Christopher Grasso - Skepticism and American Faith: from the Revolution to the Civil War

The sceptic and the christian , Robert Dale Owen and Origen Bacheler, argued for ten months in the pages of the Free Enquirer, a freethought newspaper, in 1831. Their discussion articulates many of the major issues marking the relationship of skepticism and faith from the era of the American Revolution to the Civil War, when these two terms were used to organize a field of thought and experience the way the poles of a magnet arrange metal shavings tossed onto a piece of paper. I was brought up by a kind and strictly religious mother, in the very lap of orthodoxy, the sceptic wrote. But the more he read and reflected, the more convinced he became that nature was silent regarding the doings, the attributes, nay the existence of a God. Turning away from the ghostly dreams and disquieting imaginations of the churches, he felt freed from religious anxiety. He stepped forward publicly as the sceptic to challenge religious dogmas so that others might be freed, too. The christian countered: It was once my unhappy lot to be for a time a Sceptic. But then he became convinced that the Bible really was the Word of God, and that Gods Spirit was at work in his soul and in the world. He thought it his duty to help others similarly free themselves from the snare of skepticism.

Each man knew that beneath the intellectual debate they were conducting about the existence of God, the nature of humanity, and the possibility of revelation ran a current of personal psychological experience. But each knew, too, how the concerns about religious skepticism and faith also flooded over and transformed a much broader social, economic, and political landscape. Religion was not just false, the sceptic argued, but dangerous. It excites fears that are without foundation; it consumes valuable time that can never be recalled, and valuable talents that ought to be better employed; it draws money from the layman to support a deception; it teaches the elect to look upon their less favored fellow creatures as heathen men and publicans, living in sin here and doomed to perdition hereafter; it awakens harassing doubts, gloomy despondency and fitful melancholy; it turns our thoughts from the things of this world, where alone true knowledge is to be found: worse than all, it chains us down to antiquated orthodoxy and forbids the free discussion of those very subjects which it most concerns us to discuss. If such a religion be a deception, its votaries are slaves.

The christian answered that the fears that religion excited were necessary to keep bad people in check. And religion had other crucial social benefits. The time, talents, and money devoted to the subject, are vastly overbalanced by the good effects on society, to say nothing of futurity. Thus it is of immense advantage to the world in a temporal point of view. It does not turn our thoughts from social duties, but affords a most powerful incentive to vigilance therein. It does not forbid the discussion of any subject, or hold us back from following truth, lead where she may; but, on the contrary, it directs us to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good.

Time and money; power and persecution; freedom and obligation; blindness and insight: the stakes for a society, for a people, were high.

His family and friends thought he was dying, so a local minister came to ask the pale, sick young man questions about his faith. A divinity student, he gave orthodox answers to the pastors questions about doctrineorthodox for his mid-eighteenth-century New England town, where something like Puritan piety still passed for religious common sense. Even on what he thought might be his deathbed, though, he could not reveal his secret: he had long been wandering in what he would later call the cloudy darksome valley of religious skepticism. His skeptical turn had not been prompted by a public debate or even by private conversations with friends or acquaintances. He had internalized the dialogue of skepticism and faith from his reading. As an intellectually voracious college student and then a tutor he had read not just the standard Puritan divines but their liberal and deist critics, as well as the new enlightened philosophy and science. His studies had forced him to confront an awful, unspeakable idea: What if the Bible was not the revealed word of God after all? What if Christianity, like other religions, was merely nothing but priestcraft and artificial error?

Ezra Stiles recovered from his illness, returned to his faith, and eventually became a clergyman. But after the American Revolution he watched with grave concern as other doubters came out of the closet and started to achieve positions of social prestige and political power. This development was especially worrisome at a time when states were reframing the relationship between religion and government. Few critics of Christianity were as outspoken as Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary War hero from Vermont who published