By now, it is nearly a commonplace observation to note that secularism – until quite recently simply assumed to be the basis of modern nation states and the public sphere – is a contested and even “beleaguered” cultural, social, and political formation. Once regarded as the sine qua non of public democratic life and the requisite integument of international relations, the secular was taken to be unmarked ideologically, as the mere absence or negation of obsolescing “religion.” Linked to this regard for secularism as an unmarked, neutral category was the standard secularization thesis, according to which modernity itself was characterized by, if not understood as predicated upon, the progressive decline of religion – its relegation to the private sphere, its diminishing hold on individual belief, and its loss of authority in separate and increasingly differentiated spheres of discourse and activity. Published in Michael Rectenwald, Rochelle Almeida and George Levine, eds. Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age. Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter (2015): 1-24. Click here or on title.
In the late 1840s, a new philosophical, social, and political movement evolved from the freethought tradition of Thomas Paine, Richard Carlile, Robert Owen, and the radical periodical press. The movement was called “Secularism.”1 Its founder was George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906).2 Holyoake was a former apprentice whitesmith turned Owenite social missionary, “moral force” Chartist, and leading radical editor and publisher. Given his early exposure to Owenism and Chartism, Holyoake had become a freethinker. With his involvement in free-thought publishing, he became a moral convert to atheism. But his experiences with virulent proponents of atheism or infidelity and the hostile reactions to infidelity on the part of the state, church, and press induced him to develop in 1851–52 the new creed and movement he called Secularism. Published in Michael Rectenwald, Rochelle Almeida and George Levine, eds. Global Secularisms in a Post- Secular Age. Boston: De Gruyter (2015): 43-64. Click here or on title.
Review of The Age of Scientific Naturalism: Tyndall and His Contemporaries. Bernard Lightman, Michael S. Reidy (editors). Pickering & Chatto, 2014. Published in Endeavour Vol. 38, No. 3–4 . September 6, 2014. Click here or on title.
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’. Published in The British Journal for the History of Science. 46(2): 231–254, June 2013. Click here or on title.
Secularism is an orientation to life that places paramount importance on the matters of ‘this world’, and considers observation and reason the best means by which the things of this world can be known and improved. It has its roots in a response to religious belief, but is not necessarily a form of religion in itself . In some forms, secularism has been preoccupied only with the elimination of religious belief; in others, it is concerned with substituting a secular creed in its place. Published in Harris, Margaret, editor. George Eliot in Context. Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 271-278. Click here or on title.
As Thomas Carlyle quipped in 1829 in “Signs of the Times,” in the nineteenth century, “every little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine;-- hanging out, like its windmill, into the popularis aura, to grind meal for the society.” In my dissertation, “The Publics of Science: Periodicals and the Making of British Science, 1820-1860,” I have endeavored to study the “machinery” for the production and dissemination of science in culture—to examine how various sects or publics provided scientific “meal for the society.” Examining several periodicals from early to mid-nineteenth-century Britain, my dissertation is an account of emerging sites for the production, dissemination, negotiation, and appropriation of knowledge amongst various participants—authors, publishers, editors, reviewers, critics, readers and others—as they vied for (and against) cultural authority on the basis of beliefs claimed as “scientific.”
