History of American Government
Mark Twain objected to lynching in his 1901 essay “The United States of Lyncherdom.” H. L Mencken wrote passionately against lynching and lobbied along with the NAACP for a federal anti-lynching bill. Twain was an unbeliever that wrote the satirical and anti-religious “Letters from the Earth.” Mencken wrote, “It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.” (8)
Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were civil rights workers murdered in Neshoba County, Mississippi on June 21, 1964. These murders were made widely known by the movie “Mississippi Burning.” Schwerner and Goodman were secular Jews. On March 24, 1965, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a thirty-nine year old mother of five, was killed by a Ku Klux Klan “missionary squad” as she attempted to drive a black civil rights worker home. Liuzzo was a lapsed Catholic. She left the church after being told that by Catholic doctrine one of her babies that had been born dead would not go to heaven because it had not been baptized. She joined a Unitarian Universalist church because it did not have dogma that she found objectionable. (9)
These murders of Schwerner, Goodman, and Liuzzo illustrate the extensive participation of non-believers and the freethinking religious in the civil rights movement. It is not generally known that many of the murders called lynchings did not actually involve hanging by a noose. Many different methods were used. These three are among the last racially motivated murders that have been called lynchings. That era is generally seen to have ended in 1965. (10)
Martin Luther King and most of the black leadership of the civil right movement were religious and were not considered freethinkers as was the case with most of their white supporters. However, King and his deputies did not hold to a literal and inerrant interpretation of the Bible and did not espouse the radical religious views of the Fundamentalists.
Conclusion
The Declaration of Independence was a ringing endorsement of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness for all people. It required an enormous effort to actually deliver that liberty to all people. It required a war for independence, another to free the slaves, and long term struggle to secure equal rights for women and blacks. Universal liberty required the universal inclusion of all people in the democratic process. Without that inclusion, people were limited in their basic rights to liberty, property, education and opportunity.
At each stage in the process, religion was used not only to justify the status quo, but to mobilize attacks on those that wanted to make society fair to all. The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger (4 BCE – 65 CE) said, "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful." Obviously it can be quite useful for rulers to convince people that the existing rule is acceptable to God no matter how cruel and unfair to humans.
Secularists and freethinkers were responsible for the liberty we now cherish to an extent that was vastly beyond their proportion in the population. It was only in the last stage with the black leadership in the civil rights movement that religious leaders were even more responsible for direction than the freethinkers. The religious assert that without religion we will become nihilists who cannot take action in a world that has no meaning. Actually the reverse is true. The religious endorsement of the status quo can preclude action for change.
In the absence of religion we realize that all the caring and concern is up to us, individually and societally, and we must demonstrate caring and concern if the world is to become fair and just to every person. It is not an accident that secularists (including the freethinking fringe of the religious) were responsible for the liberty and democratic inclusiveness that we now value in government. That freedom of thought required them and requires us to take responsibility for ourselves and society
We hope that your understanding of the role free and critical thinkers had and has in establishing and maintaining your freedom will encourage you to join the fight for a secular society that will insure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all citizens.
Related essays:
Direction from God
Foundational Documents of the United States
Deism of Madison, Washington, Adams, Franklin and Allen
Lincoln and Abolition Era Leaders
<NEXT>
History of American Government
Foundational Documents of the United States
