What was golden about the “golden age” of American irreligion?Footnote 1 In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, new formulations of atheism became more widely articulable,Footnote 2 expanding freethought networks became increasingly visible,Footnote 3 and a sense of “secular triumphalism” suffused the irreligious ranks.Footnote 4 Yet, law and stigma still limited irreligionists’ civic and social participation, and their triumphalism was rightly tinged with trepidation.Footnote 5 Accordingly, Leigh Eric Schmidt's recent work has persuasively dispensed with counter-posed metanarratives of American irreligion involving either inexorable advance or unmitigated marginalization, offering instead a contentious tangle of interdependent faith and unfaith.Footnote 6 Set in the same space between competing metanarratives, this paper nonetheless asks what social stigmas irreligion may have dislodged during its late nineteenth-century era of ambivalent optimism. In answer, it offers a case study in the mechanics of de-marginalization that illuminates one of American irreligion's many protracted entanglements with Christianity. With their legal battles barely begun, and their social standing still strikingly unsettled, this paper argues that late-century irreligionists mimed and subverted the deathbed strategies of their Christian detractors to convince a skeptical American audience to concede the contested sincerity of their disbelief. A large corpus of deathbed presentations, recovered here, provide a visceral sense of what was at stake for irreligionists and a vivid picture of their entanglement in a traditionally Christian procedure, all bound up in a polemical prioritization of incendiary inner states.
When Courtland Palmer died on July 23, 1888, the stakes and the procedure were readily apparent. He had been a genteel radical, Comtean positivist, and founder of a notable freethought debating society.Footnote 7 The New York Sun reported that Palmer was calm, philanthropic, and expressive in his final moments. His last words were: “The general impression is that free thinkers are afraid of death. I want you one and all to tell the whole world that you have seen a free thinker die without the least fear.”Footnote 8 The Washington Post proclaimed Palmer's death “another of the refutations of the assertion that the deathbed of an unbeliever is an agonizing one.” The Post then stressed the social payoff of presenting a disbeliever dying without fear or pain, and with disbelief intact: “No one who reads that wonderfully impressive account of Mr. Palmer's death . . . can doubt now that he was sincere in the views which he held.”Footnote 9
Widely understood questions regarding not only the tenability, but the sincerity of disbelief had preceded Palmer to his deathbed. And the national papers suggested that what Palmer said and did on his deathbed persuasively answered the questions. Doubtless, accounts of nineteenth-century deaths like Palmer's were sometimes inaccurate, sometimes accurate, and always useful. This paper attends entirely to their usefulness. It does not locate belief or sincerity. Rather it tracks the popular theorization of belief and sincerity promoted by the massive production and circulation of deathbed accounts. Such production and circulation primed and structured the event and eventuality of death as an immanent occasion for debating the composition of dis/belief and in/sincerity and their relationship to lived ir/religion. This paper pivots accordingly toward “the strange social politics of [dis/belief's] invocation” and the publicly available work that went into blurring and/or brightening the lines between belief and disbelief, sincerity and insincerity.Footnote 10 Scholars have yet to examine how American irreligionists got the deathbedFootnote 11 to do that kind of work for them.
Scholars have, in contrast, extensively examined how America's Christians put the deathbed to work.Footnote 12 But even here they have not reckoned with the full range of such deployments.Footnote 13 The good death needed its confirming counterpart—the infidel deathbed—but that counterpart worked to deride irreligionists as insincere, not just to establish irreligion as ultimately untenable. Certainly, the infidel deathbed demonstrated, for Christians, that every variety of disbelief—whether delusion, indifference, skepticism, or stupidity—collapsed in the confrontation with death, confirming that only belief was ultimately tenable. And certainly, per a given logic, sincere delusion, indifference, skepticism, and stupidity, on the one hand, and irreligious imposture, on the other, were mutually exclusive. In many infidel deathbed narratives, that logic even held up—whether in demonstration of unitary sincerity or unitary insincerity. But more narratives claimed that inner infidelity was mixed and multiple, with degrees and kinds of dis/belief and in/sincerity competing for primacy over time. These narratives mapped the mixtures and multiplicity, and then split the difference between sincere disbelief (dissolved by death) and insincere disbelief (denuded by death). Enough narratives split the difference for the storied infidel deathbed to cumulatively taint disbelief with duplicity. Ground-level Christian derision and irreligious reaction reflected that cumulative effect.
Declaring disbelief insincere was common enough in America's long nineteenth century. As, indeed, was decrying the insincerity of belief. Christians claimed infidels feigned disbelief to rationalize sin or gain notoriety.Footnote 14 Skeptics claimed Christians feigned belief to maintain social order and political power.Footnote 15 Christians and skeptics both worried that the other's claims might be true,Footnote 16 while economic and social dislocations, proliferating religious radicals, and evolving religious freedom jurisprudence shaped the high stakes involved in those claims over time.Footnote 17 The slippage between lived irreligion and believed irreligion was fraught territory, surveyed with various tools. And for over a century, the deathbed figured prominently as one of those tools—invested with considerable power to test and prove dis/belief and in/sincerity. Christians initiated the investing, and irreligionists eventually cashed out.
With a broad and deep enough sample, a rough periodization of this process is possible.Footnote 18 American Christian production and circulation of infidel deathbed narratives rose from the 1820s through the 1840s, held steady through the 1870s, and then declined for the next three decades. By the first decade of the twentieth century, American Christians shared less agreement and less enthusiasm regarding what the deathbed could demonstrate about disbelief. And though Christian stories about dying disbelievers echoed and multiplied into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they more often lacked mainstream purchase and less often appeared in published form.
This paper argues that the decline was due, in large part, to irreligionists’ presentations of their own deaths. In early and mid-nineteenth-century America, irreligionists often argued that the deathbed had no power to prove anything about the tenability or sincerity of dis/belief because the physical and mental dissolution preceding death made last words and acts impossible to interpret. But increasingly through the second half of the century, rather than rejecting the deathbed's interpretability altogether, irreligionists selectively appropriated the deathbed's accrued power to prove sincerity. Across the country, they developed a distinctively ordered form of irreligious dying, prolifically presenting counter-narratives of their own deaths to prove the uniform sincerity of their disbelief. These efforts peaked from the late 1870s through the 1890s, correlating to the lock-step decline in Christian production and circulation of infidel deathbed narratives. Moreover, late-century Christians increasingly came to echo and affirm the idioms of irreligionists’ own deathbed presentations. Causation is complex, but amid other major transformations in American society, a recognizable network of irreligious dying helped neutralize what had been, for nineteenth-century Christians, one of the most compelling ways to discount disbelief and deride disbelievers. Along the way, the deathbed—mimed and subverted—figured unexpectedly in the identity and interests of American irreligion.
