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What's God Got to Do With It?
Robert G. Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk, and the Separation of Church and State
By Tim Page Steerforth Press
Copyright © 2005 Tim Page
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58642-197-7
CHAPTER 1
ROBERT INGERSOLL
He was an impassioned patriot, an early member of the Republican Party, and a supporter of Abraham Lincoln. He was a tireless advocate for justice and liberty, a man who thought the Declaration of Independence the "bravest, grandest" political document ever conceived. He spoke out on most of the great is sues of his day — race relations, women's rights, birth control, capital punishment, the role of religion in a modern state — with a combination of moral authority and mischievous wit. The power of his ideas and his skills as an orator made him one of the most famous men in America. And today — in an era of "faith-based initiatives" and White House prayer breakfasts, at a time when "televangelists" attack children's cartoon characters for supposed homosexual tendencies and evolution is downgraded to a mere theory, one out of many, in textbooks — the wisdom of Colonel Robert Ingersoll (1833–1899) is as resonant and relevant as ever.
Ingersoll is one of the great lost totemic figures in American history, and it is time that he was brought back into our collective consciousness. After Ralph Waldo Emerson, he may have been the busiest and most controversial lecturer of the nineteenth century, attracting many thousands of listeners across the country over the course of each year. His works were published in twelve volumes; he has been the subject of half a dozen biographies; he was a hero to Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Thomas Edison (who recorded Ingersoll's speaking voice on early wax cylinders). Oscar Wilde called him the most intelligent man in America. Mark Twain praised one of his speeches as "the supreme combination of words that was ever put together since the world began," and added, "Bob Ingersoll's music will sing through my memory always as the divinest that ever enchanted my ears." And H. L. Mencken, writing in the 1920s, suggested that "what this grand, gaudy, unapproachable country needs and lacks is an Ingersoll":
He drew immense crowds; he became eminent; he planted seeds of infidelity that still sprout in Harvard and Yale. Thousands abandoned their accustomed places of worship to listen to his appalling heresies, and great numbers of them never went back.
Appalling heresies. In these two words lies the secret of Ingersoll's disappearance from view. Although he called himself an agnostic, he was usually labeled an atheist and — except when he was exercising unusual tenderness with an audience's sensibilities — he scarcely seemed to recognize the distinction. And Ingersoll was hardly the sort of quiet, respectful doubter who is still found in every city and town across the nation. Instead, he roared out his skepticism in sharp, lively, cadenced oratory on platforms from Maine to California. His speeches and articles carried aggressively provocative titles such as "Some Mistakes of Moses" and "Why I Am an Agnostic."
Ingersoll was particularly opposed to any attempt to meld church and state, which he considered an erosion of the secular principles set down by the Founding Fathers. He knew that the omission of any reference to God in the United States Constitution was no mere oversight but the result of a consensus — accepted and agreed to by even those among the framers who were deeply religious — that it was dangerous, and unworkable, to incorporate any formal acknowledgment of the supernatural into this fledgling experiment in democracy:
Suppose, then, that we amend the Constitution and acknowledge the existence and supremacy of God — what becomes of the supremacy of the people, and how is this amendment to be enforced? A constitution does not enforce itself. It must be carried out by appropriate legislation.
Will it be a crime to deny the existence of this constitutional God? Can the offender be proceeded against in the criminal courts? Can his lips be closed by the power of the state? Would not this be the inauguration of religious persecution?
Orthodox religionists despised Ingersoll, of course, all the more so as local infamy begat widespread fame. He was denounced from pulpits and editorial pages as a cynic, a rogue, as the Devil himself. His books were banned from libraries; his speeches were regularly disrupted. In 1881, the chief justice of the Delaware Supreme Court went so far as to threaten Ingersoll with indictment under local blasphemy laws (a threat that Ingersoll took seriously enough to cancel all further visits to the "First State").
Despite it all, Ingersoll was an enormously popular attraction and made a handsome living from his tours. And with good reason — even those who disagreed with him most strenuously often found themselves stimulated by the vigor of his arguments and charmed by his humor, which was both daring and self-deprecatory. As the Progressive Senator Robert M. ("Fighting Bob") LaFollette recalled, "He was witty; he was droll; he was eloquent; he was as full of sentiment as an old violin."
When Ingersoll died, when he was no longer around to proclaim his thoughts in person, much of his magic died as well. Moreover, he belongs to that not-inconsequential roster of artists and writers who never created a polished master piece. Rather, he returned to the same ideas again and again, in lecture after lecture, with the result that his collected works might qualify for inclusion in what the Firesign Theatre dubbed the "Department of Redundancy Department." But he does not deserve his present obscurity: If Ingersoll is best sifted for nuggets rather than read straight through, the best of those nuggets remain potent and timely.
