The Great Agnostic (2 page)

Despite a schedule so demanding that he occasionally lost his voice in an era when speakers were unaided by sound amplification devices, Ingersoll transmitted energy and enthusiasm to his audiences as he walked around the stage, usually speaking from memory. Described by one twentieth-century biographer as the Babe Ruth of the podium, Ingersoll weighed more than two hundred pounds—a disproportionate share of them concentrated in his abdomen—by his forties. His portliness impelled the
Oakland Evening Tribune
to note that in another century, the amount of fat in the Great Agnostic's body would have produced a “spectacular auto da fé.”
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He told his audiences, “We are not endeavoring to chain the future, but to free the present. We are not forging fetters for our children, but we are breaking those our fathers made for us. We are the advocates of inquiry, of investigation, and thought. This of itself, is an admission that we are not perfectly satisfied with our conclusions. Philosophy has not the egotism of faith.”
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Asked if he enjoyed lecturing by a newspaper reporter in Kansas City, the ebullient Ingersoll replied, “Of course I enjoy lecturing. It is a great pleasure to drive the fiend of fear out of the hearts of
men, women, and children. It is a positive joy to put out the fires of hell.”
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The continuing lack of public consensus on the proper balance between religion and secularism in American life could easily be used to support the argument that Ingersoll's current obscurity is richly deserved. He did not, as the explosiveness of religious issues in American politics has made clear since the 1980s, put to rest the issue of whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation. Nor did he manage to lay an unshakable foundation for a future in which Americans would emphatically reject the injection of religious dogma into public schools, in which teaching the biblical story of creation in a high school biology class would be as unthinkable as telling schoolchildren that thunder and lightning were produced by Thor's hammer. Yet the persistent tension and inflamed emotion surrounding these issues—a phenomenon that exists nowhere else in the developed world—ought to enhance rather than diminish the Great Agnostic's stature. Intellectual history is a relay race, not a hundred-yard dash. Ingersoll was one of those indispensible people who keep an alternative version of history alive. Such men and women are vital to the real story and identity of a nation, because in their absence, public consensus about the past would be totally controlled by those who wish to re-create
the country's mythic origins in their own image—including founder-worshippers who see the passionate risk-taking revolutionary leaders and anti-intellectual ideologues who think that too much education is a dangerous thing.

To understand Ingersoll's importance, one need only look at a partial list of distinguished Americans of his own generation who were influenced by his arguments and, even more important, younger admirers who lived on into the twentieth century to make critical contributions to American politics, science, business, and law and to become leaders on behalf of civil liberties and international human rights. This list of nineteenth-and twentieth-century luminaries—poets, artists, inventors, social reformers, even a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame—includes Clara Barton, Clarence Darrow, Luther Burbank, Eugene V. Debs, Frederick Douglass, W. C. Fields, H. L. Mencken, Robert M. LaFollette, Andrew Carnegie, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Thomas Edison, and my favorite Ingersoll fan of all, “Wahoo” Sam Crawford, baseball's outstanding power hitter throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century.
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Ingersoll's appeal as a freethinker cut across political and class boundaries. A Republican who upheld the gold standard and traveled in social circles
that included business titans like Carnegie, Ingersoll's closest friends and fervent admirers also included champions of labor such as Debs, who would garner more than a million votes as the Socialist candidate for president in 1920, and LaFollette of Wisconsin, the leader of American Progressivism until his death in 1925. “Ingersoll had a tremendous influence on me,” LaFollette recalled in later years. “He liberated my mind. Freedom was what he preached; he wanted the shackles off everywhere. He wanted me to think boldly about all things. … He was a rare, bold, heroic figure.”
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The nation's most famous agnostic and freethinker, also a successful trial lawyer, gave up a promising career in politics to pursue his campaign against religious orthodoxy and for the separation of church and state. Then as now, a man who openly rejected belief in a deity and in all religion could never hope to go far in American politics. As part of his mission, Ingersoll elucidated Darwin's theory of evolution for millions of Americans who might otherwise have heard about the great scientific insight of their age only through the attacks of biblical literalists. Unlike orator-celebrities today, Ingersoll did not preach only to the converted (or, in his case, to the unconverted). The diverse array of men and women who jammed lecture halls to hear Ingersoll could scarcely have presented a shaper
contrast to today's segmented American audience, whose members generally tune in to pundits and log on to blogs that merely reflect and reinforce preexisting views.