I. Rise of the Infidel Deathbed: Famous Figures
The infidel deathbed had ancient precedents, but famous deaths in Reformation and Enlightenment Europe configured its modern forms.Footnote 19 All of Europe watched when Luther died in 1546. In response to Catholic propaganda, Protestants produced a flood of pamphlets and reproductions of Luther's death mask to prove that he had died well.Footnote 20 His death helped them defend, primarily, the tenability of disbelief in Catholic dogma. In 1677, Pierre Bayle reported the peaceful death of Spinoza. But unsympathetic witnesses were sparse, so critics suspected that some doubt or duplicity had been susceptible to embarrassing exposure in extremis.Footnote 21 Spinoza's death helped them claim, primarily, that heretics were usually hiding something. A century later, Hume and Voltaire died two years apart. Per Adam Smith's account, the dying Hume was scandalously jocular.Footnote 22 Voltaire had more to lose in Catholic France—not least a decent burial, which cost him a minimal deathbed concession of deference to the church. He presumably conceded enough to secure such a burial, but not enough to indisputably discredit his philosophe friends.Footnote 23 While authoritative accounts of Hume's nonchalance sometimes flustered believers, and ambiguous accounts of Voltaire's concession often encouraged them, in truth, both proved amenable to the purposes of American Christians.Footnote 24
But neither generated as much narrative profusion as did Thomas Paine, whom American Christians came to consider the patron saint of surreptitious belief. The Norfolk County native died on the morning of June 8, 1809, in Greenwich Village. That he “died an infidel is undisputed,” writes Thomas W. Lequeur, “Whether he suffered spiritual anguish in his last days as a consequence was disputed for more than a century.”Footnote 25 Disputes about deathbed anguish, according to this common account, were disputes about disbelief's tenability—that is, the veracity, coherence, and strength of irreligion itself as a set of propositions—the presumption of the disputants being that, if disbelievers died in anguish, then death had proven something about the ultimate deficiency of (deluded, indifferent, skeptical, and/or stupid) disbelief, albeit sincerely acquired. True enough, but the truism about deathbed tests of tenability nonetheless misses the additional work done by the tests themselves. Proving disbelief's deficiency pressed the question of its previous sincerity. Tests of tenability tended to circle back and interrogate the slippage between lived irreligion and believed irreligion. As a measure of change over time, dying an infidel in early nineteenth-century America did not yet mean dying a sincerely disbelieving infidel. The latter proposition was interrogated through accounts of deathbed anguish and deficient disbelief.
One of the earliest examples—and the most relentlessly circulated by Christians for the next seven decades—was the account of Paine's physician, Dr. James R. Manley. It was solicited and printed by James Cheetham, Paine's former friend and hostile biographer, within months of Paine's death. “Mr. Paine professed to be above the fear of death,” Manley wrote. But for the last two weeks of Paine's life, he “would call out during his paroxysms of distress, without intermission, ‘O Lord help me, God help me, Jesus Christ help me, O Lord help me,’ etc.” Paine nonetheless insisted, to the end, that he disbelieved, and ultimately died an infidel. Manley's explanation for this otherwise “unaccountable” behavior was Paine's “excessive pride of opinion, consummate vanity, and inordinate self-love.” “Had not Thomas Paine been such a distinguished infidel,” Manley concluded, “he would have left less equivocal evidences of a change of opinion.”Footnote 26 Manley's account split the difference between erstwhile disbelief and insincere disbelief. Paine's fear and suffering meant his final profession was probably a prideful pretense, but this final pretense also tainted his previous skepticism. How far back had pride prevented a full break from irreligion?
Christian answers to that question were prolific. One account had Paine telling a deathbed confidante that many times in the past “when searching the New Testament for matter to cavil at, he was convinced of its excellency, that he was almost ready to abandon his infidel labor, and become a christian. But the applause of his admirers urged him on.”Footnote 27 By mid-century, narrative mappings of Paine's multiplex inner infidelity followed a familiar form. Brash skepticism and awful ignorance had produced his popular screeds, which, in sober and self-reflective moments, he had deeply regretted. More, “he was led . . . to doubt” and “could not believe his own trash.”Footnote 28 But his sinful passions and craving for notoriety kept him from renouncing his infidelity. Thus when the deathbed called forth the full fury of his suppressed conscience, it also re-called, in Christian narratives, the insincerity of his decades-long disbelief. Death collapsed disbelief, demonstrating its ultimate deficiency, but death also collapsed past and present, demonstrating disbelief's proximate insincerity. In American deathbed narratives, the infidel's agonized conscience was often a time capsule of irreligious imposture.
These narratives drew from a deep well of transatlantic print. For example, in 1693, London publisher John Dunton printed six editions and over thirty thousand copies of The Second Spira: Being a Fearful Example of An Atheist Who Had Apostatized from the Christian Religion, and Dyed in Despair at Westminster. . . . Footnote 29 Multiple editions were published in Boston the same year.Footnote 30 Many more editions and adaptations were published throughout Europe and New England for the next century.Footnote 31 With the rise of religious print in the early national period, the narrative took on new life (and new details).Footnote 32 It appeared in dozens of periodicals.Footnote 33 It fueled college revivals.Footnote 34 It provided the substance of sermons.Footnote 35 It purportedly turned infidels into ministers.Footnote 36 And it was endlessly adapted and circulated by tract societies and other voluntary associations.Footnote 37 The Second Spira’s textual trail was emblematic of antebellum American print culture generally, which continuously “adapted and altered both single texts and entire genres” from Europe.Footnote 38 But more importantly, transatlantic texts like The Second Spira provided ready templates and raw material—accounts of deathbed agonies through which Americans could interrogate irreligious sincerity.
