14 Liberal Family

ETHICS

THE FORMS OF FAITH

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

ATHEISM

SOURCES

Intrafaith Organizations

Liberal

Mail Order and Internet Churches

The modern world has, along with its pluralism, been characterized by the rise of religious skepticism. Skepticism had two major thrusts. It first challenged the hegemony of orthodox forms of religion that dominated cultures through powerful inclusive religious organizations backed by the state’s power. The separation of church and state thus became a standard element in the skeptic’s program. In the Christian West, the skeptics also challenged ideas at the very heart of Christian thinking. Brought together in this chapter as the “liberal” family of churches and “religious” organizations are those groups that have challenged the orthodox Christian dominance of Western religious life: Unitarianism, universalism, and infidelism. Unitarianism championed the idea of a unitary God over the Christian’s Trinitarian God. Unitarianism necessarily involved the additional denial of the divinity of Jesus. Closely related to Unitarianism, universalism affirmed that God will save all humanity, and thus denied the Christian belief in hell.

The several forms of infidelism—deism, rationalism, humanism, atheism, and so forth—moved in an even more radical direction, away from the religious life (and any need for piety, prayer, worship, or devotion) toward human-centered philosophies that tended to denounce all religion or at best paid lip service to a few abstract religious ideas. What are in this chapter termed liberals thus fit on a continuum between Unitarians, who still acknowledge the viability of the religious life, and the more radical atheist infidels.

The origin and much of the continuing life of liberalism lie in its attack upon the dictates of Christian orthodoxy. (Orthodoxy may be described as the mainline Christian faith that adheres to the authority of the scriptures and the three ancients summaries of Christian truth—the Nicene, Chalcedonian, and Apostles’ creeds.) Thus, the liberal tradition has a secondary nature, protesting existent churches. The differences within the tradition can be gauged by how far various liberal groups deviate from orthodox beliefs.

Most liberals defend the individual’s right to believe as he or she wishes, and the privilege to not believe at all if reason leads to disbelief. Liberals therefore have been in the forefront of fights for religious liberty and have joined with persecuted minorities in the debates on religious freedom, such as those of the late eighteenth century in France and the United States.

In America, beginning in the eighteenth century, liberals dissented from the established orthodoxy, primarily of New England Calvinism and to a lesser extent Protestantism in general. Before the Civil War (1861–1865), American liberals were judged by themselves and others only in relation to the creed from which they deviated. Therefore, they were called, by themselves and others, by such negative names as antitrinitarian, atheist, and infidel. After the Civil War, though, liberals began to see themselves in a new light and described themselves in such positive terms as secularists, humanists, and liberals.

As an intellectual movement, liberalism stresses the power of human reason to perfect the world. This emphasis on reason is coupled with a high regard for the worth of each human being. Liberals hold the self-image of being on the progressive cutting edge of human history, striving for the freedom of the individual. Although never very numerous, liberals have had tremendous influence on society as the public accepted their ideals. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, for example, stands as a landmark of the liberal tradition.

What is liberal for one generation may become conservative for another generation. For example, in the 1920s, to be a liberal meant to be in the labor movement. Today, though, to be a liberal often means to be against the labor movement because labor is seen as part of the establishment. Thus, liberalism takes on new meanings with time. Also, at any given moment in history, liberals tend to be more united by their opposition to the current orthodoxy than by any positive idea they might promote. They have lacked the positive thrust that builds such movements as Methodism or Calvinism. Their common history of protesting orthodoxy, however, does tie them together, so both Unitarians and atheists (infidels) can be seen as belonging to the liberal tradition, although some from both communities might be unhappy at being lumped together. That the Unitarian Universalist Association recently joined the International Humanist and Ethical Union suggests an acknowledgement of a common history and contemporary agreement on many significant issues.

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century identified liberals with the high regard for reason. As religion shifted away from God and supernaturalism, only two bases for religion were left: man’s feelings and man’s mind. An arational mysticism became the hallmark of the liberals who chose feelings as the base for their religion. The Transcendentalists followed the arational path, developing an idealistic movement that emphasized the union of the individual with the spiritual

reality underlying all life. Most liberals, however, opted for the rational. They said that humans were the product of a law-abiding nature, and reasonable thinking could reveal the universal laws that permeated everything.

