Modern freethinkers, despite their pronounced rejection of tradition, consider several historical movements, developments and individuals as pre-modern precursors, such as critical thought in
Ancient Greece, repositories of knowledge and wisdom in
Ireland and in the
Iranian civilizations (for example in the era of
Khayyam (1048–1131) and his unorthodox
Sufi Rubaiyat poems). Later societies made advances on
freedom of thought such as the Chinese (note for example the seafaring renaissance of the
Southern Song dynasty of 1127–1279), on through
heretical thinkers on esoteric
alchemy or
astrology, to the
Renaissance and the
Protestant Reformation pioneered by
Martin Luther. French physician
Rabelais (died 1553) celebrated "rabelaisian" freedom as well as good feasting and drinking (an expression and a symbol of freedom of the mind) in defiance of the hypocrisies of
conformist orthodoxy in his
utopian Thelema Abbey (from θέλημα: free "will"), the device of which was
Do What Thou Wilt: So had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt; because free people ... act virtuously and avoid vice. They call this honor. When Rabelais's hero
Pantagruel journeys to the "Oracle of The Div(in)e Bottle", he learns the lesson of life in one simple word:
"Trinch!", Drink! Enjoy the simple life, learn wisdom and knowledge, as a free human. Beyond puns, irony, and satire, Gargantua's prologue-
metaphor instructs the reader to "break the bone and suck out the substance-full marrow" ("
la substantifique moëlle"), the core of wisdom. Modern freethinkers also consider the execution of
pantheistic writer and former
Dominican friar
Giordano Bruno by the
Inquisition in 1600 a landmark.
Australia Prior to
World War II, Australia had high rates of Protestantism and Catholicism. Post-war Australia has become a highly
secularised country.
Donald Horne, one of Australia's well-known
public intellectuals, believed rising prosperity in post-war Australia influenced the decline in church-going and general lack of interest in religion. "Churches no longer matter very much to most Australians. If there is a happy eternal life it's for everyone ... For many Australians the pleasures of this life are sufficiently satisfying that religion offers nothing of great appeal", said Horne in his landmark work
The Lucky Country (1964).
Canada In 1873, a handful of secularists founded the earliest known secular organization in
English Canada, the Toronto Freethought Association. Reorganized in 1877 and again in 1881, when it was renamed the Toronto Secular Society, the group formed the nucleus of the Canadian Secular Union, established in 1884 to bring together freethinkers from across the country. A significant number of the early members appear to have come from the educated labour "aristocracy", including Alfred F. Jury, J. Ick Evans and J. I. Livingstone, all of whom were leading labour activists and secularists. The second president of the Toronto association,
T. Phillips Thompson, became a central figure in the city's labour and social-reform movements during the 1880s and 1890s and arguably Canada's foremost late nineteenth-century labour intellectual. By the early 1880s scattered freehought organizations operated throughout southern
Ontario and parts of
Quebec, eliciting both urban and rural support. The principal organ of the freethought movement in Canada was
Secular Thought (Toronto, 1887–1911). Founded and edited during its first several years by English freethinker
Charles Watts (1835–1906), it came under the editorship of Toronto printer and publisher James Spencer Ellis in 1891 when Watts returned to England. In 1968 the
Humanist Association of Canada (HAC) formed to serve as an umbrella group for humanists, atheists, and freethinkers, and to champion social justice issues and oppose religious influence on public policy—most notably in the fight to make access to abortion free and legal in Canada.
France In France, the concept first appeared in publication in 1765 when
Denis Diderot,
Jean le Rond d'Alembert, and
Voltaire included an article on
Liberté de penser in their
Encyclopédie. The concept of freethought spread so widely that even places as remote as the
Jotunheimen, in
Norway, had well-known freethinkers such as
Jo Gjende by the 19th century.
François-Jean Lefebvre de la Barre (1745–1766) was a young
French nobleman, famous for having been
tortured and
beheaded before his body was burnt on a
pyre along with Voltaire's
Philosophical Dictionary. La Barre is often said to have been executed for not saluting a
Roman Catholic religious procession, but the elements of the case were far more complex. In France, Lefebvre de la Barre is widely regarded a symbol of the victims of Christian
religious intolerance; La Barre along with
Jean Calas and
Pierre-Paul Sirven, was championed by Voltaire. A second replacement statue to de la Barre stands nearby the
Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris at the summit of the butte
Montmartre (itself named from the
Temple of Mars), the highest point in
Paris and an
18th arrondissement street nearby the
Sacré-Cœur is also named after Lefebvre de la Barre. The 19th century saw the emergence of a specific notion of
Libre-Pensée ("freethought"), with writer
Victor Hugo as one of its major early proponents. French Freethinkers (
Libre-Penseurs) associate freedom of thought, political
anti-clericalism and socialist leanings. The main organisation referring to this tradition to this day is the
Fédération nationale de la libre pensée, created in 1890.
