AS281: Village Atheists with Leigh Schmidt

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Atheistically Speaking. This is episode 281, and I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Alright, all right, got a cool interview for you today! There was an article in the Atlantic called "Women Atheists Are Genuinely Considered Monsters." Now, it was kind of a click-baity title. What Really, the substance of it is a book by someone named Leigh Schmidt, who's my guest for today. It's called Village Atheists, and it's about kind of the history of atheism and secularism in America, one aspect of which, of course, is female atheists, but also there's a lot more to it than that. Leigh has a PhD in religion from Princeton and is coming at this from kind of an outsider's sort of a scholarly view, studying atheists, in a way, and I thought it'd be really interesting to see what an outsider would make of us and, you know, our movement. And another component that's really interesting, I never think about atheists historically.

0:01:24 Thomas: Really, I don't think about the movement through, you know, the 1800s and the early 1900s and that kind of thing. I've never, I just, just haven't put much thought into it. So it was really cool to hear, here, about kind of the some of the history from a neutral perspective, someone just studying different religions. Again, atheism isn't a religion, but you get what I mean, just studying people of different religious views. So, without giving too much more away, I give you my interview with Leigh Schmidt. Schmidt, how are you doing?

0:02:05 Leigh: Good. Happy to have the chance to talk with you.

0:02:08 Thomas: I'm very happy to have you on here. So, the way I discovered your work was through this Atlantic article, and I found it really interesting. So, I thought I'd have you on, and I'm really happy that you were willing to oblige.

0:02:21 Leigh: Good.

0:02:21 Thomas: Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, your field, and then how you came to be interested in this particular subject, which is sort of the history of secularism in America and among other things.

0:02:35 Leigh: Yeah. Well, I got my PhD in the study of religion. I work at the intersections of religious studies in history. And I have worked on various things over the years. And one of the things I was always interested in was with this history of liberalism, religious and secular. And the last five to seven years, I became really interested in the history of atheists and freethinkers and secularists and their relationship back to religious progressives and liberals. But I became very interested in those groups on their own terms.

0:03:15 Thomas: Is there anything you can pin down that sparked your interest in particular, something you read or just...

0:03:21 Leigh: Sure. Well, a couple of things were going on, obviously, in the past 10 or 15 years. One was this phenomenal growth of the new atheists and that literature and how popular it had become, especially in the wake of 9-11, really a decade plus now of intensive intellectual interest in atheism. And then secondly, more a demographic development, a sociological development, that there are just more and more Americans who don't identify with a religious tradition. I mean, this is the group the sociologists like to call the nuns, N-O-N-E-S. And that group is up to now about 25 percent of the population. So you had those two things going on simultaneously, and it became more and more of a puzzle to me to think about both of those phenomena in historical terms and give it some background, some way of framing these more recent developments beyond just the kind of newness of it all. So I think those things were real factors for me in turning my attention in this direction. Well,

0:03:21 Thomas: Right. Yeah. So the name of the book for everybody is called Village Atheists. And why don't you talk about before we get in depth in it, what were you trying to accomplish in this book? What are you trying to look at? Is it what you already talked about, just kind of putting it in historical context? Was there anything else?

0:04:52 Leigh: One of the questions that fascinated me the most was just this issue about whether religious belief was critical to the way Americans thought about citizenship and whether those who didn't have religious belief, the irreligious, were somehow thought to fall outside the purview of things like liberty of conscience and free expression. Um, and um, just how much of a requirement godliness was, uh, in the culture and the benefits that flowed from that of respectability and things like that.

So I was really interested in those questions around the ways in which religious belief was being used to define citizenship, the limits of citizenship, the norms of citizenship, um, over time, um, and you know, what whether, you know, whether, whether, in the 19th century, there was greater freedom for freethinkers and infidels on the lecture circuit in some ways than there was during the Cold War, that this just wasn't necessarily the kind of march of secularist progress. Maybe it was a more uneven history than that. And I sort of wanted to get into that and think about those issues around, yeah, around the ways in which religious belief, religious membership, religious affiliation, how those things were being used to define like what constituted a good American citizen somehow, and how atheists and freethinkers were somehow being treated as un-American or less American because of their godlessness.

0:06:23 Thomas: That's really interesting. So what did you find with that? And I've admitted on the show many times that history is by far my worst subject, so I'm terrible at it. So I think coming from somebody like me who's terrible at history and maybe thinks in pretty simplistic terms sometimes if I'm not careful, I would tend to think of it as like this linear progression, like, you know, from the dark ages or whatever it is to now, atheists would have had a hell of a time back then, and then it's steadily getting better or something. But what did you end up finding in your research, you know, sort of the path of it?

0:06:34 Leigh: Right.

0:06:55 Leigh: There is some truth to that. You know, atheists had a hell of a time back then, and it's gotten better. I mean, there's some truth to that, I mean certainly in the 17th and 18th centuries, expressions of atheism, the denial of Christ's divinity, other blasphemous expressions, you know, were treated as potentially capital offenses. So, you know, in the early 21st century, at least in the United States, they're not being treated that way. There are other parts of the world in which, you know, lives are at stake when people, whether in Jordan or Bangladesh or whatever, there's still lives can be at stake on these things.

But in the United States, you would say over time becomes an increased recognition of state neutrality, really, when it comes to belief and non-belief, that the state is not supposed to be in the business of favoring belief over non- belief, and that becomes the judicial norm by the middle of the 20th century, certainly by the early 1960s, that that becomes the rating legal principle. So you can see that story. Now, I also found, though, that there are surprising complexities to it. I mean, if you look at, say, Thomas Jefferson's election and the people around Thomas Jefferson in 1800, they seem to get away, at least in their own circles, with all kinds of expressions of unbelief and in a way that you can't imagine politician today, saying

0:08:31 Leigh: What they say, right?

