While there are books that document Mill's little-known preoccupation with religion and God in his writings, such as Sell's Mill on God: The Pervasiveness and Elusiveness of Mill's Religious Thought (Ashgate, 2004), Timothy Larsen's work is the first “religious” biography of Mill, chronicling how religious believers and theological writings impacted his life, appreciation for religion, and his own religious views. Larsen relies on a variety of sources—Mill biographies, Mill's published writings and correspondence, secondary sources on Mill's view of religion, and nineteenth-century theological and philosophical writers on religion who influenced Mill—in producing an engaging and detailed account of Mill's life and views on religion, particularly Christianity.
Some of Larsen's claims about Mill's view of religion and own religious beliefs are accurate and properly challenge received scholarly opinion about Mill's religious views, yet others are overstated, misleading, or neglect strong countervailing evidence. Larsen rightly argues that Mill was preoccupied with religious questions throughout his life, that he had several close religious friends who educated him about organized religion, that he had a long-standing sympathy for the value of enlightened forms of religious belief and for the nobility of Jesus's moral teachings, that his criticisms of organized religion were not meant to eliminate it but to reform or purify it, that Mill was not an atheist, and that it is ultimately difficult to label Mill's own religious identity.
Nevertheless, Larsen also makes some problematic claims, such as Mill “viewed religion as a necessary feature for human flourishing” (viii), that throughout “his whole mature life, Mill was a prophet of God's goodness” (201), that Mill “wanted to believe in God and affirmed that such a belief is beneficial” (206), and that Mill saw himself as a Christian.
Larsen's spiritual biography of Mill proceeds chronologically, and he cleverly begins each chapter with an apt biblical quotation. His chapters are a mix of informative biographical details of Mill and of the religious beliefs of his family, friends, acquaintances, and professional relationships, summaries of some of the main ideas, arguments and religious themes in Mill's major writings and correspondence, accounts of laudatory reactions of high profile religious thinkers to Mill's writings like The System of Logic and On Liberty, and clear expositions of the theological views and arguments relevant to Mill's engagement with organized religion.
One of the virtues of the book is that Larsen provides illuminating and little-known information about Mill's exposure to organized religion through the religious sentiments and theological views of family members, friends, his wife Harriet Taylor, and his step-daughter, Helen. In this way, Larsen is right that religion “impinged” on Mill, and Larsen's lively and fascinating account of these relationships is perhaps the novel contribution of the book.
Another virtue is Larsen's extensive documentation of the value of enlightened religion in Mill's thought and how his sympathy explained what critics thought were dissembling comments about Christianity in his published writings, such as the claims that utilitarian morality is compatible with Christian revelation and that the Golden Rule reflects the complete spirit of utilitarianism.
Nonetheless, Larsen makes some overstated or misleading claims about Mill's own religious views and his philosophy of religion. He states that Mill “viewed religion as a necessary feature for human flourishing,” but without clearly defining the meaning of “religion”—and Larsen strangely does not give Mill's definition of it—this claim is either mistaken or not properly qualified. If “religion” means belief in supernatural realities like a deity, then Mill most certainly did not believe that religion was necessary for human flourishing since those devoted to the improvement of their character and of the human race can live the highest life. If “religion” means, as it did for Mill, “the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognized as of the highest excellence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of desire” (Utility of Religion), then “religion” is necessary in life but stands for any ideal object, such as the human species, that inspires the moral life and personal and social improvement. Ultimately, Mill's view of the need for religion can be summed up as follows: improve yourself and society, and if you need the motivation to do so, it is legitimate to hope in supernatural realities that are consistent with reason and moral feelings.
Larsen's claim that Mill was “a prophet of God's goodness” needs qualification, too, since Mill's view was that if there is a divine architect, then it is good; Larsen's analysis too often leaves the impression that, for Mill, God probably exists, but the evidence for Mill is only analogical and one of the weaker forms of inductive evidence. Larsen also problematically claims that Mill “rightly” thought himself a Christian based on a single, and polemical, passage in a letter to Holyoake regarding Mill's understanding of Jesus. Presumably, virtually all Christian “mainline denominations” (210) in Mill's day would not have accepted someone as “Christian” who admired Jesus's moral teachings but thought they were vague and not the complete moral truth, who did not believe that Jesus was divine, who did not believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, who did not believe in God's omnipotence, and who contended that one could entirely do away with the belief in a supernatural deity and live a perfectly fulfilled life.
What Larsen fails to examine fully, or discuss at all, shows some of the tendentiousness in his approach to understanding Mill. Larsen does not fully and forcefully explain Mill's skeptical account of revelation and the implications for Christian faith. More tellingly, Larsen completely neglects Mill's defense of the design argument in Theism, which is the entire basis for the rational hope in a good, but limited in power, deity. Given the now overwhelming evidence against the design argument and for evolution, which Mill would assuredly affirm, Mill's defense of theism collapses, and with it, any rational basis to hope that Jesus's life was divinely commissioned. What remains for the hope of theism is an appeal to revelation, of which Mill, like Hume, was very skeptical.
Finally, Larsen's attempt, like others, to identify Mill's own religious stance is precarious since Mill never directly states his views, and there is a difference between Mill's philosophy of religion espoused in the Three Essays and Mill's own religious convictions. I do not think we can reliably know Mill's own imaginative supernatural hopes, but if there are any, a top contender would be an afterlife reunion with his beloved wife, Harriet.
