: A very brief overview of freethought
Religion 101: Religious Freethought in the Americas
Religion 101
This series explores various religious topics in which the definition of religion is not confined to the worship of a god or gods. More from this series:
Religion 101: The European witch craze
Religion 101: Sacred Fire
Religion 101: Women and marriage under ancient Irish Brehon law
Religion 101: Ancestor Worship in Oceania
Religion 101: Ceremonial Human Sacrifice
Religion 101: Some Norse Gods
Religion 101: Confucianism
Religion 101: Searching for the Earliest Religion