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  • Village Atheists: How America's Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation by Leigh Eric Schmidt
  • Malcolm D. Magee
Village Atheists: How America's Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation. by Leigh Eric Schmidt. (Princeton and Woodstock, Eng. Princeton University Press 2016. Pp. xxii, 337. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-16864-7.

The forgotten stepchildren of the Great Awakening are America's skeptics and unbelievers. Once average citizens realized they had a right to choose which church to attend and how to worship God, they also grasped that they had the right to choose to not believe. While the vast majority of the new country's population continued to believe and created an Americanized evangelical version of Christianity, a small and often vocal minority chose to exercise their right to not believe. In time, this faction created a distinctly American version of atheism, one that added a great deal of original thought to that of European freethinkers. In his book Village Atheists: How America's Unbelievers Made Their Way in a Godly Nation, Leigh Eric Schmidt gives these people their rightful voice in the history of American religion.

While the scope of this book reaches from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, from Thomas Paine to Christopher Hitchens, the bulk of the book focuses on mostly forgotten nineteenth-century skeptics. The introduction and extended epilogue are largely reserved for the analysis of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. The book is well researched, and Schmidt has extensively examined sources that have not been analyzed in any depth before. The author's analysis of the life and work of the cartoonist Watson Heston will be of particular interest to those who study cartoon images as material history. The examination of Heston's cartoons is worth the price of the book alone, but it is not the only exceptional feature of this work. The people whom Schmidt explores range from the better-known Robert Green Ingersoll to less well known subjects such as Samuel Porter Putnam, Charles B. Reynolds, the fascinating ex-Quaker Elmina Drake Slenker, and others.

Modern American culture, our understanding of the Constitution, and American religion itself would look much different had these brave gadflies not done their unpopular work. Always a minority with little, if any, political clout, these skeptics and atheists nonetheless crusaded for what they felt was just in a truly democratic republic. Their ongoing battles with the moral powers-that-be are a fascinating and timely theme of this book. Of particular note are the common confrontations between many of these people and Anthony Comstock, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Comstock's name became synonymous with censorship and prudery, and his use of the postal service to entrap and prosecute freethinkers and others aroused the ire of many civil libertarians. The United States would be much different without these battles. Religious people can thank these skeptics and atheists for some of the freedoms they now enjoy, as the civil liberties that skeptics fought for spilled over to protect other unpopular religious minorities.

The book is well organized and well written. It would be good for both popular and scholarly audiences. Schmidt has done exhaustive research, and the endnotes are often as interesting as the text itself. The book is a timely companion to the study of American religion as well as the history of American civil rights. A 2014 Pew Research Center study shows that while the number of atheists in the United States has increased, atheists remain a very small [End Page 966] minority. Nevertheless, they are an integral part of the American religious landscape, and they have managed to do plenty in the nation despite their small numbers. Schmidt's book is a refreshing read and will add a great degree to our understanding of this often ignored, more often maligned, group.

Malcolm D. Magee
Grand Canyon University
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