0:08:30 Thomas: Right. Yeah, you couldn't possibly be elected president as an atheist, in my opinion, right now. But could you have been? Is that what you're getting at? Like, it might have been.

0:08:38 Leigh: In 1800, Jefferson is just far more heterodox than any candidate would try to be today. I mean, Jefferson had a Bible and was cutting out the passages. He was doing that, you know, on his own for his own edification. I mean, he wasn't publicizing that widely, but there were other things that he said that he was willing to be overt about his skepticism around Christ divinity, things like that. And you know, no politician now is going to take that kind of risk. They wouldn't. So in some kind of, there are these moments. It's also clear in the late 19th century, a great figure like Robert Ingersoll, but he had a lot of company out there on the lecture circuit, that most of the the time they're tolerated. People let them come into town and say their outlandish things about the Christianity, about the church, or about ministers and how corrupt they are.

And they leave them alone. I mean, they might not be happy about it, but they, as a rule, are tolerated Now, that's not always true. You know, sometimes there's a riot. Sometimes there's a book burning. Sometimes somebody gets hauled in for blasphemy. But a lot of the time, And they circulate, giving these lectures,

0:08:42 Thomas: Right, right. Right. Yeah. Yeah, the Jefferson family.

0:09:06 Thomas: Yeah yeah

0:09:56 Leigh: But still, you know, with a level of civic acceptance that this is just, this falls within the realm of freedom of expression, and we're just going to let this go, even if we don't like it. So I guess I – times I found greater tolerance and acceptance for these expressions of unbelief than I sometimes think people would get away with, at least politically today. Day, and we would try to to say the kinds of things Jefferson said or Ingersoll said. I mean, very few would try. I mean, every once in a while you see a congressional candidate or a candidate for local office who's, um, as an atheist or secularist, um, but rarely do you see someone successful. The

0:10:40 Thomas: Yeah. I think it's particularly interesting to think about sort of, I think you mentioned it, almost was worse for atheists kind of in the, what, in the 50s and during those times. And one thing that's so funny, yeah, Cold War, yeah. One thing that so funny that I think a lot of atheists know because they've come across the argument before of, well, you know, it's in God we trust. It's the founders put in God, we trust on the money. And then you say, well actually they didn't, you know, yeah right.

0:10:52 Leigh: Cold War, I think and they they actually didn't, right. Right, that is, that it's a kind of Civil War inscription that's put on some coinage and, um, you know, it doesn't become an official motto, national motto, until the Cold War. So, yeah.

0:11:20 Thomas: And is that A part of what you're talking about, though? That sort of Cold War, I don't know, paranoia or gripping on to religious identity to kind of distinguish us from them or something like that.

0:11:20 Leigh: Um, right.

0:11:34 Leigh: You're right. So this kind of sense that, you Know, communism is built on godlessness and, uh, and an aggressive secularism, the destruction of the churches, anti-clericalism and what distinguishes us as Americans from from Soviet communists is our faithfulness. That's one of the things that really distinguishes the two countries. It's painted that way. And so by the 1950s, religious affiliation is at an all-time high in the country. Very few people who don't report a specific religious identity, Protestant, Catholic, or Jew, or something else. They're reporting some kind of religious identity seen as integral to being American. And so that's a kind of high watermark.

0:12:21 Leigh: And now, of course, over the last 50 or 60 years, we've started to see that erode. And that's why the change looks so dramatic when you see these Christians, say, in Iowa or wherever, where they just feel that their culture has deserted them. I mean, it's particularly from that baseline of kind of 1950s. Where the givenness of belief in God or, or just that, that just was going to be affirmed in a kind of automatic way. So, so, yeah, that's been a huge change over the last 50 or 60 years.

0:12:42 Thomas: Yeah, one thing I noticed, and let me know if I have the proper conception of this, but when I read the Atlantic article, it's very much geared toward women and atheism as the primary focus. Was that just one particular component of the book, or was that something you focused exclusively on, is it something that this Atlantic this, piece just wanted to single out as something interesting.

0:13:17 Leigh: It's only one part of the book. You know, it's an issue I'm quite interested in, but it is just a component. So Emma Green, who wrote that piece, ended up focusing on that. But it is kind of one of several themes I follow through. But there was a sense that the woman atheist in particular is monstrous, because a woman is seen as kind of the bearer of domestic piety. And so, you know, it's one thing.

0:13:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:13:49 Thomas: Now, when are we talking? Do you mean just specific?

0:13:51 Leigh: Oh, you could, you can see this, you know, Frances Wright in the 1820s and 1830s. She's a free thinker. She is excoriated. It is kind of this monstrous being because she's a because, you know, what kind of woman would be an infidel is just seen as whorish and libertine and an abominable and almost unmanageable. There is a double standard. That is for sure.

0:14:17 Leigh: And so there's a little more room for a kind of masculinist pose of independence and freedom and autonomy that might edge over into being unchurched in some kind. A little more room for that, a lot less for women. I have this one character in my book, this woman in this little town in Pennsylvania. She writes and she said, you know, there's not been another woman in this town in four years who's paid me a visit because of my belief or non-belief. And she says that people would come from miles around to see her because they just said, we've never, ever seen a woman who's

0:14:13 Thomas: So there's Yeah,

0:14:55 Leigh: An atheist. Atheist, and so she was like the specimen on most people Yeah, Exactly.

0:14:58 Thomas: She's like a bearded lady. She's like, yeah.

