In Race in a Godless World, Nathan Alexander confronts the charge that secularization “allowed for racism to take hold of our modern society” (2). Whereas “the Bible proclaimed that God ‘hath made of one blood all nations of men’ (Acts 17:26),” the argument goes, secular science in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and North America began claiming that different human groups had emerged or evolved separately, creating a “natural” racial hierarchy with whites on top (1). Many other historians have looked at the relationship of Christianity and racism. Alexander's transatlantic intellectual history focuses instead on how atheists from the mid-nineteenth century to World War I linked ideas about race, religion, and the progress of civilization.

Alexander defines “secularization” as merely “the falling away of Christianity” (1) and assumes the process continues to push “atheists and other nonreligious people from the periphery to the center” in modern (Western?) culture (216). This dodges a long and continuing debate about whether secularization theory, however tweaked and revised, can possibly do justice to the complex relations of “religion” (however defined) and modern life. But Alexander is not really interested in secularization as a broad historical process. He is concerned with tracing the ideological effects of replacing Christian doctrine with scientific naturalism. Did racism become worse with a godless worldview?

Assessing the racist implications of large bodies of ideas—Christianity, the Enlightenment, and Darwinism—Race in a Godless World is an ambidextrous book. On the one hand, it notes the Bible says all humans are of one blood, but, on the other, there was the curse on Noah's son Ham and his descendants. Alexander agrees with his mentor Colin Kidd that Christians were as “equally capable of interpreting the Christian scriptures in a racialist as in an anti-racialist manner” (13). Furthermore, Christian universalism meant that all people inherited Adam's sin and required Christ's redemption, but it had not for centuries entailed any sort of social or political equality. Antisemitic, anti-Islamic Christians, too, biologized difference with notions of “purity of blood” long before the Enlightenment. For its part, secular Enlightenment thought, Alexander writes, “offered powerful arguments against inequality and slavery through its rhetoric of the equality of man, but it also served to emphasize the division between human races through the guise of rational science” (8). After Darwin, “on the one hand, there were those who argued that evolution showed that all humans were related and any racial differences between them were ultimately superficial in the vast expanse of evolutionary time. On the other hand, there were those who argued that races could be ranked in a hierarchy on the basis of their evolutionary progress” (25).

The strength of Alexander's book is not in merely noting this ambivalence on race but in exploring how a large transatlantic cast of characters came to their varied conclusions. Six chapters take us from the mid-nineteenth-century ethnologists countering the Genesis story of Adam and Eve with the theory of multiple human creations to freethinkers arguing for racial equality at the Universal Races Congress in 1911. His supple analysis appreciates complexity and nuance and recognizes the dangers of overgeneralization. He details how leading secularist Charles Bradlaugh, for example, used the new ethnology (polygenesis) not only to attack biblical myths but to support the idea of fixed racial differences. Yet in other hands, polygenesis did not lead to racial discrimination. Anti-racist themes run through Charles Darwin's work. But “Darwin's Bulldog,” T. H. Huxley, used “the lower races as a way to bridge the gap between humans and apes,” demonstrating how “racial hierarchies often persisted within an evolutionary framework,” and Darwin's cousin Francis Galton used evolutionary thought to develop eugenics (62, 60).

In the late nineteenth century, the idea that the West was best and whites should rule passed as a perverse kind of common sense for most whites in Europe and North America. While many white freethinkers and atheists shared these assumptions, atheists were over-represented in the small minority who rejected them. Atheists, Alexander argues, “were at the forefront of attacking racist ideas” (175). The “Great Agnostic” of the Gilded Age, Robert Ingersoll, was one such racial optimist. He joined Black freethinkers such as Hubert Harrison and W. E. B. Du Bois in denouncing discrimination. Alexander thinks that the rigorous skepticism embedded in the atheist worldview “made them constantly question their own societies’ orthodoxies” and that their scientific rationalism gave them the tools “to critique ideas of racial prejudice and racial determinism” (27, 104). Yet Alexander concludes that the inclinations of many (though not all or even most) atheists toward progressive social thought might ultimately have had less to do with the godless ideas themselves or the habits of mind that led them to atheistic conclusions than with the social positions they were forced to occupy because they lacked religious belief. They were critical outsiders, further radicalized by being ostracized by their neighbors, and thus (sometimes) were more ready to reject their neighbor's racist “common sense” along with his God and his Bible.

Alexander ends his insightful book with his belief that “science and reason—if at times deployed toward unsavory ends—still seem to provide the most reliable grounds on which to confront racism” (216). Yet he also notes that, here in the second decade of the twenty-first century, some atheists (and not just alt-right trolls) are trying to link atheism to conservatism and racism (213). For the future as well as the past, the distinction between one hand and the other hand marks a contrast of very different godless worlds.