II. Rise of the Infidel Deathbed: Local Figures
Death itself provided another kind of raw material. In contrast to many European countries, mortality rates in America actually rose from the 1790s until the 1850s, and did not begin their long-term decline until the 1880s.Footnote 39 Death was not only prevalent, it was ritually intimate. Scholars have detailed the quotidian care with which Americans personally prepared and interred their dead prior to the post-Civil War emergency of funerary industries.Footnote 40 Moreover, death in daily life gave grist to cultural cogitations. Antebellum arts and letters dwelt almost obsessively on the theme.Footnote 41 Most importantly, American Protestants were preoccupied with it. When E. Brooks Holifield examined the diaries and letters of forty-four Protestant (Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Baptist, Methodist, Unitarian, and Quaker) children, aged nine to sixteen, between 1770 and 1861, he found that “no single theme appeared as frequently as death.” Children “worried about it, tried to explain it, and encountered it through the demise of their loved ones.” Their dwelling on death may be a telling measure of early American Protestantism's “core” concerns, Holifield suggests, because it “reveal[s] what adults thought were the essentials that had to be transmitted to the next generation.”Footnote 42
Protestants dealt with the dilemmas posed so prevalently by death through traditions of holy dying, or, the good death. The dilemmas they felt most deeply were uncertainties about salvation (whether Calvinist or Arminian) and social ties. Death separated loved ones, and then the boundary between heaven and hell threatened to make the separation experientially endless. (This is why some discontents expressed a preference for non-existence, or the company of their loved ones in hell, rather than separation from their loved ones in heaven.Footnote 43 ) But, for many American Christians, eschatology began on the deathbed; the veil between this world and the next began to part, and divine presence broke in, however partially. So a dying person's peace and joy in the presence of the divine could presage their heavenly destination. Done right, holy dying could also draw surrounding loved ones into the divine presence permeating the deathbed and toward the same heavenly destination, reassuring them in their hope of reunion. Archetypes of holy dying, like Helena Davis of Macon, Georgia, could “smile in the very face of Death,” “express . . . unshaken reliance” on Christ, “tenderly exhort” on-looking loved ones, and assure them that death would “separate them but for a short period.”Footnote 44 As a solution to the uncertainties of salvation and separation, traditions of holy dying did not satisfy everyone—most notably numerous Protestant converts to Mormonism and Spiritualism.Footnote 45 Nor did everyone fully share the uncertainties the traditions addressed—most notably Universalists and Catholics. Yet, as Drew Gilpin Faust has argued, widespread efforts to reconstruct the traditions during the Civil War, and to ritualize the deaths of soldiers at a distance from their home communities, demonstrates how deeply the traditions had come to matter to most American Christians.Footnote 46
As a foil for holy dying, infidel deathbed narratives shored up the assurances Christians derived from these traditions. But as a polemical platform, the infidel deathbed narratives went much further. Infidels did not just die in the absence of assurance, they died in the approaching presence of God, and their attendant agony often revealed not only the insufficiency, but the insincerity of their disbelief. Thus, even the earliest American narratives commonly called the deathbed “a detector of the heart” but also a “detector of . . . imposition” in “that honest hour.”Footnote 47 When emphasizing the latter, Christians claimed the deathbed could “prove,” that ir/religionists “really believe [only] what they can abide by at that ‘honest hour.’”Footnote 48
But what was it, exactly, that dying infidels could not “abide by” and therefore did not “really” disbelieve? Infidelity meant many things to many Americans, and often many things at once. Throughout the nineteenth century, the category intertwined sexual subversion and enlightened skepticism and conflated both with various heterodoxies and heresies.Footnote 49 Early infidel deathbed narratives accordingly coded various shades of sexual and theistic deviance as irreligion. But with every decade, more infidel deathbed narrators dealt more narrowly with technical atheism and materialism, while drawing rhetorical strength from the genre's previously wider purview. They did so well ahead of irreligion's golden-age visibility in the 1880s. Already in the 1830s, many dying infidels in Christian narratives professed anticipation of “eternal sleep” rather than a deistic afterlife or unorthodox salvation scheme.Footnote 50 By the 1840s, a full majority denied any post-mortal existence. And by the 1860s, most deathbed exegetes dealt with outright disbelief in deity, even when they reused stories of long-dead theistic infidels to do so.
Whatever the object of disbelief, the narrative arc could very well land on disbelief's deficiency without interrogating its sincerity. Death, in such narratives, forced surprising and destabilizing revelations on earnest infidels. “What is death?” one atheist asked in agony; “‘tis but a release from this miserable world—there is no hell,—I have proved it—there is no hell—but if there is—Oh God! . . . The flames of hell torture [my] sight even in the hour of death.’”Footnote 51 And yet, other familiar narrative forms made their mark on the entire genre. Aspiring disbelievers often came to question their own sincerity as death cast their disbelief in a different light. I “labored to persuade” myself, recalled one dying heretic: “I rather wished [irreligion] was true, than believed it to be true.”Footnote 52 Conversely, even those who sincerely attempted disbelief often became insincere when death dissolved their attempt and they persisted in their profession. Mary, a nineteen-year-old Northeasterner, had trustingly taken up her family's atheism. As death neared, her disbelief crumbled, but out of face-saving loyalty, and without a shred of real conviction, she cursed “the Nazarene” and declared her disbelief in God and the Bible with her dying breath.Footnote 53
Ultimately deathbed agony provided richly ambiguous material for interrogating irreligious sincerity. In an 1841 sermon delivered in a Methodist chapel in Baltimore, the Reverend Richard Fuller reportedly described a man in his region who had been “a free thinker and a free liver.” Setting up the slippage between these two modes of irreligion, Fuller said that the gentleman “professed to disbelieve in religion and often opposed and ridiculed it,” and spent his wealth “freely in pursuit of pleasure.” Summoned to this man's home one night, and finding him “so near death that no time was to be lost in conversing with him,” Fuller “inquired what had been his real views and feelings in regard to Christianity—whether he had indeed been as unbelieving and indifferent as he professed to be.” Fuller
saw by the workings of the dying man's countenance, that his mind labored intensely; and wishing to bring him to some definite point, he asked “Have you ever had sufficient belief in the Bible and felt so much fear of God as to lead you to pray to him?” “Sir,” replied he, “do you see that woman?” pointing to his wife, who was at his bedside in tears of agony—“many a time have I come home at a late hour, and heard her engaged in prayer in her own room; and I have gone in and commanded her to cease and rise from her knees, for I would have no praying in my house; and then I have left the room rushed into another, bolted the door, and thrown myself upon my face, exclaiming, ‘O God, have mercy upon me.’” “Thus,” said Mr. F[uller], “died that infidel.”Footnote 54
Here the test of disbelief's tenability limned the interrogation of its sincerity. The narrative arc landed on the latter. Disbelief dissolved, but its dissolution left standing monuments of double-mindedness and dishonesty starkly visible. The man died an infidel, but not sincerely disbelieving.