Science was the product of rationalism. Science discovered the tangible world of indestructible particles. What was real was what could be seen, felt, and, most importantly, measured. The law-abiding world could be observed and documented. From observation came knowledge, and, by extension, liberals concluded the only knowledge worth having was that produced by scientific observation. Scientific method, said liberals, could be applied to the study of religion, and from it a scientific religion, acceptable to all, could emerge. Beneath the diversity of ideas and practices could be found the great religious values, some reasoned. Others reasoned that if those values were not found, religion could be destroyed altogether.

The scientist’s emphasis on the visible world gave way to secularism as a worldview. The search for values in this world and this life became part of the lifestyle of the liberal tradition.

As comparative religion became a major study, its findings directly fed the development of liberalism. The study of the world’s religions revealed that all of the major religions of the world were undergirded with a sophisticated theology and an educated intelligentsia. As more solid information on the major faiths filtered out of the scholarly enclaves, a search for a universal religion began. Liberals hoped such a religion, laying aside each religion’s peculiarities and distinctive ideas and practices, and built upon “essentials” or common factors all shared (seen as the natural religious particles), could command the respect of all. Books such as The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors (1875) by Kersey Graves (1813–1883) provided ample material to attack Christianity’s distinctiveness.

In the nineteenth century, many liberals adopted the fourfold creed of evolution, reason, science, and materialism. From Charles Darwin (1809–1862) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), liberals learned to think in terms of progress. Not only nature, but also human culture was progressing. For liberalism, the great stumbling block to progress was ignorance, and the great tool to aid progress was education. Thus the alliance of liberalism and the university was a natural one.

ETHICS

The antimystical intellectualism within the main body of the liberal tradition led to a dominance of ethical concerns. Liberals followed their triumphs in the Bill of Rights with active involvement in the great crusades of the pre-Civil War era. Always the liberals could be found standing with those issues that aimed at greater freedom for the individual. They swelled the ranks of the abolition, peace, prison reform, and women’s rights movements. In the liberal religion camp were Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910), Lucy Stone (1819–1893), Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877), and Lucretia Mott (1793–1880). In the twentieth century, liberals were prominent in the labor, sexual freedom, and civil rights movements.

Interestingly enough, ethics has also been a major point of Christianity’s attack upon liberals, especially atheists. Christians have argued that in giving up a belief in revelation, God, and the Bible, a belief in absolute values and moral law has also been given away, and that the attack upon traditional religion leads to amorality and immorality. Liberals have countered such assertions with the fact that atheism has in fact no track record of unethical activity; to the contrary, liberal leaders have been in the forefront of the advocacy of moral concerns, especially in the public sphere.

THE FORMS OF FAITH

The active revolt against specific religious forms, which eventuated in the atheists’ attack upon religion itself, does not lead to worship, piety, and prayer. These occur only on the extreme right wing of the liberal movement. The dominant activity of liberalism has been the communication of information, at first in the sermon and, more frequently as time passed, in the lecture. Great emphasis has been placed upon the education of members and the public, particularly their sensitization on moral issues.

The efforts at education and sensitization have been carried on by the liberal press. Liberal periodicals, most of which were independently published, have been the backbone of the movement from the early nineteenth century. The liberals’ oldest periodical still in existence is The Truth Seeker, founded in 1873. Books attacking orthodoxy and religion are subsidized and circulated. Some have become popular items.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

The liberals look to an amazing number of radicals in Christian history as precursors of their movements. Various liberals claim as precursors such figures as Origen (c. 185–254 c.e.), Pelagius (fourth to fifth century c.e.), and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). The real beginning of the line of descent, however, is generally conceded to be Michael Servetus (1511–1553), whose On the Errors of the Trinity (1532) challenged traditional notions of the triune god, which he compared to the three-headed hound of hell of ancient mythology. Fleeing from Spain, he arrived in Geneva expecting a welcome from the Protestants, only to discover that they were as vehemently opposed to his theological position as were the Roman Catholics. Martyred by John Calvin (1509–1564), Servetus has become a symbol of free religion fighting orthodox intolerance. However, other reformers of similar antitrinitarian opinions led parts of Europe into a Unitarian perspective. Faustus Socinius (1539– 1604) converted Poland, and Francis David (1510–1579) converted a large segment of Transylvania. In 1568 the only Unitarian king in history, the youthful John Sigismund (1540–1571), issued the Western world’s first edict of religious toleration.

