Michael Rectenwald

Secularism and the cultures of nineteenth-century scientific naturalism

This essay examines Secularism as developed by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851–1852. While historians have noted the importance of evolutionary thought for freethinking radicals from the 1840s, and others have traced the popularization of agnosticism and Darwinian evolution by later Victorian freethinkers, insufficient attention has been paid to mid-century Secularism as constitutive of the cultural and intellectual environment necessary for the promotion and relative success of scientific naturalism. I argue that Secularism was a significant source for the emerging new creed of scientific naturalism in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only did early Secularism help clear the way by fighting battles with the state and religious interlocutors, but it also served as a source for what Huxley, almost twenty years later, termed ‘agnosticism’. Holyoake modified freethought in the early 1850s, as he forged connections with middle-class literary radicals and budding scientific naturalists, some of whom met in a ‘Confidential Combination’ of freethinkers. Secularism became the new creed for this coterie. Later, Secularism promoted and received reciprocal support from the most prominent group of scientific naturalists, as Holyoake used Bradlaughs atheism and neo-Malthusianism as a foil, and maintained relations with Huxley, Spencer and Tyndall through the end of the century. In Holyoakes Secularism we find the beginnings of the mutation of radical infidelity into the respectability necessary for the acceptance of scientific naturalism, and also the distancing of later forms of infidelity incompatible with it. Holyoakes Secularism represents an important early stage of scientific naturalism.

Introduction: Secularity or the Post-Secular Condition

This book addresses the recent criticism and breakdown of the secularization thesis, a development that amounts to a crisis in the concept of secularism and in the long-held assumptions about an inevitable modernization from traditional, religious worlds to secular ones. Until the last decades of the twentieth century, secularization was generally regarded as a nearly indisputable fact of modern life and a staple of sociological thinking. A broadly held belief in secularization, what I call ‘the standard secularization thesis’, pointed to religion’s continual and inevitable decline. In the conjectures of the earliest sociologists — including Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Max Weber — secularization was considered an inevitable result of modernization: urbanization, industrialization, the rise of science, individualization, and so forth. Secularization was understood as teleological and irreversible, ending in the ultimate extirpation of religion and ‘the death of God’.1 As an example of this article of faith, in 1968, the American sociologist Peter Berger was quoted in the New York Times as predicting that ‘[b]y the 21st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture’.2

The Three Newmans: A Triumvirate of Secularity

The widely divergent religious reconversions of the two Newman brothers — John Henry to Roman Catholicism and Francis William to a ‘primitive Christianity’ — have intrigued and troubled commentators and historians since the mid-nineteenth-century, when their religious crises represented a national concern. With the publication of Francis William Newman’s The Soul (1849) and Phases of Faith (1850), at least one reviewer lamented the loss of two of the Church of England’s most talented scholars and brothers — the one to ‘superstition’ and the other to ‘unbelief’.1 The fascination with the religious lives of ‘the Newman brothers’ continued well into the twentieth century and became the title of a book.2 Even broader studies of the period included discussion of the two Newmans.

Secularizing Science: Secularism and the Emergence of Scientific Naturalism

The received notion regarding the relationship between science and secularism is that modern science is undoubtedly a secular and secularizing formation. As science advances, so this story goes, religion inevitably retreats and is eliminated from the domains of knowledge production, the public sphere, and even private belief. As we saw in Chapter 1, Richard Carlile’s hopes for a materialist science were leveraged on such a narrative. Assuming this article of positivist faith, at least until the last quarter of the twentieth century, Whiggish historians and positivist sociologists continued to work under the assumption that in order to understand secularization, one should begin with science (among other factors) and chart its impact on the broader public sphere.1 As I suggest in Chapter 2, this approach begs the question of just how science became secular in the first place — or moreover, how science came to be understood as secularizing per se. Matthew Stanley notes in a related context that scientific naturalism was not always the dominant philosophical framework for conducting science; its emergence and later prominence were by no means natural or inevitable.2 Similarly, science was not always ‘secular’, and there is nothing inevitably secularizing about its growth and development. It should be quite clear that the belief in an essentially secular and secularizing science is itself in need of explanation (although this chapter does not aim at such an explanation, at least not directly).

Holyoake and Secularism: The Emergence of ‘Positive’ Freethought

The facts about George Jacob Holyoake’s founding and early leadership of Secularism have been well documented. Yet, to date, Secularism has not been appreciated for its significance in terms of general secularism or modern secularization. In this chapter, I aim to explore Secularism not so much for its success or lack thereof at converting religious believers to its fold, or in terms of its institutional structures and organizational apparatuses. Social historians of Secularism, especially Edward Royle, have done well to demonstrate in great detail such social facts about Secularism.1 Instead, my focus will be on Secularism as a particular cultural and intellectual formation or constellation. I am interested in Secularism as a historic signpost for what it can tell us about the configuration of the elements involved in its construction, the secular and the religious, and how these interacted with each other and other factors under Secularism’s banner. My approach to the structure of Secularism thus lies somewhere between cultural history, intellectual history, and cultural critique. I look for what Secularism can reveal about its historicity as a cultural, intellectual, religious, and social development and what that development suggests about the configuration of what we now understand as modern secularity.

