Six Prominent American Freethinkers

by James Farmelant and Mark Lindley

An article in the March 2008 issue of Aufklärung und Kritik¹described four "new atheists" in the USA (Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens); the present article describes some earlier prominent American freethinkers.  We won't go back as far as the deists (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Thomas Paine) among the leading 18th-century founding fathers of the USA, and we will leave aside (a) Mark Twain (the genial humorist, who merits an essay all to himself and whose atheism was not part of his publicpersona during his lifetime but became evident in writings published many years after his death), (b) Ralph Waldo Emerson (a freethinker in his own somewhat mystical way, but not clearly an agnostic, let alone an atheist) and (c) Henry David Thoreau (a radical whose ideas had, however, far less impact in the USA than upon Mahatma Gandhi in southern Africa).  We will focus instead on the following six figures:

• Col. Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899), in his day famous throughout the USA as an attorney, a top-level political figure, a great orator, a colorful writer and, most saliently, a public spokesman for agnosticism.

• Felix Adler (1851-1933), who founded The Ethical Culture Society, a rationalistic, humanist, non-theist religion promoting ethical conduct as its central aim and sponsoring an historically important social-work NGO.

• George Santayana (1863-1952), a sophisticated philosophy professor well known in the USA for a best-selling Bildungsroman and fairly well known also as an atheist, but also a lifelong admirer of Roman Catholicism.

• John Dewey (1859-1952), an eminent pragmatist philosopher whose outlook was avowedly naturalistic and non-theist but who proposed to retain much of the traditional language of religion while redefining many of its traditional concepts to make them compatible with a scientific outlook.

• Ayn Rand (1905-1982), an outspoken atheist who considered altruism and all other forms of social concern to be "anti-human" and whose advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism provided to her close personal disciple, Alan Greenspan, the ideological platform upon which he, as executive head of the central banking system in the USA from 1987 to 2006, played a leading role in pumping up the financial bubble which is currently in the process of bursting.

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