In seventeenth-century Europe, the Enlightenment offered liberal alternatives to traditional Christian beliefs. In particular, the deists of England preached a religion stripped of orthodox accretions. Deists argued that the creator does not interfere with the laws of the universe. Deists pictured God somewhat like a watchmaker who makes a watch, winds it up, and leaves it to run on its own. God, they said, leaves the world to follow its own course. The deists advocated a natural religion based on human reason and morality rather than revelation. Deism found a ready audience among the educated and upper classes of both England and America. Many of the leaders of the American Revolution (1775–1783) identified themselves with the deist idea world, particularly George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743– 1826), Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), and James Madison (1751–1836). By the time of the American Revolution, the three key ideas of the liberals—Unitarianism, universalism, and infidelism—had matured and had come to dominate the liberals’ dissenting orientation. With each of these three ideas was carried a fight for religious freedom and a battle against the abuses of clericalism.

Universalism had been preached in America as early as the 1740s by Dr. George de Benneville (1703–1793) in Pennsylvania. In 1770, major impetus was given to the movement by the arrival of John Murray (1741–1815) from England. Murray had been raised a Methodist and had become a class leader. Impressed with George Whitefield (1714–1770), he left Methodism and associated himself with Whitefield’s independent London tabernacle. While in London he became a universalist and was expelled from the tabernacle membership when he refused to “confine his sentiments to his own bosom.” After his arrival in the New World, Murray itinerated and preached his universalism, which had by 1775 created such an impact that pamphlets were written against him. About this time universalist congregations began to appear. Murray’s followers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who had belonged to the Congregational Church, had their membership suspended. So, in 1779, they formed the Independent Church of Gloucester.

The movement to form churches grew, and in 1786 the Articles of Association for Universalist Churches were promulgated, although the association itself was short-lived. In the 1790s Hosea Ballou (1771–1852) appeared on the scene to continue the leadership of the aging John Murray. His newspaper, the Winchester Profession, became the standard for universalist views. In 1790, at a convention in Philadelphia, Articles of Faith and a Plan of Government were adopted. Thus, universalism became the first of the liberal views to solidify into an organizational structure.

In the eighteenth century, Unitarianism was preached in England and America. Theophilus Lindsey (1723–1808) founded the British Unitarian movement in 1774 after his resignation from the Anglican priesthood. In New England, Unitarianism originated in the Congregational Church, but it was not until 1794, when Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) migrated to America, that churches were founded that took the name Unitarian.

During the pre-Civil War nineteenth century, three men—William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and Theodore Parker (1810–1860)— in succession dominated Unitarian thought. The liberal debate in America centered around them.

In the second decade of the nineteenth century, William Ellery Channing, a Congregational minister, was the leading intellectual among Unitarians, which originally existed as a liberal wing in the Congregational Church. His 1819 sermon at the funeral of Jared Sparks (1789–1866) became the Unitarians’ manifesto. In 1825 Channing led in founding the American Unitarian Association, a missionary group. Most members of Unitarian churches date their beginnings from one of these two events. Channing is credited with emphasizing ethics instead of theology, an emphasis that has become a hallmark of Unitarian churches.

In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists were at their intellectual apex. Emerson’s efforts to sell his monist position, most notably through his famous speech to Harvard Divinity School in 1838, were rebuffed for the time. But Emerson, his colleagues at Brook Farm (an experimental, communitarian venture of the Transcendentalists), and the raft of romantic literature flooding America from England could not long be denied.

Theodore Parker stands as the symbol of the union of Unitarian thinking with Transcendentalism. While Unitarianism could not contain Emerson, it was forced to accept Parker. He combined three elements: the philosophical, which appealed to Unitarians because of their emphasis on the mind; the mystical, which appealed to the Transcendentalists; and the practical, which appealed to the liberals because of their desire to improve society. Parker, applying Transcendental ideals in concrete situations, was an abolitionist and a spokesman against the fugitive slave law. His sermon at the ordination of Charles Shackford in 1841, titled “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity,” set the tone for liberal Christianity for his generation and served further to drive a wedge between the orthodox and liberal Congregationalists that was to result in the formal break between them after the Civil War.

For the origins of what in the nineteenth century was called infidelity (the complete rejection of theism, the church, and piety), one immediately turns to France and the works of Voltaire (1694–1778) and his contemporaries. These perspectives reached their culmination in the radically anticlerical, antireligious aspect of the French Revolution (1789–1799). In its early days in America, the adjective French was often used to modify infidelity. The first exponent on the American scene was Ethan Allen (1738–1789), the Revolutionary War hero, who published his Reason the Only Oracle of Man in 1784. This publication was essentially a restatement of deism, emphasizing man and his reason. For various reasons, the work made little impact. But in 1794 Thomas Paine (1737–1809) published his Age of Reason, which was an immediate success. The Age of Reason became the Bible of the free thought movement, and Paine quickly moved from being a hero of the Revolution to becoming the symbol of evil infidelity to the orthodox.