0:15:00 Leigh: That's kind of how it was, and and then she said that, um, and her husband was also an atheist freethinker, and they ran this little drugstore, and of course it was eating into their business, the fact that people didn't, suspected them, so there was a kind of boycott, and she said at one point a customer was so upset with the way her husband talked about his goldfish, um, probably in some darwinian naturalistic way, I don't know how he was talking about his Goldfish, but he was so upset that he, he, he brought a charge of blasphemy against him. It didn't stick, but it's at that level, you know, so she's feeling doubly marginalized, um, in that community, but it wasn't, it wasn't easy on her husband either, but she was feeling the brunt of it even more. So I did look at those kinds of things just to see how this kind of played itself out.

And also that in these atheist communities, free-thinking communities, as some of the women atheists pointed out, there was a kind of heroic male kind of trinity of Payne, Ingersoll, and this editor, D.M. Bennett. And those are the the portraits that are always up and they're never any freethinking women who are brought to the fore and things like that.

So there was a, there were those kinds of concerns and, uh, you know, kind of like does two issues of women's right really matter to in these circles or not.

0:15:29 Thomas: Uh, yeah,

0:16:22 Leigh: And, and so that debate was internally divisive, Among, um atheists and freethinkers. And you still see echoes of that, um today, some of those debates about whether it's a, you now,

0:16:34 Thomas: Yeah, I mean, I know from my demographics, and just from being in the community, uh, from my listener demographics, I mean it's definitely a male-dominated thing, and I wonder, I wonder if you could talk about that, like, why, what your theory is, is it left over from that, is there a new cause altogether nowadays, why do you think it's so, uh, male dominated?

0:16:52 Leigh: Right. Well, yeah, I mean, it was true. I mean it's true at any point I looked at it. This one group in the 1920s, which was fairly prominent, called the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, one of the first groups to really fly the atheist banner, which was organized in the wake of the Scopes trial, the monkey trial in 1925, their membership was 90% male or something. I mean, it was very, very male. So it's been a pattern for a long time. You know, a lot of it has to do, again, I think, with these expectations around women as the churchgoers and as pious and domestic, and there's just a kind of, that that expectation is in place. And there are a lot more women church members than men in the 19th century.

And a lot of times that that could alienate men, and men might go off and be in a fraternal society or a lodge, or be a Mason or something, instead of going to church. So there was already a certain amount of tension along gender lines in terms of religious membership. So, you know, and now, I mean, I think another debate that you can see, where you see it, it is this issue about how an atheist is supposed to relate to his or her Christian neighbors.

0:17:22 Thomas: The

0:18:15 Leigh: And there's much more of a, ideal of bravado and confrontation among you know, in the subculture broadly. Well, the new atheists, but historically too.

0:18:21 Thomas: New atheist or but historically

0:18:25 Leigh: So you can kind of see that debate there, right? Right. And that seems to break along to some degree along gender lines, like it just, it seems like a bit of a performance of masculinity, and that, you know, to some some degree, I mean, they're, picked I've, cartoons where, you know, they're, they, you know, dress, um, men who want to stay, you, in the church, they dress them as women to kind of embody like this soft, uh, feminacy and criticize that, and versus, and so they're playing on all those kinds of stereotypes, and I, I don't know, those stereotypes aren't as strong, obviously, now as as they, uh, once were, but there's still an element around this, I think. But yeah, so I think that's part of it, that of confrontation, which seems to

0:18:25 Thomas: Too oh okay yeah yeah yeah

0:19:14 Leigh: Be pretty gendered. And I don't know if it wouldn't be the same if you looked at sort of what we might call the humanist fellowships in communities, like Ethical Culture Society or some of those. I don't think you'd have as big of imbalance in those, because the posture, the confrontational posture, is just not there. It's much more about, you know, it's about humanist fellowship and community. It's more building something that looks like religion out of secularism. And so it's different. I think the the gender dynamic shifts accordingly in those settings.

0:19:51 Thomas: To think about the the conflict part of it, and I've always thought of atheism, in some ways, potentially depending on how you're raised, can almost be kind of somewhat of an antisocial thing, too, in some ways. I mean, you have to have an ability to take, in America anyway, in most places in America, you have to have an ability to not care what everybody in your community essentially believes in, and finds important, and sort of think, I don't really care about this. I want to question it. I want to, you know, and there's... there's something there that that's interesting thing to me that I could strike me as somewhat gender imbalanced, but

0:19:51 Leigh: Right, right. Right, right well

0:20:29 Thomas: I don't know.

0:20:31 Leigh: I mean that's part of why I like this image of the village atheist, because it speaks to that sort of lone isolation and dissent and non-conformity, and I think in that is a very important part of the whole image. And it's part, sure, there's genuine loneliness and isolation. On the other hand, there is something almost attractive about that posture within the kind of myth of American individualism and self-reliance, too. Like this football player, Arian Foster, when he came out as an atheist. At ESPN coverage of him, journalists for ESPN talked about this confession in really fairly positive ways, I think, because it was that sort of, this is someone who stood up on his own, he didn't care, all the pressures of the team were to go to church, be an evangelical Christian, but this one person, you know, stood up for this independence of mind and, and um, and for free inquiry and so on. So, so I think that it is a posture that it has a certain appeal, and you know know, um, in the American mythology, but you not enough to

0:20:39 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, but that sort of goes back to how, like, we expect, we accept heroes to display, you know, certain characteristics that every, in everyday life we're not gonna do, you know, we're gonna, yeah, yeah

0:21:45 Leigh: Right right exactly it's fine if we find someone who can embody it for us like you know, like, a, you know, great if Bill Maher can could do it, but it's a lot more dangerous in a small community where the social costs could be really great. I mean, they can be really great, their business costs associated with this, as I suggested, kind of boycotting of businesses, um, right

0:21:58 Thomas: Yeah yeah. Yeah yeah. I, I certainly ran into trouble with my, job. I worked at a company right out of college that was actually a family-owned company and turned out to be quite religious. I definitely was kind of out of the inner circles once they found out I wasn't a Catholic.

