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Joseph Barker was a Methodist New Connexion minister, but his evolving religious journey led him to split the denomination. He moved to America and became a leading popular freethinker and anti-Bible lecturer. On his return to England, he was the co-editor with Charles Bradlaugh of the atheistic paper, the National Reformer. Concerns about morality were one factor in his reconversion.

The Victorian Secularist movement knew that it was experiencing a crisis of doubt. Freethinkers reconverted because they came to believe that Secularism was merely negative, that it offered no basis for morality, and that it adhered to a procrustean system of logic. Positively, they were drawn to the Bible and to Jesus of Nazareth, to the realm of the spirit (sometimes through Spiritualism), and to Christians who modeled learning and a commitment to justice. Popular radicals were ahead of members of the social elite when it came to these intellectual trends.

Although our own contemporaries are widely agreed that Hume's Treatise was largely unconcerned with problems and issues of religion (i.e. on the general assumption that he removed all such material from the Treatise) his early critics took a very different view. This way of reading Hume's Treatise is especially apparent in A Letter from a Gentleman to his friend at Edinburgh, a pamphlet composed by Hume in 1745 in reply to several accusations made against him when he applied for the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh University. Among the most important and fundamental “charges” made against Hume are those of “skepticism” and “atheism.” The nature and character of these charges and Hume's replies reveal the particular relevance and role of the (dogmatic) philosophy of Samuel Clarke in this context—as well as the philosophy of Clarke's prominent Scottish disciple Andrew Baxter.

This chapter shows how the social and political concerns of Catholics, secularists, and Jews influenced their perceptions of the Exhibition. Just as some Protestants perceived the Exhibition as a plot by the Papacy, Catholics were prone to criticize the Exhibition as part of an avowed strategy by Protestants to undermine Catholicism. The Exhibition was similarly criticized by the more radical freethinkers and secularists as a capitalist enterprise that perpetuated the oppression of the working classes. However, the Owenites welcomed it as an opportunity to spread their own socialist philosophy. By contrast, the Anglo‐Jewish community evoked the success of Jewish exhibitors in order to refute the view held by many Christians that Jews were inferior.

Cecil Maurice Bowra learnt, at an early age, that the gods toy with humankind, juggling their fates and destinies with unblinking callousness. When he later discovered that some Greeks held the same view, he could hardly have been surprised. The mystery could never be sorted out. Ambiguity was everywhere. Bowra's father had been a freethinker, proudly proclaiming himself a pupil of T. H. Huxley and his friends, who had given the late Victorian Church such a drubbing. Yet the diary of Edward Bowra records a regular pattern of family churchgoing. Similarly, no issue divided Maurice's friends more. Some, like John Betjeman, always insisted that the Warden had had a lively belief in an afterlife; others were adamant that he had none whatever. It was a confusion that almost certainly reflected the true state of Bowra's mind.

“The Gender of Solitary Vice” argues that the solitary vice became an issue of major concern in the United States only after Sylvester Graham began offering identical sexual advice to women and men. The eighteenth-century British text Onania, aimed primarily at men, had drawn little attention in North America. But violent reaction to Graham’s “Lecture to Mothers” in 1833 introduced large numbers of Americans to the idea that masturbation caused disease, insanity, and death. Graham contended that the same physiological laws governed male and female passion and exhorted each woman to take control of her own sexual life. Unlike contemporary freethinkers who made similar arguments, he advised women to abstain from the solitary vice and marital excess. The chapter recounts Graham’s early career and alliance with moral like John R. McDowall. It also identifies self-avowed libertines among mob leaders. Reform women responded to the riots by asserting their right to learn about physiology, defining virtue as the conquest of passion in obedience to the laws of health, and arguing that virtue rather than gender should define citizenship. Adapting solitary vice discourse to express their own sexual subjectivity, female moral reformers initiated the first national crusade against masturbation.

The third instalment of The Decline and Fall (1788) required Gibbon to narrate the rise, growth, and decline of Islam, a subject in which he had been interested since his early youth, and which had also, since the late seventeenth century, been a battleground between the forces of religious orthodoxy and heterodoxy in both England and Europe. This chapter contextualises Gibbon's account in that complex tradition, and shows how he picks his way between the simplified versions both of his critics and of those freethinkers with whom his critics attempted to confuse him. Gibbon's attainment of the desired character of a consummate historian was to some degree facilitated by his clerical opponents.

A revival took place at Washington-on-the-Brazos in the newly independent state of Texas in 1841. Nearly all the inhabitants of the small town attended, a high proportion became converts and the revival spread to adjacent places. The Baptists who promoted the awakening were successful in vanquishing the rough culture of the town. They brought the leading freethinkers of Washington to Christian allegiance. By accepting much of the thought of the Enlightenment, the moderate Baptists identified with the revival overcame their more traditional co-religionists who wanted nothing to do with organised missions or colleges. Yet the participants in the event resisted more extreme version of the Enlightenment embodied in the views of the Campbellites. The revival reveals much of the ideological struggle of the times to shape the future of Texas.