Prominently featuring such figures, American infidel deathbed narratives cumulatively tainted disbelief with duplicity. Some of the more telling indicators of the taint emerged in one of antebellum America's most spectacular literary and scriptural productions. Published in April 1830, the Book of Mormon primarily recounts roughly a thousand years of sacred history in the Americas, from 600 b.c. to a.d. 400. Three disparate disbelievers make major appearances within the proto-Christian civilization that dominates the Book of Mormon narrative. Nehor preaches universal salvation, Sherem denies Christ and Christian prophecy, and Korihor adds an outright denial of the existence of God. The Korihor narrative dwells at length on the legal distinction between crime (punishable) and belief (protected). Korihor takes advantage of the latter to preach irreligion, and leads his listeners into sexual sin—a sequence blasphemy jurisprudence was preoccupied with preventing in antebellum America.Footnote 55 During a confrontation with the chief priest, God strikes Korihor dumb, which quickly leads to his death. But before it does, Korihor communicates in writing that all along he “knew that there was a god.” The devil enticed him, and he preached irreligion because it pleased “the carnal mind” and brought him popularity. Sherem and Nehor similarly reveal the tenuousness and insincerity of their disbelief before dying ignominious deaths.Footnote 56 The Mormon scripture describes itself as both ancient history and modern commentary, with angels, visions, and artifacts bending time in both directions. Accordingly, its narrative content spoke with and to the pervasive logic of the infidel deathbed in nineteenth-century America and signaled a widespread interrogation of irreligious sincerity.
Such interrogation was commonly conducted in the pulpit and in the pews. Protestants, in particular, questioned the sincerity of numerous persons—Mormons, Catholics, other Protestants—but especially irreligionists. They did so reflexively as a reverberation of their originating reaction against sacramentalism.Footnote 57 They did so proactively to reify the fragile category of religion in a disestablishing polity.Footnote 58 The commonness of the interrogation only highlights the instrumental importance of the infidel deathbed. High stakes demanded deft instruments that could prove the in/sincerity Christians suspected. Christians invested few instruments with more power to do so than the deathbed. Charles Finney, among others, offered quintessential mid-century statements to that effect: “Place the skeptic on his dying bed, let a solemn hour arrive, and the inner convictions of his heart be revealed, and he knows of at least one man who is a Christian. . . . And yet you cannot suppose that he has this moment learned a lesson he never knew before. No, he knew just as much before; an honest hour has brought the inner convictions of his soul to light. Infidels generally know more than they have honesty enough to admit.”Footnote 59 Here, the deathbed was credited with power to denude insincerity, not merely dissolve untenable disbelief. While we know Christians commonly claimed infidels “adopted their views as a cloak” for sin and self-aggrandizement, what would come to matter more to irreligionists was that Christians construed the deathbed as a tool that could uniquely reveal and remove that cloak.Footnote 60
None of this is to deny the apologetic purposes of infidel deathbed narratives. The deathbed was straightforwardly designed, by Christians, to demonstrate that only belief was ultimately tenable. Thus the deathbed agonies that animated interrogations of irreligious sincerity were also exhibited as empirical evidences of Christian truth claims. Traditionally, the primary external “Christian evidences” had been prophecies and miracles, fulfilled and attested in and through the Bible and Christian history.Footnote 61 In an era when these mattered more than they ever had or ever have since, antebellum Christians talked about the infidel deathbed in the same boisterous Baconian terms. They systematically gathered observable deathbed data and inducted the general truthfulness of Christian eschatology. This was often a mundane statistical proof: believers died peacefully more often than disbelievers did. But infidel deathbeds also brought down revelation. In the liminal space between heaven and hell, they provided empirical evidence of both.
This peculiar union of supernaturalism and empiricism had Puritan precedents. Lockean empiricists like Cotton Mather and Experience Mayhew had seen dying women, children, and Indians as tabulae rasae. As death pressed them against the porous border between time and eternity, supernatural sensory data left measurable impressions from heaven, which Puritan deathbed narratives dutifully recorded.Footnote 62 Nineteenth-century infidel deathbed narrators shared the impulse but reconfigured the revelation; the realities of hell and the wrath of an imminent Judge broke into the visible world through the deathbed agonies of disbelievers. Thus, deathbeds could be for American Christians what mountains had been for biblical prophets. Dying infidels became stone tablets inscribed by the hand of God.Footnote 63
This type of infidel deathbed evidentialism culminated in two widely-published compilations. In 1851, Davis Wasgatt Clark (1812–1871), future Methodist Episcopal bishop (1864), published Death-Bed Scenes, which went through nine printings in the next twenty years, and was adapted in diverse devotional literature.Footnote 64 And in 1853, Osmon C. Baker (1812–1871), a Methodist Episcopal bishop at the time, published The Last Witness, which went through three more printings in the next thirty years.Footnote 65 Clark's compilation was four times larger—nearly six hundred pages—and more influential. It began with an extended exposition on deathbed revelation: “The dying linger for a moment upon the confines of both worlds; and why may they not, when just leaving the one, catch some glimpses of the other.” For Clarke, as for a wide swathe of American Christians, infidel deathbeds were consequently part of “‘the portable evidence of Christianity.’”Footnote 66
As both polemic and apologetic, then, infidel deathbed narratives formed a persuasive package for most antebellum American Christians. Their appeal consequently crossed denominational and regional lines. In the post-1840 world of industrial print, a given narrative usually circulated through myriad outlets in the North, South, and West.Footnote 67 By 1870–1871, American Christians were printing 400 newspapers, and most branches of their massive print complex had long been suffused with stories about dying disbelievers.Footnote 68 Moreover, raconteurs circulated a malleable repertoire of infidel deathbed narratives far beyond Christian print. In 1856, a New York Presbyterian named Caroline Cowles Richards recorded a typical, well-received contribution to a weeknight prayer meeting: a young man had “told the story of Ethan Allen, the infidel, who was dying, and his daughter asked him whose religion she should live by, his or her mother's, and he said, ‘Your mother's, my daughter, your mother's.’”Footnote 69
A few antebellum Christians did qualify, in various ways, the implications of these stories. Aware that not all Christians died well and not all irreligionists died in agony, some softened the rhetoric without retracting the narratives. These Christians taxonomically acknowledged and analyzed the exceptions in order to softly affirm the rule: infidels basically died relatively poorly.Footnote 70 Others did retract the narratives, printing cautions and critiques about demonstrably dubious ones. For example, orthodox but text-critical American Christians had falsified the popular Second Spira narrative early on.Footnote 71 But clearly this did not slow its circulation in antebellum America. Christian self-critiques were still too rare and too easy to disregard. More importantly, irreligious critics and counter-narratives were still struggling to be heard. But in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, another kind of infidel deathbed would become more difficult to ignore.
