Why the Rationalist Religion Failed in America
Document Type
Book Review
Publication Title
First Things
Publication Date
12-7-2022
Abstract
(Excerpt)
In The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, historian Leigh Eric Schmidt unfolds a forgotten episode in the history of American religion: the brief rise and fall of the “Religion of Humanity” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Inspired by the French positivist Auguste Comte and the American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and taking the eighteenth-century freethinker Thomas Paine as a kind of patron saint, a small group of Americans attempted to found a rationalist “religion” with science as its highest authority. They started congregations in cities like New York, Chicago, and Portland; they held meetings on Sunday mornings to compete with Christian rivals; they even wrote catechisms and ran Sunday Schools to indoctrinate new members. All confidently believed they were the vanguard of a new, secular religion that would displace Christianity and promote human progress.
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