The ignorant are not satisfied with what can be demonstrated. Science is too slow for them, and so they invent creeds. Theydemand completeness. A sublime segment, a grand fragment, are of no value to them. They demand the complete circle — the entire structure. (Ingersoll in 1877)
Some chips from a "grand fragment," then: Robert Green Ingersoll was born on August 11, 1833, in Dresden, a tiny hamlet in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. (The birthplace has been preserved and restored by the Council for Secular Humanism, which runs it as a museum in the summer months.) The boy was the youngest of five children born to Mary Livingston Ingersoll and her husband, John, a Congregational minister. Although Ingersoll was only two years old when his mother died on December 26, 1835, he remembered the event vividly and wrote of it on several occasions. "Nearly forty-eight years ago, under the snow, in the little town of Cazenovia, my poor mother was buried," begins one passage from 1883. "I remember her as she looked in death. That sweet, cold face has kept my heart warm through all the changing years."
His relationship with the melancholy John Ingersoll was necessarily more complicated: "My father whipped his children to keep them out of hell," he recalled. And yet he considered his father "a man of great natural tenderness" who "loved his children almost to insanity. The little severity he had was produced by his religion." Still, these beatings had a wrenching effect on Ingersoll, and in an era when rods were rarely spared, he spoke out movingly against corporal punishment:
If any one of you ever expects to whip your children again, I want you to have a photograph taken of yourself when you are in the act, with your face red with vulgar anger, and the face of the little child, with eyes swimming in tears and the little chin dimpled with fear.
The family drifted westward, through a dozen or more congregations across New York, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois; Ingersoll grew up immersed in the full intensity of religious fundamentalism:
After the sermon we had an intermission. Then came the catechism with the chief end of man. We went through with that. We sat in a row with our feet coming in about six inches of the floor. The minister asked us if we knew that we all deserved to go to hell, and we all answered "Yes." Then we were asked if we would be willing to go to hell if it was God's will and every little liar shouted "Yes."
By the time he was nineteen, Ingersoll had left home and thrown over scripture for the humanism of Shakespeare and Burns, who remained his literary idols for the rest of his life. He settled in the town of Mount Vernon, Illinois, where he taught school and studied for the bar, which admitted him in December 1854. He set up practice with his brother Ebon, as Ingersoll and Ingersoll, first in the village of Shawneetown and then in Peoria, the second-largest city in the state. The brothers specialized in criminal law.
A fellow lawyer, George Foster, has left a vibrant picture of the young Robert: "He played with words as a child plays with flowers, an artist with the keys of a piano. His voice now painted a word picture of tender thoughts, now sent forth grand harmonies that shook the souls of strong men and insensibly drew them closer and closer still to this matchless orator."
Ingersoll quickly made a name for himself and in 1860, at the age of twenty-seven, he ran for Congress on the Democratic ticket. His defeat was due in part to his vehement denunciations of the Fugitive Slave Act, a position that put him at odds with party regulars. When the Civil War broke out, Ingersoll helped found the 11th Illinois Cavalry Regiment, and was assigned the rank of colonel. He fought at the battle of Shiloh and was taken prisoner shortly thereafter by the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who would later help found the Ku Klux Klan. In an arrangement that seems positively quaint after the total warfare of the past century, Ingersoll was paroled on nothing grander than a promise to go home and fight no more.
Waiting for him back in Illinois was Eva Parker, now Ingersoll, whom he had married on February 13, 1862, nine days before marching off to battle. It was a blissfully happy union, one that ended only with his death thirty-seven years later. Steady, loving Eva provided unshakable emotional support, and Ingersoll dedicated his first book, The Gods and Other Lectures, to her, calling her "a woman without superstition."
Indeed, as Orvin Larson observed in American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll, the best biography to date: "Eva Parker was a rationalist. Never caught in the coils of sin-and-hell, her approach to religious questions was emotionally uncomplicated. If she thought of God at all, it was, as a Deist might, of a remote, impersonal force. She could not take seriously the idea of a God made in the image of man, which was the only God her husband could take seriously, either in acceptance or in attack. Agnosticism came easy for her, it came hard for him."
Ingersoll never experienced the serene happiness and sense of sustaining purpose that faith can inspire in believers; it simply wasn't in his nature. Nor could he leave it alone. He knew the Bible better than most preachers, but, for him, from a very early age, religion was all snare and delusion — an affront to reason, a divider of humanity, something to combat with every bit of strength at one's disposal. Today, with our keen sensitivity to identity politics of all stripe, it would be easy to identify and extract passages from Ingersoll that would seem to convict him as a bigot. His writings thunder against Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and (rather less fervently, for practitioners were uncommon in nineteenth-century America) Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, as well.
