Village Atheists

Leigh Eric Schmidt's Village Atheists gives readers a refreshing look at the social and legal spaces occupied by atheists and unbelievers in America during the late nineteenth century. Schmidt has organized this book around four individuals, whose biographies allow him to capture the lived experience of these radicals—people he describes as “aggrieved contrarians.” Schmidt wants to bring the “mundane materiality” of their lives into view as he explores the “religious estrangement” that arose out of the “intricate web of everyday encounters” (p. 18). Schmidt argues that these daily interactions alienated these atheists from the believing majority. Village Atheists takes an approach that is not immediately obvious. Each of the four historical chapters centers on an individual, but in a couple of them the purpose seems to be less biographical and more contextual. The most biographical chapter is the first one, on Samuel Porter Putnam, which uses Putnam's autobiography to structure the narrative of his journey from Congregational minister to secular lecturer. The chapter on the freethought cartoonist Watson Heston contains a strong biographical thread, but its primary value—and, indeed, one of the most impressive features of the book—is its reprinting of nearly fifty full-page cartoons published by Heston in freethought periodicals. Variously humorous, crude, and outrageous, those illustrations vividly depict the pugilistic visual rhetoric that was often so enthusiastically welcomed by rank-and-file infidels who subscribed to these freethought magazines. Heston drew bishops as alligators preying on schoolchildren, coin-operated automatic praying machines, Catholic and Methodist pigs slopping up pearls from the well-dressed infidel, and other sacrilegious imagery (pp. 100, 110, 193). If we sometimes lament the rowdy and belligerent tone of social media today, Schmidt's book shows us that this behavior is not new but rather is a revival of an older, less polite America

Art · Art history · Biography · Bishops · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Rhetoric · Sociology · Theology · Watson · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Classics · History · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious studies

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