Ingersoll would have been contemptuous of the idea that anonymous “free speech,” as practiced by bloggers with nothing at stake in the real world, had anything of value to contribute to public discourse. To influence the public in the late nineteenth century, one was required to speak and appear as oneself. And as contemporary newspaper accounts make clear, Ingersoll was a master at reaching people who did not necessarily agree with him or who might have been downright hostile. When he appeared for the first time in medium-sized cities where orthodox religious influence was strong, Ingersoll's reputation as a heretic often held down the size of the audience. That was never true the second time the Great Agnostic spoke. Once the local newspapers reported on the entertainment value of Ingersoll's talks, tickets became a prize for scalpers. In Iowa, the
Mason City Republican
reported that a majority of those attending an 1885 Ingersoll lecture were orthodox religious believers who nevertheless appreciated Ingersoll's wit at the expense of their own faith. “Foreordination laughs jostled freewill smiles,” the reporter recalled, “Baptist cachinations floated out to join apostolic roars, and there was a grand unison of orthodox cheers for the most unorthodox jokes.”
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When Ingersoll was at the height of his career, most newspapers still followed the hoary and informative journalistic custom of reporting applause and laughter in summaries of speeches. This created something of a quandary for papers with religiously orthodox owners, because headlines reflecting the publisher's disapproval would be followed by articles detailing the audience's enjoyment of the speech. So the
New York Times
placed a headline above an account of Ingersoll's lectures at Booth's Theater announcing, “The Great Infidel Preacher Roundly Hissed”—but the subsequent article revealed that the hissing was confined to representatives of the American Bible Society, who were handing out copies of the King James version outside the theater. Quotations from the speech would be punctuated by “Great Laughter” and “Laughter,” which followed Ingersoll's description of the founding of the Church of England after Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn. “For awhile the new religion was regulated by law,” Ingersoll remarked, “and afterward God was compelled to study acts of Parliament to find out whether a man might be saved or not. [Laughter.]”

Most satire involving contemporary events travels poorly over time, but it is not difficult to understand, after reading the basic texts of Ingersoll's lectures, why his audiences—composed not only of freethinkers but of devoted
religious believers nevertheless open to skepticism about literal interpretations of the Bible—would have been charmed by his good-natured jabs. In a frequently delivered lecture titled “Some Mistakes of Moses,” Ingersoll seduced his audiences by mocking the theories of a well-known theologian who, having half-digested Darwin, suggested that the serpent who deceived Eve into eating the forbidden fruit was probably a humanoid ape with the gift of speech. To the innocent Eve, the ape looked like an ordinary man (albeit a very hairy one); ergo, she was receptive to his suggestions. Subsequently, the talking ape was punished for his role in instigating original sin by being deprived of speech and condemned henceforth to the “chattering of monkeys.” Ingersoll had his own take on this tortuous theological speculation. “Here then is the ‘connecting link' between man and the lower creation,” he explained. “The serpent was simply an orangoutang that spoke Hebrew with the greatest ease, and had the outward appearance of a perfect gentleman, seductive in manner, plausible, polite, and the most admirably calculated to deceive. It never did seem reasonable to me that a long, cold, and disgusting snake with an apple in its mouth could deceive anybody; and I am glad, even at this late date to know that the something that persuaded Eve to taste the forbidden fruit was, at least in the shape of a man.”
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A man who combined reason with humor, who
drew audiences looking for entertainment along with enlightenment, was much more dangerous than someone disposed to harangue audiences with the conviction that they were simply
wrong
about what they had been taught since birth. Everyone who paid to hear Ingersoll speak knew that he or she would go away with the memory of good laughs to accompany unsettling new thoughts.