Germany '' is a German coming of age ceremony. Photograph from early 20th century. In Germany, during the period 1815–1848 and before the
March Revolution, the resistance of citizens against the dogma of the church increased. In 1844, under the influence of
Johannes Ronge and
Robert Blum, belief in the rights of man, tolerance among men, and
humanism grew, and by 1859 they had established the
Bund Freireligiöser Gemeinden Deutschlands (literally
Union of Free Religious Communities of Germany), an association of persons who consider themselves to be religious without adhering to any established and institutionalized church or sacerdotal cult. This union still exists today, and is included as a member in the umbrella organization of free humanists. In 1881 in
Frankfurt am Main,
Ludwig Büchner established the
Deutscher Freidenkerbund (
German Freethinkers League) as the first German organization for
atheists and agnostics. In 1892 the
Freidenker-Gesellschaft and in 1906 the
Deutscher Monistenbund were formed. Freethought organizations developed the "
Jugendweihe" (literally
Youth consecration), a secular "
confirmation" ceremony, and atheist funeral rites. The Union of Freethinkers for Cremation was founded in 1905, and the Central Union of German Proletariat Freethinker in 1908. The two groups merged in 1927, becoming the German Freethinking Association in 1930. More "bourgeois" organizations declined after
World War I, and "proletarian" freethought groups proliferated, becoming an organization of socialist parties. Conflict developed between radical forces including the Soviet
League of the Militant Godless and Social Democratic forces in Western Europe led by Theodor Hartwig and
Max Sievers. In 1930 the Soviet and allied delegations, following a walk-out, took over the IPF and excluded the former leaders.
Ireland In the 19th century, received opinion was scandalized by
George Ensor (1769–1843). His
Review of the Miracles, Prophecies, & Mysteries of the Old and New Testaments (1835) argued that, far from being a source of moral teaching, revealed religion and its divines regarded questions of morality as "incidental"--as a "mundane and merely philosophical" topic.
Netherlands In the Netherlands, freethought has existed in organized form since the establishment of De Dageraad (now known as
De Vrije Gedachte) in 1856. Among its most notable subscribing 19th century individuals were
Johannes van Vloten,
Multatuli, Adriaan Gerhard and
Domela Nieuwenhuis. In 2009, Frans van Dongen established the Atheist-Secular Party, which takes a considerably restrictive view of religion and public religious expressions. Since the 19th century, freethought in the Netherlands has become more well known as a political phenomenon through at least three currents: liberal freethinking, conservative freethinking, and classical freethinking. In other words, parties which identify as freethinking tend to favor non-doctrinal, rational approaches to their preferred ideologies, and arose as secular alternatives to both clerically aligned parties as well as labor-aligned parties. Common themes among freethinking political parties are "freedom", "liberty", and "
individualism".
Switzerland With the introduction of cantonal
church taxes in the 1870s,
anti-clericals began to organise themselves. Around 1870, a "freethinkers club" was founded in
Zürich. During the debate on the Zürich church law in 1883, professor Friedrich Salomon Vögelin and city council member Kunz proposed to
separate church and state.
Turkey of Turkey In the last years of the
Ottoman Empire, freethought made its voice heard by the works of distinguished people such as
Ahmet Rıza,
Tevfik Fikret,
Abdullah Cevdet,
Kılıçzade Hakkı, and
Celal Nuri İleri. These intellectuals affected the
early period of the
Turkish Republic.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk –
field marshal, revolutionary statesman, author, and
founder of the
secular Turkish
nation state, serving as its first
President from 1923 until his death in 1938– was the practitioner of their ideas. He made many
reforms that modernized the country. Sources point out that Atatürk was a
religious skeptic and a freethinker. He was a non-doctrinaire
deist or an
atheist, who was antireligious and anti-Islamic in general. According to Atatürk, the Turkish people do not know what Islam really is and do not read the
Quran. People are influenced by Arabic sentences that they do not understand, and because of their customs they go to mosques. When the Turks read the Quran and think about it, they will leave Islam. Atatürk described Islam as the religion of the
Arabs in his own work titled
Vatandaş için Medeni Bilgiler by his own
critical and
nationalist views.
Association of Atheism (
Ateizm Derneği), the first official atheist organisation in Middle East and Caucasus, was founded in 2014. It serves to support irreligious people and freethinkers in Turkey who are discriminated against based on their views. In 2018 it was reported in some media outlets that the Ateizm Derneği would close down because of the pressure on its members and attacks by pro-government media, but the association itself issued a clarification that this was not the case and that it was still active.