0:22:32 Leigh: Uh yeah, yeah, no, I think there's, um, that's still, I mean, there's still a lot of evidence for that. I mean, when people do these surveys, um, among atheists and agnostics, um, the level of prejudice, either within the family, where family members disown people, or at work, where co-workers really can't relate to you, you know, if they know you're, you're, or a non-believer, it's really high. All the surveys show it's commonplace, atheists and non-believers to still experience that. So you have company.

0:22:34 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah,

0:23:05 Leigh: You have company and workplace experience. I've certainly come across a lot of stories like that.

0:23:05 Thomas: Yeah. I was going to say, so what do, when, when you talk about the nones being 20, I think he said 25% or something like that.

0:23:16 Leigh: 25% I think.

0:23:18 Thomas: Yeah. That's obviously though, that's not atheists. So what can you talk about kind of the difference there between, and maybe there's some significance there between people who actually will say they're atheists versus, I don't know if you have any particular insight to how many people might be just not wanting to use that word or, you know.

0:23:34 Leigh: Right. Right, right. Well, yes. So of those 25%, about a third are atheist or agnostic, are willing to just say they're atheist or agnostic. So that means two thirds of the folks who say they have no religious identity, aren't saying they're atheist or agnostic. And some of those people would say religion still matters to them, you know, individually, they just don't have any particular religious identity. So there's, you You know, it's not a category of total religious indifference, you know, all 25 percent by any means. But I do think that it's clear that atheists and agnostic, too, but atheists especially, still a pejorative in all kinds of ways.

0:24:22 Leigh: And when they do surveys on this, you know, 40, 50% of Americans wouldn't support an atheist.

0:24:31 Thomas: Yeah. We're lower than a lot of groups. That's for sure.

0:24:33 Leigh: Right. You're right. Yeah, you're right down there with Muslims in terms of, you Know, now at this point, in terms of the statistics, so it's you have you have that phenomenon out there. And so there's still Yeah, there's still plenty of that on, plenty of prejudice in those kinds of ways.

0:24:37 Thomas: Yeah.

0:24:51 Thomas: But that number, it seems to be on a, on an uptick, right? I mean, it's how,

0:24:56 Leigh: Oh, yeah, it's on an uptick. So, so since the 1990s, I mean, it has gone up 12%, 14%. I mean even just in the last few years, I think in 2014 the survey data said 23%. And now, just this year, a new one came out, even just in the last month, it said 25%. So it's been inching up, you know, a percent or two now few years. So it is definitely on that. And it's very high among millennials. So, you now, it's, so there's a lot of room for growth. If that trend continues, the percentage should keep going up of people who don't have a religious affiliation.

0:25:40 Thomas: I wonder, do you think that growth will be proportional? Keep that one third proportion or is there any indications?

0:25:44 Leigh: Yeah, it's hard. Oh, and how many of those, how many, yeah, how many atheists?

0:25:49 Thomas: Yeah. Cause I could easily see people in general, especially maybe reacting from the, you know, extreme Christian religious right, I could see a lot of people just thinking, well, that's just, you know, I believe in God of some kind, but look at all that. Look at all these religious people. I'm not, you know—I could see that being a motivating factor for not identifying as a particular religion, but still believing in some sort of afterlife or God or something like that.

0:26:13 Leigh: Right. Yeah. No. So, yeah. So there's definitely in that group, right there. Yeah. There's definitely, I don't know, maybe a third, right. Or you're something, you might even be in that category of, um, of see, uh, the kind of seekers or folks who still have these these religious concerns and affinities, but just don't want to be identified with institutional religion because of, know, the damage that's been done to the brand, if you will, by the rise of the Religious Right. There are some sociologists that really think that that's been a huge factor in the growing alienation among millennials from organized religious religious communities is just the way in which they associate it so much with the religious right.

0:27:00 Thomas: Ted Cruz. Yeah.

0:27:01 Leigh: Ted Cruz, right, it's Ted Cruz. It's Trump

0:27:03 Thomas: Ted Cruz's face has made many a deconvert, you now. Probably. Probably.

0:27:06 Leigh: Standing up in Iowa and saying, you know, isn't everyone here a conservative Christian, and we don't want anyone else, you know, to stay if they're not. So it's, well,

0:27:12 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I don't, I don't believe he's any sort of Christian for a minute, but yeah.

0:27:20 Leigh: Yeah, it seems implausible. That he'd really be in that camp, but um, yeah. So that is the, that, I think, drives a lot of people away, um, you know, just that particular political-religious conjunction, it seems. Um. And yeah, I mean, there's pretty good, pretty good data on that. I don't know how high it'll go. I mean, you know, doubt of the United States is going to have rates of religious disfiliation as high as Sweden or England or something.

0:27:35 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:27:49 Thomas: How high is it over there?

0:27:51 Leigh: I'll round it, in 70%, 80%. The gap between the United States and, say, Europe and and Sweden, it's just, it's big. I mean, so that, you know, if you're looking at the religious world from England or Sweden, you think secularization has triumphed, um, and in the United States you're a lot less sure of that, so, but right.

0:27:53 Thomas: Wow.

0:28:17 Thomas: Do you, what do you make of that? Do you, what do you think are the, do you have any theory or did you come across anything about what might be the cause for why the United States in particular seems to be an outlier for developed nations as to how religious we are? Do you have any thoughts on that? Right.

