Robert Ingersoll, the Great Agnostic, played a vital role in defining the religion’s place in public sphere and separation of church and state. He was a great orator, his lectures were mixed with humor and many orthodox religious people would come just to listen to him. This article is a about the contributions of Robert Ingersoll, but it is also a great commentary on religion’s role in public space, secularism and separation of church and state. Susan Jacobi writes in The American Scholar;
“Known as Robert Injuresoul to his clerical enemies, he raised the issue of what role religion ought to play in the public life of the American nation for the first time since the writing of the Constitution, when the Founders deliberately left out any acknowledgment of a deity as the source of governmental power. In one of his most popular lectures, titled “Individuality,” Ingersoll said of Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin:”
“They knew that to put God in the Constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship, or not to worship; that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality and liberty of all; to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.”
“Although Ingersoll opposed organized religion in general, his specific targets were believers and clerics who wanted to impose their convictions on their fellow citizens and stifle inquiry that challenged faith. If he could not quite convince his audiences that all religion was superstitious myth, he did convince many to seek out a form of religion that admitted the insights of contemporary science or non-mythological history. Ingersoll himself was not much interested in debating abstract theological or philosophical questions, although he did so occasionally with reform-minded believers like his good friend Henry Ward Beecher, the best-known clerical orator of the late 19th century and a leader of liberalizing forces within American Protestantism. Ingersoll was, however, interested in creating a bridge between the world of secular freethought, for which he spoke so eloquently, and religions, including Reform Judaism and liberal Protestant denominations, that were willing to make room for secular knowledge. (Unitarians had done this in the 18th century in response to Enlightenment political thought and geological discoveries that posed the first solid scientific challenge to the biblical precept that the Earth was only 4,000 years old.) Ingersoll considered “moderate” religious believers if not allies, then a vanguard that, by rejecting biblical literalism, would unintentionally cast doubt on all religion”
Ingersoll and his sense of humor, the author writes;
“A man who combined reason with humor, who drew audiences looking for entertainment along with enlightenment, was much more dangerous than someone disposed to harangue audiences with the conviction that they were simply wrong about what they had been taught since birth. Everyone who paid to hear Ingersoll speak knew that he or she would go away with the memory of good laughs to accompany unsettling new thoughts”
“Newspaper quotations from Ingersoll’s speeches would be punctuated by “Great Laughter” and “Laughter,” which followed Ingersoll’s description of the haphazard founding of the Church of England after Henry VIII divorced Catherine of Aragon to marry Anne Boleyn. “For a while the new religion was regulated by law,” Ingersoll remarked, “and afterward God was compelled to study acts of Parliament to find out whether a man might be saved or not. [Laughter.]”
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