III. Irreligious Redeployment of the Deathbed
That another kind of infidel deathbed did in fact develop—that nineteenth-century irreligionists became more invested in the deathbed over time rather than less—was not inevitable. Rather, it was a striking historical contingency. Recognizing the deathbed's putative powers to prove that Christianity was correct and “that the deceased [irreligionist] had never believed in the correctness of the opinions that he had avowed,” antebellum irreligionists often countered both proving powers by arguing that the deathbed was entirely uninterpretable.Footnote 72 The physical and mental dissolution preceding death, they argued, belied its power to prove anything. As a lecturer at an 1828 gathering of the Free Press Association put it: “More than half of mankind die without knowing it; in most of the rest, the mind, shattered and weakened by disease, regards death with sensations unassociated with religion, or any reference to futurity.”Footnote 73 Or, in the oft-quoted words of Thomas Reid, the Scottish Common Sense philosopher: “The emotions and delirium of the dying are very frequently excited by the nature of the disease itself: for all mental impressions, whether real or imaginary, must operate powerfully when the mind, through disease or protracted suffering, is rendered incapable of averting their influence.” Therefore, deathbed “deeds and confessions,” even if done “with apparent collectedness,” were “not to be depended upon.”Footnote 74
This was a rigorous, naturalistic dismantling of the proving powers Christians invested in the deathbed. “In regard to the manner of one's dying,” Horace Seaver reportedly declared, “it was an event that depended upon the disease and constitution, and not upon faith or the want of it, since the best men sometimes viewed death with alarm; and the worst, with perfect composure. Death-bed scenes, in general, were no test of anything but pain and suffering.”Footnote 75 Other dismissals were likewise categorical. “Calmness” in some dying persons, and “agitation and distress” in others, could “generally be explained by the character of their respective diseases. . . . How foolish is it, therefore, to place any reliance upon death-bed scenes!”Footnote 76 If not categorical, such dismissals were often near-categorical. It was “absurd” to make inferences from a person's dying moments, because “in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred,” dying was “the very time when the brain has ceased to exercise its functions, and the whole system sinks into indifference.”Footnote 77 The argument easily suggested a studied indifference toward any descriptions—positive or negative—of disbelievers’ deaths: “If the stories were as true as they are false, what do they prove?”Footnote 78
And yet, in the last quarter of the century, irreligionists ended up relentlessly presenting their own accounts of irreligious dying to prove the sincerity of their disbelief. The groundwork had been laid for this contingency all along. Many mid-century irreligionists had selectively affirmed the deathbed's power to prove irreligious sincerity while persistently rejecting its power to test the tenability of irreligion. For example, from 1839 through the 1850s, an oft-reprinted article on the subject in the Boston Investigator argued that the “dying hour” was “favorable but to one thing, and that is, to test sincerity or insincerity. . . . It is only a test of the sincerity of the individual, and not of the verity of the articles of his faith.”Footnote 79 More importantly, mid-century irreligionists who took this position did sporadically present their own accounts of irreligious dying. A prelude to one such account declared that “all a dying confession proves, in regard to a man's faith or belief, is that he is sincere, and it is just as good evidence in favor of the Infidel as of anybody else. We allude to the subject, for the purpose of introducing a sketch of the death-bed of Voltaire . . . which is a triumphant and conclusive answer to the calumnies of the religious.”Footnote 80
The two positions—rejection of any interpretive significance adhering in the deathbed and selective affirmation and deployment of the deathbed's power to prove sincerity—produced tension in irreligious responses to infidel deathbed narratives through much of the nineteenth century. Hence, accounts of good irreligious deaths were often introduced with the caveat—the deathbed is generally uninterpretable, but here it can prove sincerity—or followed by the question—but even if she had died in agony, what would it prove?Footnote 81 Moreover, what would it prove was often a toggling two-pronged question: what would it prove about external Christian truth claims and/or what would it prove about inner irreligious convictions. When irreligionists did take the position that the deathbed could prove sincerity, they might carefully circumscribe the conditions in which the deathbed could do so.Footnote 82 But by mid-century, irreligionists had already begun converging on the position that would underwrite the remarkable late-century rise of irreligious dying—that the deathbed could prove sincerity, and only sincerity.
Irreligionists agreed amongst themselves that the deathbed could not prove the tenability of irreligion, any more than it could prove the tenability of “Mohamedanism,” or, for that matter, Christianity.Footnote 83 This position had never wavered. The belatedly resolved question was, rather, whether the deathbed could prove individual irreligious sincerity. Irreligionists long maintained a rough balance between dismissal and deployment of the deathbed, rejecting the deathbed's proving powers altogether as often as they had selectively appropriated its putative power to prove sincerity. But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the balance shifted. Irreligionists continued to reject the deathbed's power to prove tenability, less often rejected the deathbed's proving powers altogether, more aggressively and publicly challenged Christian accounts of infidel deaths, and much more frequently published their own ground-level accounts of good irreligious deaths. Irreligionists had been sporadically presenting their deaths all along, but by the 1880s, their deaths took marked priority over their meta-discourse about the interpretive problems and possibilities of the deathbed. By then, Christians had invested the deathbed with considerable power to prove sincerity, and late-century irreligionists strategically appropriated that power by relentlessly miming and subverting the deathbeds of their detractors.
IV. Rise of Irreligious Dying
Nineteenth-century irreligious print never matched the volume or circulation of Christian print; but the dozens of irreligious periodicals that arose in America from 1825 to the end of the century were no less effective at creating a trans-regional “textual community.”Footnote 84 Accounts of good irreligious deaths poured into these periodicals from every corner of the country. The accounts then circulated to thousands of irreligionists who cited them while presenting subsequent irreligious deaths. The community cultivated by this textual feedback loop transcended geography, tied local irreligious deaths to the interests and identity of irreligionists everywhere, and ordered the presentation of irreligious dying. Their burden was to make dying an irreligionist mean dying a sincerely disbelieving irreligionist and to brighten the blurred lines between belief and disbelief; or, to purify disbelief from past and present moments of mixture, multiplicity, and irresolution that might invite interrogations of irreligious sincerity. Thus, their constant refrain was that irreligionists died well and that their dying disbelief was therefore uniformly sincere.
