In the post\u2013Civil War era, writes law professor Green, a \u201cfreethought\u201d movement swept across the United States. It was never quite coherent, with many strains of dissent advocating such causes as sexual liberation and militant atheism. Green\u2019s account opens in 1887 with a New Jersey activist being hauled to court for blasphemy, \u201cone skirmish in a larger battle pitting the dominant evangelical Protestant establishment against emerging forms of religious heterodoxy.\u201d Leading the establishment\u2019s war was Anthony Comstock, a special agent for the U.S. Post Office Department who prosecuted thousands of Americans for alleged obscenity after mailing what he considered subversive material. Comstock, writes Green, was \u201ca religious fanatic, a delusional, self-appointed agent of God, and a misogynist to boot,\u201d but much of his campaign and a law named for him remains in place today. Green capably traces the origins of the freethought movement and its principal exponents to the New England transcendentalists and the \u201ctradition of eighteenth-century deism,\u201d though by the late-19th century, they were far less genteel. At points, freethought merged with violent anarchism, at other points with feminist rejection of the \u201cChristian \u2018ideal\u2019 of marriage and family,\u201d and at every turn it was met with severe opposition from the religious orthodoxy. This conservative front strongly supported Comstock while resisting efforts to weaken the powers of the major denominations. The freethought movement essentially disappeared in the early 20th century, and for various reasons: The Red Scare of the 1920s cowed many leftists into silence, while movement leaders such as Robert Ingersoll found no heirs after their death. But more, Green writes, \u201cmany of the causes that freethinkers embraced and believed were inhibited by organized religion\u2014scientific inquiry, evolution, greater artistic and intellectual freedom, and social reform\u2014 were gaining ground on their own.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the post\u2013Civil War era, writes law professor Green, a \u201cfreethought\u201d movement swept across the United States. It was never quite coherent, with many strains of dissent advocating such causes as sexual liberation and militant atheism. Green\u2019s account opens in 1887 with a New Jersey activist being hauled to court for blasphemy, \u201cone skirmish in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6091,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6090"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}