Religious skepticism as American as Ghost Hunters
As my wife would gladly tell you, I am no libertine hedonist, wild-eyed radical or utopian free spirit. But I do subscribe to one core impulse for all of those: people’s need to privately figure out what parts of reality work best for them—without bowing mindlessly to hidebound tradition or mystical received wisdom.
For me, accepting a universe where supernatural beings simply don’t exist is what works best. And this philosophy has the added charm (for me, anyway) of harming no one except possibly delicate bigots.
And even though in rural, church-going, mainstream-Christian South Dakota, I may seem like a 21st century anomaly, quite a few of us atheists—about a quarter of the population—now populate the prairie state. And it’s not even new. Religious Americans have for centuries shared their country with hordes of spiritual skeptics, doubters and nay-sayers, and out-and-out atheists. Because the vast majority of Americans have long been committed Christians, the outliers—for good reason—didn’t say much in public about their beliefs. There were consequences, after all.
As British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) once said about American society, “The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.”
Indeed, American history is liberally sprinkled with closeted and uncloseted disbelievers and doubters of religion, as people in one of the newest countries on earth wrestled with reality and tried to carve out a measure of personal peace and contentment while finding meaning in their existence.
I was reminded of this last week when a long-ago colleague of mine—an American photojournalist and artist who ultimately married a lovely young woman from India and moved there—emailed me an article about the Lily Dale, New York, freethought colony. The colony was founded in 1879 by freethinking people who wanted to further the science, philosophy and religion of Spiritualism, a bogus intellectual fad at the time holding that spirits of dead people could interact with the living. It was all the rage.
So, the term “freethinkers” did not necessarily mean rational thinkers, but, more accurately, free-ranging thinkers. From this freethought movement that began in the 19th century in the United States came religious skeptics, atheists, Universalists, even Spiritualists, people who wanted to throw off the chains of oppressive tradition—religious and social—and think anew. The term “utopia” then came into vogue, and scores of utopian communities sprang up from 1824 to 1967 all over the country, ancestors of so-called “hippy communes” in the 1960s and ’70s. Then, as now, everybody was looking for nirvana generally in places other than mainstream churches.
Some of these colonies, like Lily Dale, had real staying power. Although Lily Dale’s year-round population today is around 275, more than 20,000 visitors arrive to participate in classes, workshops (e.g., showing how to contact spirits), demonstrations (“actually” contacting spirits), lectures and even public church services. Visitors have ranged from Tibetan monks; Dr. Wayne Dyer, the late self-help guru; uber-famous New Age wellness proponent Deepak Chopra; and members of the paranormal reality TV series Ghost Hunters that ended in 2016. HBO even aired a whimsical documentary No One Dies in Lily Dale (2011).
Now, if you’re like me, you view a lot of this as a lot of nonsense. But what makes it relevant here is that mainstream religion is not the be-all end-all of everyone’s spiritual yearnings. And the history of religious skepticism and experimentation tells us that traditional godliness doesn’t cut it for a lot of people, who have long searched—and search still—for answers that will complete their lives.
Nothing is set in stone for a lot of folks, it turns out. Not even the Ten Commandments.