Still, the very breadth of Ingersoll's antipathy toward religious doctrines ought to exempt him from the charge of belaboring one above another; moreover, he was usually considerate enough to channel his attacks not on subscribers to a creed but to the creed itself. Indeed, he was close to a number of his day's leading clergymen (including Henry Ward Beecher), and his heartfelt farewell to Reverend Alexander Clark is included in this volume.
A faithful husband, a devoted friend, a kindly father, a "soft touch" for those in need, a man keenly concerned with social issues — in many ways, Ingersoll embodied what the religious right has claimed as "Christian values." One of his latter-day champions and editors, Roger E. Greeley (himself a retired Unitarian minister), has gone so far as to call Ingersoll a "deeply religious man," although he adds some immediate and necessary qualifications: "If religion consists of living an honest, useful and loving life and seeking to add to our knowledge of ourselves and planet earth, then Robert Ingersoll was a deeply religious man. If, instead, it is believed that religion is the guarantee of a next-life for those who have memorized the proper passwords, Ingersoll is not, by these narrow standards, religious."
It was the doctrine of eternal punishment that Ingersoll hated most profoundly; he called it the "infamy of infamies" and denounced it in his work hundreds of times. "In the New Testament, death is not the end, but the beginning of punishment that has no end," he wrote. "In the Old Testament, when God had a man dead, he let him alone. But in the New Testament the trouble commences at death." And, on another occasion:
I would not for anything blot out the faintest star that shines in the horizon of human despair, nor in the sky of human hope, but I will do what I can to get that infinite shadow out of the heart of man. ... I would not for my life destroy one star of human hope but I want it so that when a poor woman rocks the cradle and sings a lullaby to the dimpled darling, she will not be compelled to believe that ninety-nine chances in one hundred she is raising kindling wood for hell.
Susan Jacoby, whose book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism is an essential corrective to more traditional national narratives, observes that "Ingersoll's spotless reputation as a husband and father was a source of considerable frustration to those who would have loved to catch him in bed,dead or alive, with a young woman." His attitude toward women was unusual, she adds, in that "he combined a bedrock belief in the intellectual equality of the sexes with old-fashioned chivalry and idealization of romantic love."
This last is borne out repeatedly in Ingersoll's writing:
If upon this earth we ever have a glimpse of heaven, it is when we pass a home in winter, at night, and through the windows, the curtains drawn aside, we see the family about the pleasant hearth; the old lady knitting; the cat playing with the yarn; the children wishing they had as many dolls or dollars or knives or somethings as there are sparks going out to join the roaring blast; the father reading and smoking, and the clouds rising like incense from the altar of domestic joy. I never passed such a house without feeling that I had received a benediction.
Jacoby starts her book by evoking what she clearly considers the high-water mark of nineteenth-century "freethought" — Ingersoll's 1876 oration delivered in Peoria on the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. "One hundred years ago, our fathers retired the gods from politics," Ingersoll began:
Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever founded in this world. The first secular government; the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more.
You might as well have a government united by force with Art, or with Poetry, or with Oratory, as with Religion. Religion should have the influence upon mankind that its goodness, that its morality, its justice, its charity, its reason, and its argument give it, and no more. Religion should have the effect upon mankind that it necessarily has, and no more. The religion that has to be supported by law is not only without value, but a fraud and curse. The religious argument that has to be supported by a musket is hardly worth making. A prayer that must have a cannon behind it better never be uttered. Forgiveness ought not to go in partnership with shot and shell. Love need not carry knives and revolvers.
It was strong stuff — even 130 years later one cannot imagine any traditional politician speaking such words and remaining in the game for very long. By 1876 it had been obvious for some time that Ingersoll, for all of his passion, intelligence, and organizational abilities, could never be elected to higher office. After making a brilliant start — becoming the first attorney general of Illinois in 1867, while still in his early thirties, and then seeking (and nearly winning) the Republican nomination for governor the following year — he "came out" as an agnostic in an address commemorating the birth of Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist, on September 14, 1869:
Slowly, beautifully, like the coming of the dawn, came the grand truth that the universe is governed by law — that disease fastens itself upon the good and upon the bad; that the tornado cannot be stopped by counting beads; that the rushing lava pauses not for bended knees, the lightning for clasped and uplifted hands, nor the cruel waves of the sea for prayer; that paying tithes causes rather than prevents famine; that pleasure is not sin; that happiness is the only good; that demons and gods exist only in the imagination; that faith is a lullaby, sung to put the soul to sleep; that devotion is a bribe that fear offers to supposed power; that offering rewards in another world for obedience in this is simply buying a soul on credit; that knowledge consists in ascertaining the laws of nature, and that wisdom is the science of happiness.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What's God Got to Do With It? by Tim Page. Copyright © 2005 Tim Page. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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