To die well was to die as Christians claimed only Christians could: peaceful, happy, resigned, philanthropic, and firm in the (anti-)faith. Christiana Gardner of Boston “was a firm believer in Nature, and in nothing beyond, and was firm in her opinions to the last.”Footnote 85 William C. Hawley of Carthage, Illinois “died a materialist, expressing the same firm and unshaken opinions, that had characterized him through life.”Footnote 86 Ann S. Parish of Providence, Rhode Island “remained firm and unshaken in her opinions to the last,” and passed “in placid serenity of mind, demonstrating to by-standers that an Infidel can die with composure.”Footnote 87 Jous G. Paine of Thomaston, Maine “died as he had lived, what is termed an Infidel. . . . His mind wavered not as to the truth of the cause he espoused; . . . He defended his faith with energy and zeal to the last.”Footnote 88
Irreligionists took pre-emptive and organized measures to preserve and publicize good irreligious deaths. William C. Bell, of Lexington, Kentucky, died near Pottsville, Pennsylvania on July 1, 1845. Two days after his death, “a spontaneous meeting of Infidels assembled . . . at the Social Reform Hall.” After a chairman and secretary brought the meeting to order, Bell's friend, Robert Bass, in whose home Bell died, rose and described Bell's death. In his final moments, Bell had drawn Bass close and said, “when I die, I want you to tell the world that I die in the most perfect confidence in the principles which I have advocated and published. . . . Tell them that I believe in nothing above or separate from Nature!” Bass described writing Bell's words “as he dictated them, in the presence of all my family; and shortly after this he expired.” Bass claimed Bell had “retained the full possession of his faculties to the last breath,” and that no man had ever died “with so much calmness and fortitude.” “He died, as he lived,” Bass concluded. After Bass finished speaking, the secretary set down several “unanimously adopted” resolutions, including: “Resolved, That [Bell's] departing in a firm and unshaken adherence to the principles he so ably advocated during life, demonstrates, that death, although unattended by clerical ceremonies and useless rites, has no terror to the practical good man.” And, “Resolved, That a copy of these minutes be forwarded to the Board of Managers of ‘The Infidel Society for the Promotion of Mental Liberty,’ in New York, and a copy to the Boston Investigator for publication,—with a request to other Liberal papers to copy.”Footnote 89 Here irreligionists marshalled all their institutional machinery to press their account of irreligious dying.Footnote 90
“Died as lived” was already the central idiom of irreligious dying when Bass attached it to Bell in 1845. Its repetition increased exponentially in the final decades of the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth. The French novelist Eugene Sue's mid-century swan song was reported as: “I wish to die as I have lived, a Freethinker.”Footnote 91 James A. King of Shelby County, Texas “died as he lived”—a deist.Footnote 92 Levi J. Ball of North Hannibal, New York “died . . . as he lived” and “left the record of a death-bed scene which thousands of our Christian friends would do well to envy.”Footnote 93 Elijah Clark of Davis, Illinois “died as he had lived, with strong faith in his [irreligious] convictions.”Footnote 94 Peyton Randolph Boss of Patrick County, Virginia was told by an attending physician “that ‘Tom Paine’ had recanted and professed religion on his death-bed,” but “calmly assured the doctor that it was Christian calumny and falsehood” and then declared to all-onlookers that “he was dying as he had lived—an Agnostic and a philosopher.”Footnote 95 Lovering B. Silver of Cleveland, Ohio “died as he had lived,” requested “no one to say that repentance had come to him on his deathbed,” and impressed all onlookers with “his quiet disavowal of any religious belief.”Footnote 96
Occasionally, irreligionists’ deathbed accounts went on the offensive—not just proving that irreligionists died well, but subverting the assurances Christians derived from dying well themselves. A letter signed by “B.” described the deathbed of a Mrs. Nancy in Lynn, Massachusetts. Surrounded by concerned Christians, Mrs. Nancy claimed, in conversation with her husband, an eternal union made possible by strict materialism:
Her husband asked her if she was any more reconciled with the Christians’ hopes? She replied, “I am not. Allowing their fancied heaven and hell, and myself admitted to the former, I could not be happy there, for if I knew myself, (and if I did not it would not be myself,) I should mourn your absence; for if your absence gave me no pain, your arrival there would give me no joy. And, oh! The thought, the horrid, withering thought, that you might finally be cast into their hell of unmitigated, unending torments, would make existence even in heaven, a very curse instead of a blessing. I believe the Christians’ hopes are more than counterbalanced by their fears. I shall not know any separation.—As long as I have a conscious being, I shall be with you, which amounts to an endless union to me.”Footnote 97
B.’s narrative claimed that irreligious dying could do what holy dying could not: strip death of its soteriological and social uncertainties.
Meanwhile, living irreligionists were busy combatting Christian stories about long-dead disbelievers. Such combat was locally aggressive and tapped into the trans-regional irreligious textual community. In the early 1850s, Nehemiah Adams, Congregational pastor of Essex Street Church in Boston, started describing the death of David Hume in a hugely popular sermon.Footnote 98 Adams said the dying Hume distracted himself with playing cards for a while, but “as the shadows of departing life were gathering over him, and he drew near to the invisible world, he cried out, ‘Lord Jesus, help me; Jesus Christ, save me.’”Footnote 99 In January 1859, a skeptic in Fairfield, Indiana wrote in to the Boston Investigator and reported that a local Baptist minister had repeated a version of Adams's story. The skeptic confronted the minister and demanded evidence of Hume's embarrassing end, but the minister apparently had none. In reply to the skeptic, the Boston Investigator printed Adam Smith's famous account of Hume's peaceful and playful death, and urged persistence: “We suggest to our Indiana friend that he exhibit the foregoing letter of Adam Smith to the slanderous minister, and ask him to read it from his pulpit. The Rev. Dr. Adams, to whom we send a copy of this paper, will also read it from his pulpit if he is an honest man.”Footnote 100 The irreligious textual community could reach into local settings like Fairfield to contest ground-level Christian incantations of infidel deathbed stories.