0:28:35 Leigh: Well, there, there are various, you know, ways people, people think about it. One is that the United States disestablished one version of Christianity pretty early on, right? So what it left was this kind of open marketplace of denominational competition, and that the churches ended up thriving in that milieu because it made it much more entrepreneurial, and it gave much more power to the laity just to make their own choices. It, it didn't seem just to be this established church, you know, with bishops and, you know, the kind of authority top down. It became much more, it made these religious movements much more of the people. So there's, there that, you know, that's certainly one line of argument.

0:29:20 Leigh: It seems like an important one. I think they're probably, you know, the peculiarities of the Cold War that make, I think, the United States look different in the 20th century for a longer period of time, so, yeah, and, and it also could be the kind of Protestantism that's prevails in the United States that we, you know, we get a big influx, uh, influx of these revival-oriented, um, Protestant groups. And that form of religiosity is missionary-focused, conversion-focused, so, you know, unlike, say, the Lutheran Church in Sweden or the Church of England, you know, these are revival-based movements that put an immense emphasis on recruiting people, people converting people, missionizing, so that style of Protestantism, um, that those forms of protestation likely made a big difference in in that too.

0:30:22 Thomas: It's interesting to think about the particular characteristics, allowing it to thrive more like a...

0:30:27 Leigh: Right, in some ways too. I mean, I think the fact that the country was religiously more, uh, pluralistic had a, you know, some would say, well, that eroded religious identities because people could encounter all this difference and, and then notice that their own form of religion wasn't so particular and unique. But actually, it also kind of creates these environments where religion is one of the ways people can really form, like, a particular identity within the American context. So if you're an immigrant community, you come here. If you're a Korean, you're more likely to be a Korean Protestant in the United States than you are to be a Korean Protestant in Korea.

0:31:06 Thomas: Yeah.

0:31:06 Leigh: And there's a way these religious communities become an important part of the immigrant experience. And so that very, very pluralism the American immigrant experience probably had an effect too. Too. So a lot of things go into it, but the United States is definitely among industrial developed countries an outlier. It's far different than Canada, too. I mean, it's fascinating to see how different.

0:31:33 Thomas: Yeah! Why so different from Canada? I mean, we're right there. We're so close to them. They're a stone's throw away.

0:31:36 Leigh: It should be the same, right? Yeah. I know. I'm

0:31:41 Thomas: Do you think it's the particulars of how the, you know, of like the government and the secularism that was set up in the system, or what

0:31:47 Leigh: Right. Or the fact that you Yeah, the absence of a dramatic revolution that then kind of reworked the whole religious world. You would think there would be a closer, you know, convergence there. But as we know, whether it's the medical care system or the for the churches, the Canada piece is significantly different than the United States.

0:31:56 Thomas: Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, changing gears a little bit, there's another thing I found interesting, and actually, I have you correct here, you wouldn't be the first historian on the show to to say this, the sort of war between science and religion. It seems, I get the indication that I think you maybe said it was, it was kind of imagined, like it's not, it's a little bit trumped up, the supposed war between Science and Religion. I can definitely speak for a typical atheist community member when I say that it does very much feel from, being in the the movement and being in all that, that there's this war going on and it's always been there and Galileo and this and that, you know, can you talk about that?

0:32:54 Leigh: Right. Yeah, no. Sure, sure. Sure. Well, certainly within freethought tradition, within these secularist communities, within atheist circles, that is exactly the way it's been imagined. Know, there's a kind of, you know, Galileo, Bruno, you know, history of the church persecuting intellectual inquiry and scientific and that that's, that is the story. And it's, so there is a warfare model out there. And a lot of people, see that as kind of the story that by the end of the the 19th century, that is the way to think about the relationship between religion and science. And Andrew Dickson White at Cornell and so forth, it really does have this kind of, it's a war, you know?

0:33:43 Thomas: Oh, it dates back that far.

0:33:45 Leigh: Yeah, yeah, no, they have the kind of, it's war. I mean, this is the war between Christianity and science. It's the war between science and superstition. And so they have that. And the historians, historians Historians of science will say a lot of the time that that model is overblown, that on the ground, if you went through the science departments at Harvard or Johns Hopkins or Cornell or wherever you went in the end of the 19th century, What you'd find is a lot of people who were able to synthesize their understanding of Christianity with Darwinism, that there was a kind of way that they worked back and forth.

0:33:45 Thomas: Okay. Interesting.

0:34:31 Leigh: They had ways of synthesizing this and holding it together and kind of living between those worlds. And so, you know, that's that's this kind of, let's get on the ground, do this history of science, see where these, where these people were, historical perspective based on looking at that range of evidence. That doesn't take away from the fact that there were all kinds of secularist thinkers who thought it was a warfare and still think it's a warfare. So, but I guess that just gives another kind of way of thinking about it, that it wasn't necessarily experienced that way. It might not even have been experienced that way by the majority of practicing scientists in the period.

0:35:17 Leigh: Now, I will say over time, surveys that come out in the early 20th century and so on, they're arguing that the best men of science, the leaders in their field, that those figures are consistently anti-religious and that very few believe in God. So they have that kind of sense that, well, the, you know, the best scientists, the best thinkers, they know it's a warfare. That's the kind of argument you see frequently by the 1910s and 20s. And then in turn, that attitude creates among more tradition-minded Christians and evangelical Christians a sense that the universities are going to hell. Uh, you know, that all these professors are godless and we've got to start our own colleges, our own Bible institutes, and you know, yeah.

0:36:04 Thomas: Yeah. Well, yeah. And the fact that they, you're going to send your kids to college and they'll turn out liberal. I'm sure that nowadays that doesn't help as well.

