This book is the first extensive historical analysis of the relationship between empire and the Victorian secularist movement. Historians have paid little attention to the role of empire in the development of organized free thought. Secularism as it developed in Britain and its settler colonies was an overtly outward-looking, global ideology in a period marked by the rise of scientific rationalism and belief in the logic of a European civilizing mission. Recent scholarship has focused on how the empire influenced British and American atheists on the question of race. What is missing is an in-depth examination of the formation of secularist ideas about universal progress, ethics, and secular morality. Through an examination of the secularist periodical and pamphlet press, this book argues that the religious diversity of the British Empire helped to shape the ethical worldview of the secularists, providing ammunition for their critiques of Christian morality and the church and justification for their policy reform proposals both in Britain and the colonies.
Author(s): Patrick J. Corbeil
Series: Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 198
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Contents
1 Introduction
Holyoake and Secularism
Chapter Descriptions
2 “The Assumption of an Indian or Egyptian Priest is just as Good, to Our Thinking, as the Assumption of a Christian Priest”: Secularism and Comparative Religion, Imagining a Secular World
Comparative Religion: Enlightenment Precursors and Victorian Parallels
Freethought and the Historicizing of Christianity
Judaism, Freethought and Anti-Semitism
Islam, Religious Violence, and Secularization
3 Grounding Non-theological Morality: Secular Ethics and Human Progress
A Moral Society of Atheists
Articulating the Grounds of Secular Morality
Eastern “Secularism” and Grounding Morality in Nature
Unity and Disunity in Secular Ethical Discourse
Conclusion
4 Sceptical Missionaries and Republican Internationalism
Secular Internationalism
The Secularist View of India
Secularists and Missionaries
The Spectre of Violence and the Importance of Secularism to India
The Oath and Education
5 Secularism and the Limits of Universal Progress
New Zealand, Emigration, and Colonial Secularism
Race, Humanitarianism, and the Limits of Improvement
Missionaries, Secularists, and Ideas of Indigenous Extinction
Conclusion
6 Conclusion
Index