The free thought tradition gradually replaced the deist tradition of the eighteenth century. The transition can be marked in the 1790s by the leadership of Elihu Palmer (1764–1806) and the beginnings of local free thought societies. The free thought movement stressed the importance of the inquiring mind, scientific methodology, and philosophical thinking. The movement opposed orthodoxy in religion, orthodoxy being the mainline Christian tradition based on scripture and the creeds. Palmer, from 1791 until his death in 1806, was instrumental in the founding and leadership of at least three different radical societies, the most important being the Deistical Society of New York City. This society published the Temple of Reason, one of the first periodicals in America supporting an infidel tradition. After Palmer’s death in 1806, there were about 20 years of silence from the free thought camp. Then, in the 1820s, Robert Owen founded his New Harmony experiment in Indiana, which gave the United States many of its firsts in education and community service.

In 1827 the free thought voice was heard again with the establishment of the Free Press Association in New York City. Before the end of the decade, societies were founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Woodstock, Vermont; Patterson, New Jersey; Schuylkill, Pennsylvania; Wilmington, Delaware; and St. Louis, Missouri. In the 1830s and 1840s, societies were also founded in a number of other northern and midwestern communities. Many adopted the name of Free Inquirers. Moral Philanthropists and Rationalists were also popular names. Attempts at national organization in 1828 and 1835 failed. A short-lived attempt to form the Infidel Society for the Promotion of Mental Liberty began in 1845 but died in 1848.

Other attempts waited until after the Civil War. Meanwhile, the liberals, both Christian and free thought, found themselves caught in circumstances that worked against organization. First, due to the Congregational Church’s polity of local independence and the local nature of the infidel societies, leaders had no one but their local constituency to please. National organization tended to work against the very freedom that was so highly prized. Second, the decades before the Civil War were a period of intense social change; and involvement in the antislavery crusade, women’s rights, and other social causes took much of the energy that could have gone into organizational building. The close of the war ended the era of social activism, and two generations of existence had caused a shift of emphasis in liberal thought. It began to turn from its primary emphasis on a critique of its religious origins toward the development of a positive position, setting the stage for the solidification of the liberal forces.

The last four decades of the nineteenth century were a time of organization of liberal churchmen. On April 7, 1865, just five days before the surrender of Robert E. Lee (1807– 1870) at Appomattox, a National Convention of Unitarian Churches met in New York City to organize a National Conference of Unitarian Churches. Transcendentalists, not happy with the overly orthodox position of the National Conference, organized the Free Religious Association (FRA) in 1867. Among the leaders of the FRA were Octavius Brooks Frothingham (1822–1895), Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911), and David Wasson (1823–1887). The radicals who formed the FRA in turn found themselves divided between the mystical Transcendentalists and the scientifically oriented members. The latter organized as the National Liberal League in 1875. The issue around which they organized was a movement in the 1860s by evangelicals for a constitutional amendment that would wed church and state. Specifically, the amendment would tie the Protestant churches closely to national political institutions, from the president and Congress on down. The Liberal League countered with a program to achieve complete separation of church and state. The Liberal League itself divided over support of obscenity laws, and the group favoring a complete lifting of censorship formed the National Liberal League of America.

The thrust of most of these organizations lasted only one generation. As the issues that gave them birth died, they passed from the scene and were often absorbed by more stable bodies such as the Unitarian churches. This absorption liberalized the stable groups. Replacing the organizations that died were new associations that gathered to respond to new issues. One such association was the Union of Liberal Clergymen, formed following the Parliament of Religions in 1893. The Union of Liberal Clergymen promoted progress, reverence for law, science, and an openness to new knowledge,

and contended that the church should be a school of the humanities.

ATHEISM

Increasingly, since the Renaissance, some people have denied the very existence of a God. Many atheists were intellectuals—scholars and university professors—giants

in their own particular disciplines. Included are such figures as Thomas Hariot (1560–1621), Christopher Marlowe (1524–1593), and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). It was not, however, until the nineteenth century that atheism became a force with significant support.