0:36:18 Leigh: Well, that is a, yeah. So there is that kind of picture that's that's in, and it really then that kind force creates another kind of culture war over education, um, and what kinds of institutions of higher learning you should have and support. So yeah, so there's a lot of conflict. I wouldn't want anyone to go away thinking that there's no, you know, the the confluence aren't serious and, and sustained. They are. It's just that there is this other way of also thinking about that relationship and a lot of advocates for a kind of middle ground approach.

0:36:19 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. So I had a historian on here, actually, who talked about Bruno and he said that it wasn't, really was misportrayed in cosmos is what he was saying. And, and that, and I instantly became, you know, I'm, I're not the expert, but he made a compelling case, but I, I really did become kind of wary and concerned about how easy it is for me as an atheist to take that view. You know, like it, it, It's a really easy thing. And it, and it feels good to think like, yeah, those idiots, you Know, they've been persecuting us for years and we had all the science and all You know, and I as soon as I started learning about that, I did become really concerned at how, you know, just the bias that I might have there. And I so I'm certainly open to the idea that I would prefer to just kind of know, like the facts and not have it colored by.

0:36:59 Leigh: Yeah. Right. Right, right, right. Well, I mean, I think, yeah. So I think that kind of balanced perspective back and forth on this, where you can see you know you see the seriousness of the conflicts, the gravity of the conflicts, and then you know this like, and it is, what you're right, I mean, I think to be wary of the ways in which say someone like Bruno was turned into a liberal secular hero in the 19th century, and you know, and and taken kind of out of, out his immediate world, um, and made into to um a different sort of hero. And they built a huge statue in Rome for him in the 1880s and it becomes a kind kind of secularist meeting point. I mean, people still, you know, in the atheist community kind of gravitate toward Bruno and his side of his execution.

0:37:41 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:38:27 Leigh: So, yeah, so it's worth kind of putting one's own traditions and sort of historical perspective and seeing how that happened. But, yeah. By the end of the 19th century, they have dated a lot of the secularists, I study, and atheist, I study, are so sure that Bruno was kind of the founding figure of their world that they've redated their whole calendar to the date of his death in 1600. So, right.

0:38:53 Thomas: Really? Well, because he was he was, he believed in God, right? I mean, it's not like he was an atheist. Didn't.

0:39:00 Leigh: So, but for them, it's like, this martyr, this person who was trying to advance scientific interior and look at what the church did to him. So there is that, um, that's what they're turning, so, they but they create a whole new calendar. Where does the modern era begin? It begins with the death of Bruno. That's year one.

0:39:02 Thomas: Yeah, huh? Huh.

0:39:15 Leigh: Whatever, and then so by 1887, it's the year 287, you know. And things like that. Yeah. Yeah.

0:39:20 Thomas: Really? People really did that?

0:39:22 Leigh: They wrote their letters and they put that in the tape to year 288, you know. I mean it was, it was, you know, yeah.

0:39:22 Thomas: Wow. I feel like atheists were just as annoying back then as they can be now. Just as obnoxious.

0:39:32 Leigh: Yeah, you know. It's clever, I mean, it's fun, yeah. But

0:39:34 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, I think it's, it's funny though. It's kind of, I mean, obviously it's easy to look at everything through today's lens and, and all that. And it's Funny to think like how internet atheism is certainly an interesting thing. And it's not always a good thing. It's not always a pleasant thing. But it's funny to think, like, that is kind of that same mindset, though. Like, we're gonna screw your dating system. We're gonna just invent our own and, like... Yeah, it's kind of funny.

0:39:59 Leigh: Right. We're gonna invent our own to start our whole new calendar. Yeah, yeah, no, that's right. Right.

0:40:02 Thomas: Yeah. That's funny.

0:40:05 Leigh: And, you know, sometimes, you know, Internet atheism, you're right, that's a fascinating world unto itself. But a lot of times I look at these stuff, these journals that became popular in the 19th century, like the Truth Seeker and Boston Investigator, these kind of infidel newspapers, and they were serving a similar function in print in that, you people could write into them, like, you are this lonely atheist in this tiny town in New Mexico And you're this lonely atheist in Maine and you write in and you're like these letters and you start saying, oh, I'm connected. You know, I've got this. I'm like I'm part of a community. It's a virtual community. But, you know, part of it, because this experience in Iowa is a lot like my experience, you knows, in San Francisco or however it goes. And so there is – they create that network – in this case, it's just letters to the editor and the printing of hundreds of these letters tothe editor and these papers. But that is like their internet. That's the way they're getting connected and creating community where they would have otherwise felt incredibly isolated.

0:40:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:41:10 Thomas: You You know, another thing I thought was funny in this article was how you mentioned people ask if you're an atheist, you know, because of this and the difference between when you're writing about this and when you might be writing about religions of different kinds. Can you talk about that? What is your background? I mean, right,

0:41:25 Leigh: It, Right, well, I mean, I am, yeah, when I'm asked that, you know, I, I'm an academic, so I, and I would say this, whether if I was asked about why do you write about Presbyterians or why do you write about Buddhists, I mean I would say, you know, I'm, I'm a practicing scholar, this, you know, and I, doesn't make me, you know, I don't have to be what I'm writing about, right?

0:41:48 Thomas: Right.

0:41:49 Leigh: So I'm kind of like, I'm interested in a lot of things, and you know, so let's, let's just try, try to create, create a little separation here on that, on that score, but I would, I would take that posture across the board, um, Yeah, but I have, I have found this, and and is that, you know, you don't feel the same way if you're like working on Bahá'ís, or you're saying something about Presbyterians, there's sometimes, I mean, I remember I wrote quite a bit on presbytery at one point, someone said, you must be a presbyterian, and I was like, no, I'm not a Presbyterian, I just happen to be writing on them right now, and uh, but it didn't feel like, you know, it didn't feel like it was suspicious, right?

