From the 1881 founding statement of the American magazine Freethinker: “The Freethinker is an anti-Christian organ, and must therefore be chiefly aggressive. It will wage relentless war against superstition in general, and against Christian superstition in particular. It will do its utmost to employ the resources of science, scholarship, philosophy, and ethics against the claim that the Bible is a divine revelation; and it will not hesitate to use for the same purpose the weapons of ridicule and sarcasm that can be borrowed from the arsenal of common sense.”
Not that I find this particularly appealing. But it offers a useful illustration of how easily we misread historical context.
We tend to imagine that, in some earlier era, America was a Christian country and that these aggressive atheists gradually destroyed that inheritance. The opposite is true. Freethinker began publication at a time when the number of Christian congregations and houses of worship was growing, the number of believers was rising, Christianity was becoming increasingly visible in public life, and its political influence was expanding. That trend continued for decades, regardless of how aggressively some embarrassing, backward reactionaries expressed themselves in one atheist publication or another.
In short, one could say that the atheists of the time were defending their normal world against Bible-thumping progressives. Which side of that was conservative?
As Ivo Budil writes: “Conservatism should be grounded in the study of history, and history teaches us how transient empires are—but also ideas and values.”
And Hampl’s addendum: The problem with contemporary progressivism is not that it disrupts our ideas about how life should be lived. We would simply have to come to terms with that. The problem is that it is incompatible with a stable and happy life.