Many deists walked a tightrope between belief in a God who does not act upon the world and outright denial of God’s existence. In the nineteenth century, universities provided a haven for those who wished to declare themselves as atheists. Like its deistic predecessor, atheism was built upon an attack of the Christian churches in the nineteenth century. Primarily, however, it was an intellectual movement that launched an attack on theology and natural religion. The movement’s perspective was that of scientific materialism, the theory that the basic reality of the universe is material and is therefore observable and scientifically measurable.

Among the major atheists in the nineteenth century are Karl Marx (1818–1883), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Annie Besant (1847–1933), and Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891). Often forgotten, but important in any history of atheism, is poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822). Shelley was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for writing The Necessity of Atheism. His lengthy poem Queen Mab (1813) became a poetic reinforcement to his earlier essay. Reflecting on the death of an atheist, he cries:

There is no God!
Nature confirms the faith this death-groan sealed:
Let heaven and earth, let man’s revolving race,
His ceaseless generations tell the tale.

The spirit of nature was posed as an alternative to God.

In the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), A. J. Ayer (1910–1989), and Julian Huxley (1887–1975) were among the outspoken atheists. As a whole, however, the atheists mentioned above were isolated individuals who served as background for the organized movements that began to emerge in the years after the Civil War. The Truth Seeker, a liberal periodical, while not atheist oriented to begin with, allowed atheist notices to be printed and served as a means of communication. Only after World War I (1914–1918) were efforts to affiliate atheist bodies in larger organizations successful. As they have emerged in the twentieth century, atheists insist that first and foremost they are people with a positive approach to life that find no need to assert the existence of a deity. Their popular designation as people who deny the existence of God is an image created by their necessary attempts to explain their position in the face of a more dominant theistic population.

In the last generation, American humanists and atheists have found a noteworthy issue in pseudoscience. In the 1970s, an association of people concerned about the growing popularity of astrology and other psychic/occult activities formed the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal (now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry or CSI). This organization generated a public campaign against scientific claims being perpetuated within the general population that were based on methodologically flawed research, fraud, or inadequate evidence. While originally focused upon psychic and occult practices, the movement expanded to include a variety of questionable scientific claims and concerns, from various alternative medical practices to cultic brainwashing to denial of the Jewish Holocaust in World War II (1937–1945). A parallel concern to debunk claims of religious miracles (apparitions of the Virgin Mary, the Shroud of Turin, etc.) became part of the movement.

CSI has given birth to several other societies, including the James Randi Educational Foundation and the Skeptics Society. It has also been closely linked to the Council for Secular Humanism, both including philosopher Paul Kurtz (b. 1925) among its founders. Kurtz also heads Prometheus Books, which has grown into a major publisher of atheist humanist and anti-pseudoscience books in North America. The Skeptics Society is headed by Michael Shermer (b. 1954), a self-described agnostic, who has become a television personality on the issue of pseudoscience and has authored several books including Why People Believe Weird Things (1997) and Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (2000).

In the late-twentieth century, atheism found its most vocal advocate in Madalyn Murray O’Hair (1919–1995). O’Hair burst on the scene in the 1960s opposing prayer and Bible reading in public schools and subsequently founded American Atheists, which became the largest atheist organization in North America. O’Hair led the organization until her death in 1995, but her acerbic personality drove many away and led to the founding of a number of additional groups, of which the Freedom of Religion Foundation was the most notable.

The atheists and humanist organizations of the 1970s and 1980s, prepared the way for a new assertive movement that emerged during the 1990s. Neo-atheists, as they were termed, claimed that atheists had been too reticent to press their case, and the more articulate exponents, philosopher Sam Harris (b. 1967), biologist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), and journalist Christopher Hitchens (b. 1949), have written best-selling books to do just that. Atheists have found themselves in a significant quandary. They have historically championed freedom of thought, an important issue in providing space for liberal opinions in a situation of dominant religious world-views aligned with government power. In the modern West, however, they find themselves challenged by an environment in which freedom of thought has supported the seeming growth of traditional religions; the founding of a variety of fringe sciences from ufology to parapsychology; and the reemergence of Western esotericism and its associated use of spirit contact, astrology and other divinatory practices, channeling, and magical ceremony, all of which liberal thinkers have seen as irrational superstitions.

SOURCES

The study of the Unitarian and universalist traditions is carried on by the Unitarian Universalist Historical Society, 25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108. The society publishes the UUHS Proceedings biennially. There is no comparable structure for the study of the more radical humanist, atheist, and rationalist traditions, but several university libraries, most notably the University of Wisconsin at Madison, have extensive archival holdings on atheism.