United Kingdom The term
freethinker emerged towards the end of the 17th century in England to describe those who stood in opposition to the institution of the
Church, and the literal belief in the
Bible. The beliefs of these individuals were centered on the concept that people could understand the world through consideration of nature. Such positions were formally documented for the first time in 1697 by
William Molyneux in a widely publicized letter to
John Locke, and more extensively in 1713, when
Anthony Collins wrote his
Discourse of Free-thinking, which gained substantial popularity. This essay attacks the clergy of all churches and it is a plea for
deism.
The Freethinker magazine was first published in Britain in 1881; it continued in print until 2014, and still exists as a web-based publication.
United States '' from 1921 with picture of
Thomas Paine and symbols of the Enlightenment The freethought movement first organized itself in the United States as the "Free Press Association" in 1827 in defense of George Houston, publisher of
The Correspondent, an early journal of
Biblical criticism in an era when blasphemy convictions were still possible. Houston had helped found an
Owenite community at Haverstraw, New York in 1826–27. The short-lived
Correspondent was superseded by the
Free Enquirer, the official organ of
Robert Owen's
New Harmony community in Indiana, edited by
Robert Dale Owen and by
Fanny Wright between 1828 and 1832 in New York. During this time Robert Dale Owen sought to introduce the philosophic skepticism of the Freethought movement into the
Workingmen's Party in New York City. The
Free Enquirer's annual civic celebrations of Paine's birthday after 1825 finally coalesced in 1836 in the first national freethinkers organization, the "United States Moral and Philosophical Society for the General Diffusion of Useful Knowledge". It was founded on August 1, 1836, at a national convention at the Lyceum in Saratoga Springs with Isaac S. Smith of
Buffalo, New York, as president. Smith was also the 1836
Equal Rights Party's candidate for Governor of New York and had also been the Workingmen's Party candidate for Lt. Governor of New York in 1830. The Moral and Philosophical Society published
The Beacon, edited by Gilbert Vale. Driven by the revolutions of 1848 in the German states, the 19th century saw an
immigration of
German freethinkers and anti-clericalists to the United States (see
Forty-Eighters). In the United States, they hoped to be able to live by their principles, without interference from government and church authorities. ,
Two Ways to Go, 1896 Many Freethinkers settled in German immigrant strongholds, including
St. Louis,
Indianapolis,
Wisconsin, and
Texas, where they founded the town of
Comfort, Texas, as well as others. Others followed in Pennsylvania, California, Washington, D.C., New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, and other states. Freethought in the United States declined in the early twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, most freethought congregations had disbanded or joined other mainstream churches. The longest continuously operating freethought congregation in America is the Free Congregation of Sauk County, Wisconsin, which was founded in 1852 and is still active . It affiliated with the
American Unitarian Association (now the
Unitarian Universalist Association) in 1955.
D. M. Bennett was the founder and publisher of
The Truth Seeker in 1873, a radical freethought and reform American periodical. German freethinker settlements were located in: •
Burlington,
Racine County,
Wisconsin •
Fond du Lac,
Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin •
Latium,
Washington County, Texas •
Manitowoc,
Manitowoc County, Wisconsin In the U.S., "freethought was a basically
anti-Christian,
anti-clerical movement, whose purpose was to make the individual politically and spiritually free to decide for himself on religious matters. A number of contributors to
Liberty were prominent figures in both freethought and anarchism. The
American individualist anarchist George MacDonald [(1857–1944)] was a co-editor of
Freethought and, for a time,
The Truth Seeker. E. C. Walker was co-editor of the freethought/free love journal
Lucifer, the Light-Bearer." "Many of the anarchists were ardent freethinkers; reprints from freethought papers such as
Lucifer, the Light-Bearer,
Freethought and
The Truth Seeker appeared in
Liberty...The church was viewed as a common ally of the state and as a repressive force in and of itself." These tendencies would continue in French individualist anarchism in the work and activism of
Charles-Auguste Bontemps (1893–1981) and others. In the Spanish individualist anarchist magazines
Ética and
Iniciales "there is a strong interest in publishing scientific news, usually linked to a certain atheist and
anti-theist obsession, philosophy which will also work for pointing out the incompatibility between science and religion, faith, and reason. In this way, there will be a lot of talk on
Charles Darwin's theories or on the negation of the existence of the
soul". In 1901, the Catalan anarchist and freethinker
Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia established "modern" or
progressive schools in
Barcelona in defiance of an educational system controlled by the
Catholic Church. The schools had the stated goal to "
educate the working class in a rational, secular and non-coercive setting". Fiercely anti-clerical, Ferrer believed in "freedom in education", education free from the authority of church and state. Ferrer's ideas, generally, formed the inspiration for a series of
Modern Schools in the United States,
Cuba,
South America, and
London. The first of these started in
New York City in 1911. Ferrer also inspired the Italian newspaper
Università popolare, founded in 1901. ==In Freemasonry==