He told his audiences that when he first read
On the Origin of Species
(1859) and became acquainted with Darwin's theory of evolution, his initial reaction was to think about “how terrible this will be upon the nobility of the Old World. Think of their being forced to trace their ancestry back to the duke Orang Outang, or the princess Chimpanzee.”
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This sentence demonstrates what a brilliant orator he was, because he was taking advantage of an American hostility to Old World, and especially British, aristocracy that was much more alive in the nineteenth century than it is today. He used the American disdain for unearned hereditary privilege (which, then as now, did not necessarily extend to inherited wealth) to make the idea of descent from lower animals more accessible and less threatening. “I read about rudimentary bones and muscles,” he confided. “I was told that everybody had rudimentary muscles extending from the ear into the cheek. I asked, ‘What are they?' I was told: ‘They are the muscles with which your ancestors used to flap their ears.' I do not
so much wonder that we had them as that we have outgrown them.”
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Although Ingersoll opposed organized religion in general, his specific targets were believers and clerics who wanted to impose their convictions on their fellow citizens and stifle inquiry that challenged faith. If he could not quite convince his audiences that all religion was superstitious myth, he did convince many to seek out a form of religion that did not require them to renounce the insights of contemporary science or non-mythological history. Ingersoll himself was not much interested in debating abstract theological or philosophical questions, although he did so occasionally with reform-minded believers like his good friend Henry Ward Beecher, the best-known clerical orator of the late nineteenth century and a leader of liberalizing forces within American Protestantism. Ingersoll was, however, interested in creating a bridge between the world of secular freethought, for which he spoke so eloquently, and religions, including Reform Judaism and liberal Protestant denominations, that were willing to make room for secular knowledge (as Unitarians had in the eighteenth century in response to Enlightenment political thought and geological discoveries that posed the first solid scientific challenge to the biblical precept that the earth was only four thousand years old). In this respect, Ingersoll differed significantly from those who
have been dubbed the “new atheists” in recent years and who consider “moderate” religion as bad as or worse than fundamentalism because they believe that religious moderates provide a cover that confers social respectability on all faiths.

Ingersoll himself made no distinction between atheists and agnostics. In 1885, he was asked by an interviewer for a Philadelphia newspaper, “Don't you think that the belief of the Agnostic is more satisfactory to the believer that that of the Atheist?” He replied succinctly, “The Agnostic is an Atheist. The Atheist is an Agnostic. The Agnostic says: ‘I do not know; but I do not believe there is any god.' The Atheist says the same. The orthodox Christian says he knows there is a God: but we know that he does not know. The Atheist [too] cannot know that God does not exist.”
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This critical point remains a source of both confusion and willful distortion in American discourse, in large measure because the word “atheist” has a much harsher sound to American ears than the word “agnostic.”
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Indeed, the more equivocal, bland tone of the latter is arguably the main reason for its invention in the late nineteenth century, since atheism and atheist had long been considered extreme pejoratives.

Ingersoll frequently pointed out that the labels “atheist”
and “infidel” had generally been applied as epithets to anyone, religious or not, who refused to accept biblical stories that were scientifically impossible. That had happened to Thomas Paine, who was also called a Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, and archbeast by his religiously orthodox contemporaries. Had he done nothing else, Ingersoll's lifelong effort to restore Paine's reputation should have earned him a permanent place in American intellectual history. The future president Theodore Roosevelt dismissed Paine in 1888 as a “filthy little atheist … that apparently esteems a bladder of dirty water as the proper weapon with which to assail Christianity.”
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In this cultural climate, Ingersoll subtitled his standard lecture about Paine, “With His Name Left Out, The History of Liberty Cannot Be Written.” He made it one of his missions not only to remind citizens in America's second century of Paine's indispensible rhetorical contributions to the revolutionary cause but to link those ideals to Paine's fierce defense of liberty of conscience and the separation of church and state.