By G. Corwin Stoppel
Robert “Bob” Ingersoll died just before the 20th century started and his name soon slipped into obscurity. Like his father, Congregationalist Rev. Robert Ingersoll, he was a target and magnet because of his outspoken and frequently unpopular views.
His father, a staunch abolitionist and strict Calvinist, was frequently dismissed from his pulpit, forcing the family to move every few years. They were pushed west from New York to Ohio to Illinois to eventually Wisconsin. He returned to Illinois where he died when his son was nine years old.
The crux of the tension between the cleric and his parishes was Ingersoll’s liberal social ideas and personal high standards. His congregations could not always understand this and, as is often the case in such situation, the easiest thing to do was give him the boot. It is similar to when a sports team of high-paid players can’t pull things together, so the owners fire the manager and/or coaches.
The unjust treatment of his father turned the son against Calvinism, and in time he considered himself a Deist. God existed but took no interest in the lives of mortals, and we were expected to learn, understand and obey the laws of nature.
Young Ingersoll disagreed with the great number of clergy who took it upon themselves to control people’s lives and be final arbiters of what they could say or do. It was one thing to hold those beliefs, as many did; quite another so speak them. Young Ingersoll took it one step further when he began giving lectures across the country.
Like Thomas Paine a century before him, he rebelled against any doctrine, whether religious, economic, political or anything else that tried to restrain the free exchange of ideas.
To the orthodoxy’s way of thinking, doctrine was built around an individual who came up with an idea, persuaded two or three others to agree with him, then get a group to sign off on it. After that, anyone who disagreed with them and their doctrine was the enemy. It did not matter if it was right or not. Once it was doctrinal that ended the discussion.
Many clergy and churches believed young Ingersoll was such a threat to Christianity they warned their members that anyone attending one of his lectures might be excommunicated. College presidents and deans warned students that anyone attending a lecture or espousing his ideas would be expelled. For some that type of a threat was catnip. Library and school boards worked hard to keep Ingersoll’s books off the shelves and bury his ideas.
Not everyone joined ranks with Ingersoll’s opponents. Col. George Healy, one of the earliest pioneers in my hometown, thumbed his nose at the free thinker’s enemies in 1895 when he donated $5,000 to the public library in return for agreeing no book would be excluded because of its contents unless it was immoral. Healy went on to specify books by Ingersoll and Paine were to be included in the collection and made available to the public.
It created quite the uproar and gave the local clergy a new topic for their Sunday sermons. It kept the city council so busy for a while they did not have time to come up with new ideas for taxes.
There is nothing new about battles of ideas. Today, we call it cancel culture. Individuals or groups who do not hold the “right” ideas or use the “right” speech as defined by another group supposedly need to be shamed, shunned and kept from expressing their ideas.
Others take it a step further, trying to deny these offenders’ livelihoods and intimidate their acquaintances till they drop that person.
It gets even worse when persons are expected to “virtue signal” to show they are going along with the “right” ideas and’ group. To not virtue signal is tantamount to being with the high school students not invited to have lunch at the cool kids’ table. In fact, it is sufficient to be permanently banned and treated as an object of ridicule and scorn.
There is no grace or tolerance in such behavior. It also means that those who do the cancelling can take pride they have taken the moral high road.
The only problem with that is there are no guardrails up there in the stratosphere of being a superior person hurtling along that road. They’ll either run off the rails or in our digital age someone will dig up dirt and knock them off.
It has always been that way. French republicans who got rid of the king and queen soon found themselves on the guillotine. Those who survived were put down by Napoleon, who, in turn met his Waterloo.
The Bolsheviks of the early Russian Revolution ended up being executed or handed a one-way rail ticket to Siberia. All had the “wrong” ideas or said the “wrong” things.
I cannot think of any topic so dangerous it cannot be rationally considered and discussed. “Rationally” is the operative word here because it keeps doctrine at bay and discussion open.
The classical example of cancelling discussion and debate was when Galileo suggested that the earth was not the center of the universe but revolved around the sun instead. The Vatican hit the ceiling so hard they could have put in a new skylight.
Preventing discussion of different ideas and opinions will put us right back into the dark ages. It almost seems that is the intention of some individuals and groups. It is a shame because there is always so more to learn about the world and ourselves.