Post by Admin on Apr 11, 2024 11:05:23 GMT
Conscientious unbelievers
How, a century ago, radical freethinkers quietly and persistently subverted Scotland’s Christian establishment
aeon.co/essays/how-scots-freethinkers-managed-to-loosen-christianitys-grip
On the morning of Saturday 3 June 1843, the Edinburgh police made their way past Calton Hill to the tenements of Haddington Place. Their target was the residence of Thomas Finlay, a former cabinetmaker who was suspected of running an ‘infidel’ library on the premises. Described by his sympathisers as a ‘respectable and venerable old man’, he had never previously attracted unwanted attention from the authorities. Yet Finlay had fallen foul of Scots blasphemy law, which banned the publication, sale or circulation of any work that denied or ridiculed Christianity or the divine inspiration of the scriptures. From the 1820s, the authorities had sought to clamp down on such materials and, for the first time since the 17th century, several Scots faced charges of blasphemy. The raid on Finlay’s home, which he later recalled had left the ‘innermost corner of my dwelling ransacked, and the very locks of hair of my departed father and mother strewed about’, duly uncovered numerous blasphemous books and pamphlets. These materials were seized in evidence and Finlay spent a grim night in Calton Jail before being released on bail, paid by his friends, to await trial.
Finlay’s arrest was just one of several dramatic episodes in a fractious battle over belief that unfurled in the early decades of 19th-century Scotland. At the heart of the struggle lay fundamental questions about freedom of expression. Should individuals have the right to share publicly controversial views on religion? Or were there ethical grounds to suppress the public dissemination of such ideas for public safety? The debate had been sparked by the striking emergence of minority groups of self-professed ‘conscientious unbelievers’ or freethinkers during the 1820s, one of which Finlay had joined at its inception.
The most vocal members of these communities were either materialist atheists who denied God’s existence or deists who believed in a creator deity but rejected the divinely inspired status of the Bible. Despite theological differences, freethinkers shared the view that Christian theology, institutions and clergy had harmed the welfare of individuals and society. Many were sympathetic to political reform and argued that the erroneous belief in providence encouraged acceptance of the sociopolitical status quo as part of the divine plan. Others pointed to the distress caused by belief in the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, which asserted that the elect were foreordained for salvation while the damned were destined to eternal damnation. Above all, it was agreed that social and individual flourishing depended on the right to unrestricted intellectual enquiry and freedom of expression on all subjects, including religion.
Groups who held such controversial views were unprecedented in Scottish cultural history. Scotland was overwhelmingly Christian and Protestant. Calvinist Presbyterianism represented the dominant strain of Scottish religiosity. It underpinned the Church of Scotland, established by law to protect the nation’s moral and spiritual welfare, and forged a distinctive religious culture that set Scotland apart from its southern Anglican neighbour. So pivotal was Calvinist Presbyterianism to the national identity of most Scots that, as Colin Kidd argued in Unions and Unionisms (2010): ‘Until the 1920s religion was unquestionably the central issue of division between Scots and English within the Union.’
Calvinism was also shared by many other denominations outwith the ecclesiastical establishment. From May 1843, this included the Free Church of Scotland, which was born of the ‘Great Disruption’ of the Church of Scotland, when more than a third of the latter’s ministry left in protest at state encroachments on its spiritual independence. Smaller Christian groups, including Episcopalians and Catholics (whose numbers would expand significantly with Irish immigration in the latter half of the century), did not share the dominant Calvinism, and there were also minority Jewish communities. Yet the emergence of communities of freethinkers, who felt that they could not ‘conscientiously’ subscribe to any existing religious group, were very much a novel feature in the landscape of belief.
This is not to say that disbelief in the Judeo-Christian God had been entirely unheard of in Scottish society. Faith, then as now, was rarely static throughout a person’s life, and biographies, letters, spiritual diaries, conversion narratives and poems reveal that Scots across the centuries have experienced periods of doubt or loss of faith. Nor were more radical forms of disbelief entirely new. During the previous century, the age of the Scottish Enlightenment, the celebrated philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-76) had acquired a notorious reputation for ‘infidelism’. His philosophical scepticism denied the possibility of any certain knowledge of God’s existence and he had published highly provocative critiques of miracles, the soul’s immortality and the distinctiveness of Christianity in global religious history. Scottish freethinkers themselves were conscious of Hume’s legacy. Speaking at his trial in December 1843, Finlay reflected on the irony of his imprisonment in Calton Jail, just a few minutes’ walk from Hume’s grand mausoleum: ‘I thought it strange to be confined for my infidelity, in a prison close by the walls of which stands a splendid monument in memory of the celebrated Infidel … David Hume.’
Yet there were radical differences between the modern unbelief of figures such as Finlay and the Humean scepticism that had raised eyebrows, but not the arm of the law, during the Scottish Enlightenment. What set the radical ‘conscientious unbelievers’ of the early 19th century apart from their 18th-century predecessors? How far did they succeed in changing opinions over the right to freedom of expression on religious matters? And what became of Finlay and his fellow freethinkers?