0:42:25 Leigh: But I do feel sometimes like, you've been writing about atheists, I mean, you really write a lot, you know, you really have been doing all this work on it, I always, I do, you do get more of a sense, like, Um, they're

0:41:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like McCarthyism.

0:42:36 Leigh: Making, yeah, yeah, I know, exactly. Ricky, like they're making some sort of judgment about me, I mean, I did, yeah.

0:42:38 Thomas: Yeah well maybe it scales in proportion to how disliked the group is or or something. I don't know.

0:42:46 Leigh: I remember I gave a talk at one, um, um, a conference, um, where someone came up to me afterwards and said, everyone thinks you're an atheist, you know, and you know, it was a conference where there were, um, because I work on religion, I mean, they're often different religious groups around, and people, members, and I was like, why?

I mean, I'm just, just gave a paper on free thinkers, I mean, I didn't, you know, and so it's sort of, I, and it, so, but it is just more, there is something, I mean, There is, is something different, like writing this much on atheists, you begin to, you get a sense of it, like the, um, you know, like Jessica Alquist and everyone who kind of immediately came out and attacked her after she went up to that prayer, prayer banner in her tiny town in, uh, you know, Rhode Island or something, it just can bring out a certain level of suspicion that you're, uh, kind of violating the the social norms here somehow, but, um, you know, it's just intriguing to me, I mean, I hadn't really thought about this, um, too much before, but I think, in

0:43:12 Thomas: Yeah, definitely.

0:43:41 Leigh: This case, yeah, right,

0:43:37 Thomas: I think people want to know if you're on their team or not. I mean, religious people. I really don't know. It is hard to generalize, obviously, but we have data that you have already presented that atheists are incredibly disliked. I just think it is a threat to people's belief systems. It's, it's like any it's, yeah,

0:44:04 Leigh: And there's still a kind of sense that because this has always been then the critique, I mean, over several centuries, that somehow the atheist is a libertine. The atheist is immoral. The atheist won't have the same norms that the rest of us do. You just can't trust an atheist to be They're a danger to public morality. And so there is that sort of lingering question, I think, in in some people's minds about that, and so that's why you have, um,

0:44:25 Thomas: Yeah, I don't think that's gotten much better either. Yeah, it

0:44:40 Leigh: No, That's why, you know, people like Greg Epstein writing books about, you know, Good Without God, trying to make the point, right, that you, you can have, uh, these firm ethical commitments without revelation or without a belief in God, it's a point that seems to, um, you know, needs to still be made. So, so I think, you know, that's in the air a lot of times.

0:45:00 Thomas: It's shocking, um, how absurd that is to me, because I just, there's... there's no, when you get, break down to the philosophy of it, where are you even getting your morality if you're a Christian? I mean, you have to pick and choose in the book, you have, there's all these sources, that it's not, if there's no ticket, free ticket to morality, if your, if you believe in a god or whatever, anyway, it's the the Euthyphro dilemma all over again. But anyway, yeah, it's interesting. It also kind of reminded me of, it may just have something to do with, being a semi-persecuted or semi-disliked minority.

Because I remember there was an actor, I think it was Tom Hardy, I want to say, who he kept just not, people would ask him if he was gay. There was like rumors that he was gay. And he would say, I'm just not going to answer them. Like, I shouldn't have to answer that. And that drove people nuts. Like so he is gay, you know, and it's sort of a weird it reminded me of that when you when you said people thought you were an atheist. It's like, why should I have to say I'm not or why should have to say? I am or what? You know,

0:45:22 Leigh: Uh-huh. Right. Right.

0:46:03 Thomas: Vice versa. Like it's people. I think it's it's another group where people really want to know who you are and they're they're like afraid, you know, or something like that.

0:46:13 Leigh: Right, right. Yeah, no, I, yeah, it's interesting. It is more intense with, you know, around atheism and agnosticism. I will say that. That's how I've experienced it. So, I, it hasn't been, you know it's not too bad. It's not like, uh, you know, you see a lot of the, the internet people, you know, light up on these kinds of things. A lot of times over people, you see it when they just got a quick quest case again and the Rhode Island case when that was, you Know, when, where you just saw how much it can just

0:46:23 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, so what happened with that? I'm blanking on the details of that.

0:46:46 Leigh: Okay. So she, she was this, um, know, in a high school there where there was this prayer banner that went went up like 1963 because the community was angry with the Supreme Court's ruling about not having prayer in the public schools anymore so one of the things they did was like we're going to put this big prayer banner up about you know our heavenly father or whatever and it was pretty harmless in a certain way I mean it's just kind of vague affirmation of the importance of you know know studying hard and being a good sort of something I mean but nonetheless it invoked God and she felt she felt as an atheist she'd been baptized Catholic but she'd become a convinced atheist by the time um she was in high school and she just felt it was excluding her and you know every time she saw it she thought well this this just and so she with the help of the ACLU sued sued the school and won um but she became this object of incredible wrath I mean you know the kind of the hate stuff on the internet and cyber bullying and know her own state representative called her an evil little thing

0:47:58 Leigh: I mean and so there was just this like this there's this real antagonism that came up and um she also then got a lot of support in the freethought community and people you know raised money in her support and so on and plenty of religious liberals and progressives came out and said you know no in support of minority rights in that case as well so so so but it is one of those things where you can kind of just see see it doesn't take a lot to activate all of this you know you're un-American you're a danger you don't you know belong in this community and that kind of rhetoric um

0:47:35 Thomas: Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah sure.