In the last quarter of the century, irreligionists did this kind of work constantly. The year 1877 was a watershed. On the lecture circuit in June, Robert Ingersoll offered “any clergyman in San Francisco $1,000 in gold” if he could prove that Voltaire did not die a peaceful death and that Paine passed away “in agony” and “in fear,” wrought by “the Infinite God.”Footnote 101 The next month, editors of the Presbyterian New York Observer accepted the challenge—sort of.Footnote 102 In a statement titled, “Put Down the Money,” they said two things. One, that they could prove Paine died “a drunken, cowardly and beastly death.” And two, that what Ingersoll called the “absurd story” of Paine being “frightened to death by God” would “be shown to be an ower [sic] true tale.”Footnote 103 In August, Ingersoll responded with characteristically effective theatrics. He restated the challenge: prove Voltaire and/or Paine died in agony, in the fearful presence of God. He emphasized that the sincerity of the arch-infidels’ “honest opinions” was at stake. And then he deposited a thousand dollars in gold with the First National Bank of Peoria, Illinois, laid out procedures for impartial adjudication, and deposited another two thousand dollars to cover his opponents’ costs should he lose.Footnote 104 In September, the Observer demurred—saying they never offered evidence of fearful deathbed agonies, only “evidence of the truth of [their] own statement” that Paine died a drunken, cowardly, beastly death.Footnote 105
Irreligionists were irate. Critiques of the Observer’s evasion and witnesses to Paine's “intellectual honesty,” came in a flurry.Footnote 106 Obscure local papers throughout the country followed Ingersoll's challenge and reprinted the Observer’s critics.Footnote 107 Some in the Christian press said the whole conflict had only confirmed Paine's insincerity.Footnote 108 But the tone of public discourse on Paine's deathbed had already started to shift in response to the Observer’s evasion. Midway through the conflict, the widely read Independent said that if it had ever published accounts of Paine dying in fear and agony, it would be “very careful [in the future] never to repeat them, if The Observer, after crying out ‘Put down the money!’ seems afraid to meet the issue.”Footnote 109
The crucial moment came in November when the Observer declared: “We have never stated in any form, nor have we ever supposed that Paine actually renounced his infidelity. The accounts agree in stating that he died a blaspheming infidel.”Footnote 110 This was a subtly momentous statement. Not merely conceding that Paine died as he lived, the statement surrendered the slippage between lived irreligion and believed irreligion. By posing lived irreligion as the only irreligion at stake, the statement ceded sincerity to disbelievers, while making a plausible claim to continuity, as if deathbed agonies themselves had not long been ample narrative arenas for the interrogation of irreligious sincerity. The unstated concession was readily discerned by the national press. The Chicago Tribune’s take-away from the controversy was that the Observer “now admits that Paine did not recant or die full of remorse.”Footnote 111 For the following three decades, the irreligious textual community reached into every region of the country with a new and increasing relentlessness, demanding evidence for every Christian story about a dying disbeliever, retold from the pulpit or the pews.Footnote 112
The Observer controversy echoed for years. In February 1883, apparently against its better judgement, the Independent published a lengthy and elaborate exposition of deathbed revelation by the Reverend Joseph Cook. The death of George M. Beard, the famous skeptic who popularized “neurasthenia,” was Cook's central exhibit. Cook claimed that a devout Moravian woman told the dying Beard to “Trust in Jesus.” “With unimpaired faculties, [Beard] answered: ‘I Do. I am.’” Then Beard “rose up in bed and lifted up his hand, his face brightened, and he said, with great emphasis, ‘Higher! Higher!’” and then died within seconds.Footnote 113 The editors called it “a thrilling story.”Footnote 114 But Beard's prominent colleague, W. A. Croffut, wrote in two months later and convincingly debunked it. Croffut also claimed Beard had “foreshadowed” his own deathbed canonization. A year earlier Croffut had commented on an orthodox minster's recent account of Emerson's alleged deathbed recantation. Beard responded “O! yes, it is the fate of leading minds. . . . None of us will be safe from this sort of thing on our death-beds.”Footnote 115 The Independent retracted the original story, “not with pleasure, but from a sense of duty,” and affirmed that “as a rule . . . the man who lives an unbeliever dies an unbeliever.”Footnote 116 Irreligionists were elated: “This is about the most unpalatable morsel a Christian paper has been compelled to swallow since Col. Ingersoll forced the Observer to eat its own words and publish that it never said that Thomas Paine recanted.” Most importantly, a “cornered Christian authority” had affirmed the central idiom of irreligious dying, and solidified its meaning as a datum of sincere disbelief, by testifying “that ‘as a rule’ Christians die Christian, and unbelievers unbelieving.”Footnote 117
Indeed, hundreds of documentable disbelievers were, all the while, presenting the same point. And their irreligious dying increasingly appeared in prominent papers. After the French Positivist Emile Littre died in 1881, the devout who had surrounded his deathbed claimed a recantation. But the New York Times privileged Littre's own account, prepared immediately before his death, and defended the “entire sincerity” of Littre's “unswerving positivist faith.”Footnote 118 Seven years later, Courtlandt Palmer's deathbed demonstration of sincerity enthralled the national papers. The New York Sun printed the first account, but the Washington Post, New York Times, and Chicago Tribune, among others, quickly followed: “Mr. Palmer seems to have entered the dark valley with serenity and composure fully equal to the many graphic pictures of the last hour of saints which are found in religious literature.”Footnote 119 By the end of the century, ongoing accounts of irreligious dying were a familiar feature of these national newspapers.Footnote 120
The rise of irreligious dying eventually culminated in a canon of irreligionists’ own: G. W. Foote's Infidel Death-Beds. By the time Foote's second edition was published by the Truth Seeker in 1892, its format was immediately recognizable—an introduction followed by sixty-three brief deathbed accounts of notable irreligionists, including Voltaire, Paine, Robert Cooper, Robert Owen, Emile Littre, and Courtlandt Palmer. Foote's intro declared victory over interrogations of irreligious sincerity. The infidel deathbed narratives of “anonymous [Christian] tracts” had been overwhelmed by constant reporting of “the peaceful end of ‘infidels’ who, having lived without hypocrisy, have died without fear. . . . The only terror in death is the apprehension of what lies beyond it, and that emotion is impossible to a sincere disbeliever.”Footnote 121 Foote's book spread through the irreligionists’ trans-regional community and helped order their presentation of irreligious dying, and their sense of what it meant to die a disbeliever. In 1894, for example, Sila Gleason described how “historical Freethought literature” had “fitted” Manley H. Woodbury of Rocky River, Ohio “to look upon the ending of human life as a sentence nature pronounced at birth, with no possibility of evasion. Few of the sixty-odd episodes described in Infidel Death-Beds could have been a scene of more calmness, peace, and cheerful willingness to die, than his.”Footnote 122