This chapter examines the important role of freethinking and federal republican publications on the formation of anarchist ideology and social practices. It focuses on the distribution and circulation of Spanish freethinking newspapers in Spanish-speaking progressive and anarchist communities in the United States, presenting a new line of inquiry into Hispanic anarchism and its transnational networks. The freethinking movement that crystalized at the end of the nineteenth century constitutes an excellent example of this confluence of ideas. This movement garnered the sympathies of many republicans, socialists, anarchists, masons, and other dissidents who shared the heterodox theses of its main mouthpiece, the weekly journal Las Dominicales del Libre Pensamiento (The Sunday Supplement of Free Thought). Edited between 1883 and 1909 in Madrid, this paper was well known across Spain.

This chapter expands more fully on Wagstaffe's legacy. It takes the story forward into the early eighteenth century. The chapter considers the comparable views that were expressed by Deists and freethinkers at that point and the way in which orthodox thought at last began to change — not least in the hands of Francis Hutchinson. Hutchinson's reference to Wagstaffe's book in his Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft (1718) neatly encapsulates just how far the orthodox did and how far they did not follow their freethinking precursors. The chapter focuses on him both to try to understand what factors underlay the change of beliefs among the educated about witchcraft, and to explore how far thinkers like him were now speaking the language previously espoused by the heterodox.

This chapter contains selected letters from the correspondence of Catharine Trotter Cockburn, an English moral philosopher of Scottish descent. It includes a large selection of Cockburn’s letters to and from her niece Ann Hepburn Arbuthnot, spanning the period from 1731 to 1748, as well as letters from Cockburn’s exchanges with the philosophers John Locke and Edmund Law. The topics of the letters concern ethical and moral-theological issues such as the metaphysical foundations of moral obligation and the role of reason in discerning the will of God. The chapter begins with an introductory essay by the editor, arguing that the letters provide insight into how Cockburn developed her mature ethical position in relation to her philosophical contemporaries, especially the freethinkers, deists, mystics, and advocates of self-interest in her time. The text includes editorial annotations to assist the reader’s understanding of early modern words and ideas.

This chapter follows Nietzsche's path as he travels to Sorrento. It relates Meysenbug's passionate desire to help him recover his health and her organization of the journey as well as the stay. It explores in great detail Nietzsche's encounter with a young woman named Isabelle von der Pahlen on a night train in Italy, who claims, in her autobiography, to have coined the term "Free Spirit" in her conversation with Nietzsche on this occasion, as a preferable alternative to "freethinker." D'Iorio then leads us through the textual genesis, in Nietzsche's writings, of the notion of the Free Spirit, its connection to the idea of The Light Life (Das leichte Leben), and the meaning it comes to have in Things Human, All Too Human, as a term for one who lives and thinks differently from the way in which the determining factors of his socio-economic position would predict. The chapter ends with Nietzsche's arrival in Naples and his experience of release and connection to truth in the Southern landscape. D'Iorio quotes the phrase Nietzsche writes in his notebook, upon his arrival: "I have enough spirit for the South."

This chapter explores how some anarchists aligned themselves with the emerging freethinkers' movement centered in the southern city of Ponce to address educational issues on the island. The Puerto Rican Left had been founding CESs since the end of the nineteenth century, which gave workers a source of radicalized education. While the freethinkers were mostly middle-class professionals, they shared with anarchists a fervent belief in free expression and freedom of speech. In addition, both anarchists and freethinkers condemned what they saw as the influence of religion on society, especially in education. As a result, both called for rationalist education modeled after the ideals and Modern Schools in Spain developed by Francisco Ferrer y Guardia.

The culture wars between Catholics and secularists were at once inter- and transnational: international, because they occurred in many different countries, and transnational, because both camps maintained connections across national borders. In Belgium, such conflicts manifested themselves in the ‘School Wars’ of 1879–84. During the subsequent decades, the relationship between state and church continued to be heavily contested. As a result, the country became a key site for two competing kinds of internationalism: one based on Catholic beliefs, the other underpinned by secular principles. The country was a major hub for political Catholicism and Catholic lay activism, yet it also hosted an international organisation of secularists, the International Freethought Federation. As a whole, this chapter analyses the conflict between Catholic and secularist internationalism. It discusses their respective associational guises, but also the ways in which they engaged with questions of science, nationhood and social justice.

This chapter introduces the issue of women's rights in relation to the creation of modern definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when feminists and anti-feminists, Christians and Freethinkers battled over who had women's best interests at heart. These debates were fundamental to the development of feminist thought in England, but have been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the women's movement. The study treats the subjects not simply as ideologues of infidel feminism but as activists within a movement, whose ideas emerged out of the messy reality of public meetings, arguments, encounters with the enemy and attempts to carve out a space for themselves in a male-dominated world.

On the floating villages that constituted the close confines of emigrant ships, emigrants found themselves encountering both the religiously like-minded and also different others, particularly in the cramped conditions of steerage. This chapter looks at the way emigrants began their voyage in ports, and how the Anglican emigrant chaplaincy endeavoured to meet their needs there. It goes on to examine the emigrant voyages and the various Christian practices and beliefs of steerage-class emigrants among the British and Irish labouring poor and skilled working class in steerage. Looking at the Christian denominations among these passengers, and draws out major areas of their religious lives, including the Bible, providence, death, worship and hymn-singing, temperance, sex, reading, and encounters between Christians and the religiously indifferent or disbelieving. It concludes by drawing out commonalities many emigrants found across their religious differences, while others found their voyage experience reinforced existing positions and prejudices.