0:48:31 Thomas: Yeah

0:48:31 Leigh: How fast that kicked in um in that case was a reminder because that was just in the last two or three years was a remainder of how deep those antagonisms still go and that they haven't really gone away even after the end of the Cold War that they're still there bubbling just under the surface and that can be tapped into well

0:48:32 Thomas: Yeah.

0:48:49 Thomas: So we're nearing the end of our time. I'm just wondering if there's anything we didn't get to that you'd like to go into that?

0:48:55 Leigh: I you know I do like a lot of the kinds of stories that you can recover about about people by um you know digging in here just the kind of a lot of times when people have thought about atheism historically they have still kind of treated it like, well, whatever, as a kind of loss to Christianity. And so how did these Christians enable the rise of unbelief unwittingly?

0:49:21 Thomas: Hmm.

0:49:21 Leigh: And so one of the things I liked to do, you know, here was like, no, let's recover this history as a, you know, as history of atheists. I mean, living and breathing folks who were, who really created a vigorous secularist minority. And so they're just, that was important to me. And so just coming up with these kind of, Again, colorful local characters like this guy, J.B. Wise, who was, you know, just a misfit in this little town in Kansas in the 1890s. And he just got into this long running fight with his local minister.

And, you Know, every week the minister would denounce like atheism and infidelity from the pulpit and he would have to go in and protest it. And so they got in this long, running fight about it. And then finally, he sent him this Bible passage, this, you know, reference dung and piss or something out of the Bible, this little thing he wrote down in a postcard. And the minister was so offended that had him arrested on obscenity charges because of this Bible verse. And which everyone thought was absurd. You know, you're being arresting him for sending this little bit of scripture to the man. You can't do this. Can't this can't possibly be

0:49:55 Thomas: Oh yeah.

0:50:27 Leigh: A good case.

0:50:27 Thomas: He's the Bible man. What the heck?

0:50:29 Leigh: Yeah, Right. But he's hauled off to Leavenworth and he can't make bail. So he sits in jail for a month until these civil libertarians in New York find out about it and come in and him out. And case goes to trial and everyone thinks there's no way you can't – how can they bring him to trial on obscenity charges? But they do and he's convicted but he's only fined like 50 bucks or something. It's a pretty token fine.

0:50:55 Leigh: But it's those – right, exactly. And it's for copying out a Bible verse or whatever.

0:50:55 Thomas: That's a lot back then though, right? Yeah. Yeah.

0:51:01 Leigh: And so, um, so it's those kinds of like moments of conflict and just like at that local level where you see this kind of village atheist struggling to get his footing in a community and and just the ways in which you could be ostracized and marginalized and even arrested for being a dissident in this kind of ways and you know, so it's those kinds of stories. We think all he was doing is circulating this freethought literature, getting in arguments with this minister who was definitely in his face as well. And the next thing, you know, the arm of the law is being wielded against him. So I guess that's part of what I like about having done this kind of research is I feel like there are a lot more characters like that that we can now know about because I piece together.

0:51:51 Thomas: Do you think they were kind of erased in history of somewhat or yeah

0:51:54 Leigh: Right they just yeah we just haven't paid attention or kind of, I don't think, you know, you get new sources, you go back to these sources, you start realizing, oh, I can actually learn a lot about atheism as a lived way, you know, of being in this period, because these records are a lot richer than we realize. All these letters, all these smaller figures, you know, people know about Robert Ingersoll, is a great free-thinking lecturer, and Tom Paine or something like that, Jefferson's Bible. But there's just a much bigger cast of characters, men and women, and even the occasional African-American free-thinker, atheist, lecturer, writer, that you can, you know, if you get into these materials, you can bring them out when, um, knew nothing about them.

0:51:55 Thomas: Yeah that's got to be a small demographic

0:52:42 Leigh: Yeah yeah, the, well, well, this one, I mean, this is the great thing, nobody, this guy, a lecturer, I found who was sometimes called, promoted as the Colored Bob Ingersoll. Um, Dave Sincore, um, you no no, this was, no, this wasn't, the 1880s, that's what he's but, in quotes, um, and um, that's, and he, uh, but you know, nobody, nobody knew, as far as I know, nobody knew about this, this character that he was, he was out there as an infidel lecturer, um, he ultimately, you know, leaves that world and goes back to being a stage actor, and instead of an infidal lecturer, but still, you kind of like surface, and I got, a you know, letter of his, and him talking, talking about the things he wanted to do on the circuit.

So I feel like you, you get a a much better feel, you know, and I lived everyday way about what it was like to be a secularist, or what it was like, an atheist, um, uh, you know, between 1850 and 1950, by paying, paying closer attention to the kinds of things that, you know, I was, I was looking at, like, just for hours on end, to kind of

0:52:52 Thomas: I'm guessing this wasn't very recent yeah yeah yeah

0:53:54 Leigh: Unearth these things. And so, you know, that that's part of it, I guess, if that was one more thing I, you know, I'd emphasize is just that quality, um, yeah storytelling. I mean, you want fascinating characters, you can get really interesting stories out of this if you follow the threads out with enough gents and tenacity.

0:54:03 Thomas: The storytelling aspect to it, yeah. Yeah yeah Well, that's really cool. Well, so the book is Village Atheists, the author is Leigh Schmidt. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it, you too.

0:54:23 Leigh: Thomas, I appreciate it. It was great talking with you. Great.

0:54:52 Thomas: And there you have it, that's it for today, thanks for joining me, I'd, for once, I don't know that I have any announcements or anything, so I'll just say I'll see you on Thursday. Thanks for listening.