How, a century ago, radical freethinkers quietly and persistently subverted Scotland’s Christian establishment
aeon.co/essays/how-scots-freethinkers-managed-to-loosen-christianitys-grip
On the morning of Saturday 3 June 1843, the Edinburgh police made their way past Calton Hill to the tenements of Haddington Place. Their target was the residence of Thomas Finlay, a former cabinetmaker who was suspected of running an ‘infidel’ library on the premises. Described by his sympathisers as a ‘respectable and venerable old man’, he had never previously attracted unwanted attention from the authorities. Yet Finlay had fallen foul of Scots blasphemy law, which banned the publication, sale or circulation of any work that denied or ridiculed Christianity or the divine inspiration of the scriptures. From the 1820s, the authorities had sought to clamp down on such materials and, for the first time since the 17th century, several Scots faced charges of blasphemy. The raid on Finlay’s home, which he later recalled had left the ‘innermost corner of my dwelling ransacked, and the very locks of hair of my departed father and mother strewed about’, duly uncovered numerous blasphemous books and pamphlets. These materials were seized in evidence and Finlay spent a grim night in Calton Jail before being released on bail, paid by his friends, to await trial.
Finlay’s arrest was just one of several dramatic episodes in a fractious battle over belief that unfurled in the early decades of 19th-century Scotland. At the heart of the struggle lay fundamental questions about freedom of expression. Should individuals have the right to share publicly controversial views on religion? Or were there ethical grounds to suppress the public dissemination of such ideas for public safety? The debate had been sparked by the striking emergence of minority groups of self-professed ‘conscientious unbelievers’ or freethinkers during the 1820s, one of which Finlay had joined at its inception.
The most vocal members of these communities were either materialist atheists who denied God’s existence or deists who believed in a creator deity but rejected the divinely inspired status of the Bible. Despite theological differences, freethinkers shared the view that Christian theology, institutions and clergy had harmed the welfare of individuals and society. Many were sympathetic to political reform and argued that the erroneous belief in providence encouraged acceptance of the sociopolitical status quo as part of the divine plan. Others pointed to the distress caused by belief in the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, which asserted that the elect were foreordained for salvation while the damned were destined to eternal damnation. Above all, it was agreed that social and individual flourishing depended on the right to unrestricted intellectual enquiry and freedom of expression on all subjects, including religion.
Groups who held such controversial views were unprecedented in Scottish cultural history. Scotland was overwhelmingly Christian and Protestant. Calvinist Presbyterianism represented the dominant strain of Scottish religiosity. It underpinned the Church of Scotland, established by law to protect the nation’s moral and spiritual welfare, and forged a distinctive religious culture that set Scotland apart from its southern Anglican neighbour. So pivotal was Calvinist Presbyterianism to the national identity of most Scots that, as Colin Kidd argued in Unions and Unionisms (2010): ‘Until the 1920s religion was unquestionably the central issue of division between Scots and English within the Union.’
Calvinism was also shared by many other denominations outwith the ecclesiastical establishment. From May 1843, this included the Free Church of Scotland, which was born of the ‘Great Disruption’ of the Church of Scotland, when more than a third of the latter’s ministry left in protest at state encroachments on its spiritual independence. Smaller Christian groups, including Episcopalians and Catholics (whose numbers would expand significantly with Irish immigration in the latter half of the century), did not share the dominant Calvinism, and there were also minority Jewish communities. Yet the emergence of communities of freethinkers, who felt that they could not ‘conscientiously’ subscribe to any existing religious group, were very much a novel feature in the landscape of belief.
This is not to say that disbelief in the Judeo-Christian God had been entirely unheard of in Scottish society. Faith, then as now, was rarely static throughout a person’s life, and biographies, letters, spiritual diaries, conversion narratives and poems reveal that Scots across the centuries have experienced periods of doubt or loss of faith. Nor were more radical forms of disbelief entirely new. During the previous century, the age of the Scottish Enlightenment, the celebrated philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-76) had acquired a notorious reputation for ‘infidelism’. His philosophical scepticism denied the possibility of any certain knowledge of God’s existence and he had published highly provocative critiques of miracles, the soul’s immortality and the distinctiveness of Christianity in global religious history. Scottish freethinkers themselves were conscious of Hume’s legacy. Speaking at his trial in December 1843, Finlay reflected on the irony of his imprisonment in Calton Jail, just a few minutes’ walk from Hume’s grand mausoleum: ‘I thought it strange to be confined for my infidelity, in a prison close by the walls of which stands a splendid monument in memory of the celebrated Infidel … David Hume.’
Yet there were radical differences between the modern unbelief of figures such as Finlay and the Humean scepticism that had raised eyebrows, but not the arm of the law, during the Scottish Enlightenment. What set the radical ‘conscientious unbelievers’ of the early 19th century apart from their 18th-century predecessors? How far did they succeed in changing opinions over the right to freedom of expression on religious matters? And what became of Finlay and his fellow freethinkers?