From the 1870s to the 1910s, as irreligionists relentlessly pressed their accounts of irreligious dying, they continued to characterize what Christians were doing with theirs. Irreligionists’ reactions to and perceptions of ground-level Christian derision revealed the impetus behind their network of irreligious dying. One irreligionist recounted a Lutheran preacher's funeral oration for a Christian friend in which the preacher “remarked that it was a sad commentary on Infidelity that even their most ardent supporters sometimes change their opinions when they arrive at the point of death.” The preacher “cited that to be a proof that Infidels are dishonest; that they often preach what they do not believe themselves, and when they arrive at the point of death” the preacher continued, “‘they often acknowledge their honest beliefs.’”Footnote 123 Per irreligionists’ complaints about such Christian derision, infidel deathbed narratives, as a genre, suggested that the standard irreligionist “lived a hypocrite” and “simply feigned infidelity,”Footnote 124 did “not believe what he advanced,”Footnote 125 was “only [a] cowardly believer” who lived a “scandalous and untruthful” life,Footnote 126 or, put simply, was “not sincere.”Footnote 127 Put more elaborately by P. F. Garrett from Roswell, New Mexico, infidel deathbed narratives “crushe[d] out the horrors of death by that more terrible calamity, the robbing of the dead of the fixed principles of his life, of the pride of his convictions, holding his memory up to the world as that of a coward, and branding his whole virtuous and honorable life a long and living lie.”Footnote 128 These overwrought reactions limned life on the ir/religious margins and the social stakes involved in irreligious dying, as seen by irreligionists. Deathbeds were versatile tools, certainly designed by Christians to wager the tenability of their tradition, but also deployed by Christians and irreligionists to negotiate the social standing of disbelievers themselves. Thus, while Leigh Schmidt has shown that public derision incentivized irreligionists to hide their disbelief, this history suggests that a particular kind of public derision also incentivized irreligionists to prove and publicize their disbelief, and to ostensibly purge it of mixture and multiplicity in the process.Footnote 129
They did so with a tool they fashioned in tandem with their Christian detractors. Strategically and selectively appropriated, mimed and subverted, the deathbed came to figure unexpectedly in the identity and interests of irreligionists. A textual community of disbelievers came to share a distinct sense of how they went about protecting their deaths from Christian narrators, presenting their deaths for a polemicized public, and narrating their deaths for future emulation among themselves. What the atheist sex reformer Elmina D. Slenker said of one local infidel reflected this communal self-conception of ordered irreligious dying: even the “pious friends” of this departed disbeliever, said Slenker, “were forced to own that ‘Death had no sting’ for him,” and that “they had never seen a more satisfactory ‘death-bed scene.’”Footnote 130 Though it was neither intuitive nor inevitable for American irreligionists in the long nineteenth century to invest so heavily in an identifiable, interpretable, and interpretively charged form of dying, the deathbed became indispensable to them as they deployed its agreed-upon power to recast their inner life and reposition themselves in American society.
V. Decline of the Infidel Deathbed
Christian production and circulation of infidel deathbed narratives drastically declined after the 1870s. The network of irreligious dying did its work, compelling or convincing even the most powerful Christian figures to surrender the infidel deathbed. On the eve of World War I, Billy Sunday quintessentially conceded the deathbed idiom of decades of disbelievers: “If you have lived in unbelief, in 99 cases out of 100 you'll die that way.”Footnote 131 For many American Christians, lived infidelity had become believed infidelity, and the deathbed no longer dissolved or denuded disbelief. A chorus (albeit not a consensus) of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century believers felt that “we should have done with the stories of infidel death-beds.”Footnote 132
Old narratives had lost much of their mainstream purchase, and irreligionists’ pre-emptive measures had largely prevented Christian production of new ones. A few of irreligion's longtime foes, like the famous and widely-circulated sermonizer Thomas De Witt Talmage, retold the canonical narratives of Voltaire, Paine, and Allen with some tenacity. But narratives of late-century irreligious luminaries like D. M. Bennett, Horace Seaver, Charles Bradlaugh, and Robert Ingersoll, while occasionally percolating in the pews, never gained traction in the press; after decades of battling the Paine and Voltaire narratives, famous irreligionists secured their deaths from Christian narration by publicly predicting it, and by pre-empting it with assiduously produced accounts of their own. There was also a pervasive sense, among believers and disbelievers, that fast-traveling modern media set a more rigorous standard of evidence for deathbed narration. Irreligionists constantly taunted Christians about their consequently dated narratives. Moreover, on the local level, pre-emptive measures were equally effective. In Advalorem, Texas, on November 26, 1901, Charles B. Moore's executors were legally obligated to read, at his funeral, a written statement of his disbelief in any immaterial realities, as well as dated records documenting the endurance of his disbelief on the deathbed.Footnote 133 Old narratives kept percolating, and apocryphal narratives would perennially arise, but by the turn of the century, pre-emptive measures like Moore's had largely closed the American canon.
While published narratives nationwide became increasingly rare, irreligionists occasionally reported oral narratives circulating in village revivals and other rural settings: a local Christian in Riverside, Ohio insisting on the old Voltaire narratives, a traveling evangelist in Lewiston, Idaho with a “solemn” stock of assorted narratives, or an urban salesman in Milton, West Virginia using Ingersoll's alleged deathbed recantation to appeal to potential clients.Footnote 134 The above-mentioned Talmage, who pastored in Brooklyn and then Washington D.C., was one of the few major exceptions to this trend. But Talmage also responded to public demands for proof with embarrassing evasion in the national papers, retired in 1899, and died in 1902.Footnote 135 More reflective of early twentieth-century trends was the Los Angeles Times expressing bafflement over infidel deathbed narratives that resurfaced outside urban centers.Footnote 136 By then, even oral narratives in rural settings were increasingly rare.Footnote 137
Broader changes were afoot that enveloped both the conflict between Christians and irreligionists and their joint construction of the deathbed. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans were embracing new registers of religious tolerance and pluralism and more often dying industrialized, allegedly disenchanted deaths.Footnote 138 These shifts might make the strategic responses of irreligionists themselves seem historically superfluous, but turn-of-the-century religious tolerance was, as often as not, framed as an alliance of all religions against irreligion; the dying, in connection with the dead, were arguably retaining much of their pre-industrial enchantment; and brokering the bona fides of irreligionists appeared to present a pressing tactical task.Footnote 139 This article suggests that Christian contestation fashioned the deathbed for that task. Over many decades, the deathbed accrued social purchase and agreed-upon power to test and prove dis/belief and in/sincerity. Its eventual irreligious redeployment neutralized a derisive genre and left disbelief a partially and provisionally less multiplex, less marginal marker in American society. In the process, that redeployment re-tethered irreligionists to their Christian detractors through a shared set of polemical commitments to the putative priority and irreducibility of these incendiary inner states—dis/belief, in/sincerity. The “golden age” of irreligion was thus, among other things, one in which the deathbed's constructed power could ironically purge irreligionists’ inner lives of mixture and multiplicity, and persuasively present Americans with a durably sincere disbeliever.
