An Age of Infidels by Eric R. Schlereth

Author:Eric R. Schlereth [Schlereth, Eric R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800), Political Science, Political Process, Political Advocacy
ISBN: 9780812244939
Google: CodFZEDQ_qkC
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-04-09T01:41:48+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Free Enquiry

In 1830, a tract titled Prossimo’s Experience appeared in New York City. Similar to countless tracts that circulated in the early republic, Prossimo’s Experience was a small, twelve-page, patently ephemeral pamphlet intended for cheap distribution. Although it looked like a product of America’s evangelical publishers, it contained a very different message. Prossimo’s Experience was a conversion narrative that instructed readers to find self-improvement by abandoning Christianity. The author of this narrative confidently declared, “I am now a sceptic. I live for this world, because I know nothing of any other. I doubt all revelations from heaven, because they appear to me improbable and inconsistent.” So concluded Prossimo’s full “conversion to infidelity.”1

Although Prossimo’s narrative was the subject of the early republic’s only actual tract that encouraged its readers to reject Christianity, he was not the only person with such a conversion experience to share. Beginning in the late 1820s Americans for the first time penned “infidel conversion narratives,” narratives of their conversions out of Christianity. These infidel conversion narratives typically appeared in deistic newspapers. Those who relayed their experiences frequently described themselves as “free enquirers” after their conversions. These narratives offer detailed intellectual autobiographies of why people became free enquirers, the process of infidel conversion, and the significance that observers attached to individual exits from Christianity.

Infidel conversion narratives contained several salient themes, all of which explain free enquiry’s appeal in the 1820s and 1830s. Infidel converts expressed deep aversion to aspects of Protestant theology and self-understanding that made the pursuit of salvation emotionally and psychologically burdensome, especially for skeptics. Free enquirers converted out of Christianity primarily because they found evangelical Protestantism stultifying rather than empowering. Moreover, infidel conversions prepared free enquirers to challenge evangelical Protestantism’s publishing and reform institutions. The ideal of open-ended investigation made the concept of free enquiry quite agile and capacious. Free enquiry allowed its adherents to incorporate deistic principles into larger social, political, and economic arguments against Christianity. In addition, free enquirers increasingly focused their criticisms on Christianity’s social implications rather than the personal beliefs of individual Christians. Thus ultimately, the free enquirer’s entrance into the American cultural landscape marked the accommodation of deistic critiques of Christianity to the persuasive imperatives of early national religious controversies. Free enquirers mobilized their doubts about Christianity in order to challenge evangelicals in realms of everyday religious polemics.

Free enquiry was not a novel concept in the early 1800s. For over a century writers throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world had used it to address a range of pressing religious problems. Prominent English chemist and natural philosopher Robert Boyle used his scientific work to explore God’s power and presence in the world. His 1686 critique of Aristotelian theories of divinely animated nature and Hobbesian materialist formulations of nature was titled A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. Anglican clergyman Conyers Middleton published a treatise in 1749, titled Free Enquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are Supposed to have Subsisted in the Christian Church, that denied Christian miracles, and thus

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