Epilogue: Secularism as Modern Secularity

In 1910, just four years after Holyoake’s death, the Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics included an entry on Secularism, but one that fell under the heading of Atheism. Within the subheading of Secularism, the 1910 edition rather sloppily announced the equivalence of Holyoake’s and Bradlaugh’s Secularism on the grounds of atheism, and professed both to be mistaken and problematic because they had relied on negation rather than the positing of distinct values. While Holyoake, Bradlaugh, and company surely had reasons for their hostilities and vituperations, they were essentially locked in a position of denunciation from which nothing positive could emerge.1 Thus the revision of Secularism was well underway and Holyoake’s particular contribution, in fact his construction of Secularism itself, was effectively erased and overwritten, as the two currents of Secularism were conflated.

George Eliot: The Secular Sublime, Post-Secularism, and ‘Secularization’

Despite her personal skepticism and predominantly secular outlook,1 we may regard George Eliot as a post-secularist. She was decidedly not a secularist of the Bradlaughian type. (See Chapter 3.) That is, she demonstrated a particular regard for religion and religious believers and generally acknowledged religion’s ongoing viability, its potential to contribute to individual, cultural, and national identity and the general weal. Eliot often figured religion as a tissue that extended throughout and within the organic social body, a kind of living integument providing cohesion and shape, sustaining it in health and order. Religion could offer metanarratives that afforded meaning and coherence, ordering the experience of the subject, while enlarging the sympathies and recommending the dedication of individuals to broad social objectives. Eliot even acknowledged the Anglican Church as an important ecclesiastical body for its role in providing structural coherence and service to the community. And unlike other novelists of her time — such as Dickens and Trollope, who mercilessly caricatured clerical figures for hypocrisy, sectarianism, and factionalism — Eliot generally demonstrated respect for clerics and the clerical function, especially the pastoral duty of parish ministers. We have the ‘saintly Mr. Tryan in Scenes of Clerical Life, “a powerful preacher, who was stirring the hearts of the people”; the eloquent and compassionate Methodist Dinah Morris in Adam Bede; the “wonderful preacher” Dr. Kenn in Mill on the Floss; the charismatic and increasingly self-deluded Savonarola in Romola; the learned and loquacious Dissenter Rufus Lyon in Felix Holt; and the affable Farebrother in Middlemarch’.2

Carlyle and Carlile: Late Romantic Skepticism and Early Radical Freethought

As I have suggested, mid-century Secularism as founded by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851–1852 was a post-Enlightenment development, both an extension of Enlightenment rationality, and a response to its failed promises for extending reason across the public and private spheres to the exclusion of religious belief and practice. In order to comprehend this development, I begin by examining some salient post-Enlightenment discourse and activity in early nineteenth-century Britain. This chapter counter-poses two exemplary, late Romantic-age and seemingly antithetical successors to the Enlightenment legacy. One epitomizes the late Romantic response to what Romantics deemed an overweening faith in Enlightenment rationality, as expressed in terms of scientific materialism, Political Economy, and a Utilitarian ethical ‘calculus’. The other represents the extension of Enlightenment promises to the ‘popular Enlightenment’ and the expression given it in the artisanal freethought movement, a movement that would eventually lead, circuitously, to Secularism proper. Respectively, the two figures — the ‘Victorian sage’ and cultural critic Thomas Carlyle and the Romantic-age, plebeian, Paineite radical, Richard Carlile — will serve to represent these currents. While apparently diametrically opposed, the standpoints of Carlyle and Carlile demonstrate a range of secular possibilities in the period.

Principles of Geology: A Secular Fissure in Scientific Knowledge

A study of nineteenth-century secularism would be grossly incomplete and nearly incomprehensible if it failed to address scientific knowledge production in the period. However, as Charles Taylor has suggested in A Secular Age, ‘secularization’, to the extent that it can be thought to have happened, cannot be understood as an inevitable effect of the ‘rise of science’, urbanization, bureaucratic rationalization, and so forth — that is, as a result of the processes of modernity itself.1 Nor, with Owen Chadwick, can we regard the secular as a by-product of materialist science in particular.2 For Taylor, the standard secularization thesis, among its many flaws, amounts to an instance of the hysteron proteron fallacy — a confusion of subject and predicate, of cause and effect — or of affirming the consequent: modern science (or urbanization, rationality, or what have you) is secular; thus, with the advent of modern science comes secularization. But this construction begs the question: how did science become secular before secularization, as such?