The Great Agnostic
On skepticism that Christians can respect without sharing
Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899) is one of those people from history I keep running into, without ever knowing too well.
Books by the 19th century lawyer known as “The Great Agnostic” don’t appear alongside the other skeptics — David Hume, Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, John Fiske — I found in the library of Charles Lindbergh’s freethinking parents. But Ingersoll did make a cameo in my “spiritual but not religious” biography of that pilot via the biography of two others. Orville and Wilbur Wright had stopped attending church by the time of their famed Kitty Hawk flight tests, apparently under the influence of Ingersoll’s once-popular critiques of organized religion. Like him, they were the sons of a Protestant pastor, one tolerant enough to collect Ingersoll’s books in his library and encourage his boys to read them.
Then I’d forgotten about Ingersoll — a common fate for him nowadays — until his name popped up unexpectedly during my recent research project on debates over Sunday baseball. In Lawrence Ritter’s 1966 oral history of the sport’s early decades, former Detroit Tiger outfielder Sam Crawford asked Ritter,
Why does a young fellow like you want to spend his time on something like that? Do you remember what Robert Ingersoll used to say? “Let the dead past bury its dead.” That’s what he used to say. Robert Ingersoll, remember him? A great man. I always admired him…. He was supposed to be an atheist, but he wasn’t really. More a skeptic, more an agnostic, than an atheist.1
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All of which made me exceptionally curious to read Phil Christman’s most recent article in The Christian Century, which starts with John Updike ending one of his novels (In the Beauty of the Lilies, I think) with a Christian minister losing his faith in the length of time it takes him to read one sentence from Ingersoll’s collected works. “This is absurd, of course,” writes Christman, “but the scene gives some idea of the renown and infamy that once attached to the name of the 19th-century orator, lawyer, and agnostic. This was a man so famous a Texas town named itself after him, and so unpopular among most of the faithful that that same town renamed itself after one particularly fervid Christian revival.”