General Sources

Baumer, Franklin L. Religion and the Rise of Scepticism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960. 308 pp.

Bratton, Fred Gladstone. The Legacy of the Liberal Spirit: Men and Movements in the Making of Modern Thought. Boston: Beacon Press, 1943. 319 pp.

Brown, Marshall G., and Gordon Stein. Freethought in the United States: A Descriptive Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978. 146 pp.

Flynn, Tom, ed. The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007. 897 pp.

Sheldon, Henry C. Unbelief in the Nineteenth Century: A Critical History. New York: Eaton & Mains, 1907. 399 pp.

Shermer, Michael. How We Believe: The Search for God in an Age of Science. New York: Freeman, 2000. 302 pp.

Stein, Gordon. Robert G. Ingersoll: A Checklist. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1969. 128 pp.

Unitarianism and Universalism

Albee, Ernest. A History of English Unitarianism (1902). New York: Collier, 1962. 383 pp.

Bueherns, John A., and F. Forrester Church. A Chosen Faith: An Introduction to Unitarian Universalism. Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press. 1998. 240 pp.

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Miller, Russell E. The Larger Hope. 2 vols. Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1979–1985.

Parke, David B. The Epic of Unitarianism: Original Writings from the History of Liberal Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. 164 pp.

Scott, Clinton Lee. The Universalist Church of America: A Short History. Boston: Universalist Historical Society, 1957. 124 pp.

Wilbur, Earl Morse. A History of Unitarianism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946. 617 pp.

Williams, George Huntston. American Universalism: A Bicentennial Historical Essay. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971. 94 pp.

Wright, Conrad Edick. Three Prophets of Religious Liberalism: Channing, Emerson, Parker. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. 152 pp.

Deism and Freethought

Darrow, Clarence, and Wallace Rice. Infidels and Heretics: An Agnostics Anthology. Boston: Stratford, 1929. 293 pp.

Hawke, David Freeman. Paine. New York: Harper & Row. 1974. 500 pp.

Ingersoll, Robert G. Ingersoll’s Greatest Lectures. New York: Freethought Press Association, 1944. 419 pp.

Koch, G. Adolf. Republican Religion: The American Revolution and the Cult of Reason. New York: Henry Holt, 1933. 334 pp.

May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. 419 pp.

Morais, Herbert M. Deism in Eighteenth Century America. New York: Russell & Russell, 1960. 203 pp.

Persons, Stow. Free Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1947. 162 pp.

Thrower, James. Western Atheism: A Short History. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1999. 157 pp.

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Humanism

Hawton, Hector. The Humanist Revolution. London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963. 247 pp.

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Knight, Margaret, and Jim Herrick, eds. Humanist Anthology: From Confucius to Attenborough. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995. 220 pp.

Kurtz, Paul. Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for New Planetary Humanism. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000. 76 pp.

Lamont, Corliss. The Philosophy of Humanism. 7th ed. New York: Ungar, 1990. 326 pp.

Walker, Joseph. Humanism as a Way of Life. New York: Macmillan, 1932. 83 pp.

Atheism

Angeles, Peter A., ed. Critiques of God: Making the Case Against Belief in God. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1997. 371 pp.

Brooks, David M. The Necessity of Atheism. New York: Freethought Press Association, 1933. 322 pp.

Buckley, Michael J. At the Origins of Modern Atheism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. 445 pp.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006. 416 pp.

Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: Free Press, 2005. 336 pp.

Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Boston, MA: Twelve Books, Hachette, 2007. 307 pp.

———, ed. The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. 3rd ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 2007. 528 pp.

Martin, Michael, ed. An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1980. 354 pp.

———. Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.

Stein, Gordon, ed. The Encyclopedia of Unbelief. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1985. 2 vols.

Christian-Atheist Controversy

Blackie, John Stuart. The Natural History of Atheism. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1878. 253 pp.

Graham, Lloyd M. Deceptions and Myths of the Bible. New York: Bell, 1979. 484 pp.

Haught, John F. God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. 156 pp.

Lewis, Joseph. The Bible Unmasked. New York: Freethought Press, 1926. 236 pp.

Marty, Martin E. The Infidel: Freethought and American Religion. Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1961. 224 pp.

McCabe, Joseph. The Sources of the Morality of the Gospels. London: Watts, 1914. 315 pp.

Micelli, Vincent P. The Gods of Atheism. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973. 490 pp.

Wheless, Joseph. Forgery in Christianity: A Documented Record of the Foundations of the Christian Religion. New York: Knopf, 1930. 428 pp.