From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social, edited by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter

Abstract

American South were orthodox Christians. Similarly, polygenesis often mattered to polemicists such as Charles Bradlaugh mainly as a stick with which they could poke holes in Genesis. That belief did not weaken, but might actually have supported, a relativist defense of the right of distinct races to live free from interference or oppression. As a Member of Parliament, Bradlaugh became the crusading “member for India” (127). Moreover, the racial payoff of theories of human evolution was hardly straightforward: Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley were abolitionists and committed to monogenesis, but in describing the gradations through which the human race had passed, they often sounded like believers in a hierarchy of distinct races. In any event, freethinkers resembled their Christian foes in preferring more optimistic and teleological visions of evolution than the hard gospel of natural selection. The freethinkers studied here were largely “racial optimists” (160) who argued, admittedly with much condescension, that Black and brown people might deserve social and political inclusion; by the early twentieth century, some explicitly condemned “race prejudice” as superstition (175). By this time, some American freethinkers were Black, undermining the suspicion that secularism was just a mask for white arrogance. Alexander’s research has produced something more interesting than an apology for the kind of secularization still championed by such Victorian rationalist throwbacks as Sam Harris (215). His analysis suggests that Victorian racism was less a solid mentality, ascribable to or blamable on particular social or intellectual formations, than a fluid element which ebbed or flowed with the riptides of political and especially religious controversies. It sometimes suited freethinkers to identify with the shrewd Africans or sophisticated Chinese and Japanese atheists who had apparently seen through missionaries. But there was more ventriloquism than solidarity in that tactic, as when one writer posed as the Confucian tourist “Whang Chang Bang” to ridicule the “English Christian barbarian” (130). Where freethinkers lived in places hostile to Chinese immigration, they abruptly changed tune. One British Columbian atheist attacked the clergy for wanting to “flood this fair land with hordes of yellow boys in order to pump Christ into them” (139). While some American freethinkers stood up for Black people, others sneered that God was a “negro” or Jesus a “darky” to stir up the revulsion of fellow whites against the Bible (152). If controverted by other freethinkers, such utterances were always publishable, which suggests that racism was neither a doctrine nor a taboo, but a vocabulary whose usefulness to the movement varied with time and place. Perhaps the same was true for the churches they abhorred? Michael Ledger-Lomas St Mark’s College