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Thursday, November 6, 2008On the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States

Last Friday -- Halloween night -- Sharry and I trekked down to the Med-Sci building at the University of Toronto to hear the atheist blogger and biology professor PZ Myers address an audience of like-minded skeptics.

It was a perfect Halloween -- though the Med-Sci building seemed to attract an inordinate number of guys with fake axes embedded in their foreheads (I'm assuming they were fake) -- and it was strangely comforting to sit in a warm auditorium on an autumn night and bask in the glow of a sermon on godlessness, well delivered. PZ Myers in person is an affable middle-aged academic, genus teddy-bear, whose demeanor reminded me of that other kindly American atheist, the 19th century lecturer and Civil War hero Robert G. Ingersoll, "the man who defied God." (Ingersoll's amiability often startled audiences primed for firebreathing demonic outbursts: "I am the monster of whom you have heard," he liked to say.) And it was consoling, on the verge of a US election featuring a vice-presidential candidate who openly espoused creationism, to take a long rationality break. A couple of hours in the company of people who don't believe Jesus rode a velociraptor into Jerusalem often serves to soothe the soul and calm the troubled spirit.

A few days later, for obvious reasons, I found myself considering the role of religion in American hstory, particularly with respect to the slavery debate. Just about the time Pennsylvania declared for Obama I went up to my office and fetched down a book I had come across during my research for Julian Comstock. The book was William Lloyd Garrison and his Times; or, Sketches of the Anti-Slavery Movement in America, and the Man Who Was Its Founder and Moral Leader, by Oliver Johnson, published in 1880 as a kind of valedictory to the movement. I've added some images to the Photos section here.

Garrison is an interesting case. Evangelical Christians occasionally claim credit for abolishing slavery in America. There is some truth to that -- the rifles sent to Free-Soilers in Kansas were called "Beecher Bibles" for a good reason. But the whole truth is more complicated. William Garrison was perhaps the most consistent white abolitionist of the pre-Civil War era, and the one whose rejection of racism seems the most complete by modern standards. Though he was considered a radical at the time, he took no position a sane 21st century American would be likely to dismiss. The Garrison position has become, in effect, the modern liberal tradition.

What this moral rigor meant in practice was that Garrison was denounced by the majority of American churches, and he denounced them in turn. His argument was simple: the churches were America's moral gatekeepers, and by admitting and defending slavery they had forfeited their legitimacy.

He was called an infidel for it. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe, meeting him for the first time, was moved to ask, "Are you a Christian, Mr. Garrison?" (Though she adopted his arguments wholeheartedly: Uncle Tom's Cabin aims its keenest darts at Christian apologists for slavery.)

But the copy of Garrison and His Times I own was originally the property of a church -- an African Methodist Episcopal church in Baltimore, more in Jeremiah Wright's line of descent than Sarah Palin's. The inscription hand-written on the blank leaf, faded almost to illegibility, is particularly poignant read against the 128 years of history between 1880 and the election of Barack Obama:

This Book was presented to Rev. J.M. Cargill by his Congregation Sunday June 6th 1880 Allens Chapel A.M.E. Church Baltimore Md. It was gotten up by Brother Richard Stepney, cost $1.50 cent.

(This at a time when the black church was more than a religious institution: it was the gathering place, library, school, employment agency and lender of last resort for communities otherwise denied these resources. And I'm sure Brother Stepney's one dollar and fifty cents was no mean investment.)

Garrison himself, who had once been jailed to protect him from being beaten to death by a mob, who had seen Pennsylvania Hall burned to the ground to prevent an abolitionist gathering, lived to stand with Lincoln as the Union flag was once again raised at Fort Sumter. And his legacy touched the 2008 election in too many ways to count.

Called an infidel, Garrison considered himself a Christian to the last. What would he have made of Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, and the contemporary battle waged against science by the religious right? We can't know, of course. But he did say this of his beliefs:

I have lost my traditional and educational notions of the holiness of the Bible; but I have gained greatly, I think, in my estimation of it. As a divine book, I could never understand it; as a human composition, I can fathom it to the bottom. It must be examined, criticised, accepted or rejected, like any other book, without fear and without favor. Whatever excellence there is in it will be fire-proof; and if any portion of it be obsolete or spurious, let that portion be treated accordingly.

Which is a Christianity any atheist (even PZ Myers) would surely be willing to respect.