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Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought) is an unorthodox attitude or belief.
A freethinker holds that should not be formed on the basis of authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma, and should instead be reached by other methods such as logic, reason, and empiricism. According to the Collins English Dictionary, a freethinker is "One who is mentally free from the conventional bonds of tradition or dogma, and thinks independently." In some contemporary thought in particular, free thought is strongly tied with rejection of traditional social or religious belief systems. The cognitive application of free thought is known as "freethinking", and practitioners of free thought are known as "freethinkers". Modern freethinkers consider free thought to be a natural freedom from all negative and illusive thoughts acquired from society.
The term first came into use in the 17th century in order to refer to people who inquired into the basis of traditional beliefs which were often accepted unquestioningly. Today, freethinking is most closely linked with agnosticism, deism, secularism, humanism, anti-clericalism, and religious critique. The Oxford English Dictionary defines freethinking as, "The free exercise of reason in matters of religious belief, unrestrained by deference to authority; the adoption of the principles of a free-thinker." Freethinkers hold that knowledge should be grounded in facts, scientific inquiry, and logic. The skeptical application of science implies freedom from the intellectually limiting effects of confirmation bias, cognitive bias, conventional wisdom, popular culture, prejudice, or sectarianism.
The basic summarizing statement of the essay The Ethics of Belief by the 19th-century British mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford is: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." The essay became a rallying cry for freethinkers when published in the 1870s, and has been described as a point when freethinkers grabbed the moral high ground. Clifford was himself an organizer of free thought gatherings, the driving force behind the Congress of Liberal Thinkers held in 1878.
Regarding religion, freethinkers typically hold that there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of supernatural phenomena. According to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, "No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth." and "Freethinkers are convinced that religious claims have not withstood the tests of reason. Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition. Most freethinkers consider religion to be not only untrue, but harmful."
However, philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote the following in his 1944 essay The Value of Free Thought:
A freethinker, according to Russell, is not necessarily an atheist or an agnostic, as long as he or she satisfies this definition:
Fred Edwords, former executive of the American Humanist Association, suggests that by Russell's definition, who have challenged established orthodoxies can be considered freethinkers.
On the other hand, according to Bertrand Russell, atheists and/or agnostics are not necessarily freethinkers. As an example, he mentions Joseph Stalin, whom he compares to a "pope":
In the 18th and 19th century, many thinkers regarded as freethinkers were deists, arguing that the nature of God can only be known from a study of nature rather than from religious revelation. In the 18th century, "deism" was as much of a 'dirty word' as "atheism", and deists were often stigmatized as either atheists or at least as freethinkers by their Christian opponents.James E. Force, Introduction (1990) to An Account of the Growth of Deism in England (1696) by William Stephens Deists today regard themselves as freethinkers, but are now arguably less prominent in the free thought movement than atheists.
French physician and writer Rabelais 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.
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 free thought organizations operated throughout southern Ontario and parts of Quebec, eliciting both urban and rural support.
The principal organ of the free thought 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.
François-Jean Lefebvre de la Barre (1745–1766) was a young France nobleman, famous for having been and Decapitated 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. (2025). 9781433103735, Peter Lang. ISBN 9781433103735
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 ("free thought"), 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.
Free thought 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" free thought groups proliferated, becoming an organization of socialist parties. European socialist free thought groups formed the International of Proletarian Freethinkers (IPF) in 1925. Activists agitated for Germans to disaffiliate from their respective Church and for secularization of elementary schools; between 1919–1921 and 1930–1932 more than 2.5 million Germans, for the most part supporters of the Social Democratic and Communist parties, gave up church membership. 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.
Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, most free thought organizations were banned, though some right-wing groups that worked with so-called Völkische Bünde (literally "ethnic" associations with nationalist, xenophobic and very often racist ideology) were tolerated by the Nazis until the mid-1930s.
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, free thought 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".
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.
The Freethinker magazine was first published in Britain in 1881; it continued in print until 2014, and still exists as a web-based publication.
Driven by the revolutions of 1848 in the German states, the 19th century saw an immigration of German people 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.
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.
These groups of German Freethinkers referred to their organizations as Freie Gemeinden, or "free congregations". The first Freie Gemeinde was established in St. Louis in 1850.Demerath, N. J. III and Victor Thiessen, "On Spitting Against the Wind: Organizational Precariousness and American Irreligion," The American Journal of Sociology, 71: 6 (May, 1966), 674–87. Others followed in Pennsylvania, California, Washington, D.C., New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, and other states.
Freethinkers tended to be liberal, espousing ideals such as racial, social, and sexual equality, and the abolition of slavery.
The "Golden Age of Freethought" in the US came in the late 1800s. The dominant organization was the National Liberal League which formed in 1876 in Philadelphia. This group re-formed itself in 1885 as the American Secular Union under the leadership of the eminent agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll. Following Ingersoll's death in 1899 the organization declined, in part due to lack of effective leadership.
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 Truth Seeker in 1873, a radical free thought and reform American periodical.
German freethinker settlements were located in:
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.
Freemasonry attracted many freethinkers and became a hub of the movement, during the Enlightenment era due to its emphasis on inclusive membership, logic, rationalism, and religious tolerance. Freemasonry's origins from stonemason guilds meant its symbolism and rituals drew on concepts from the Trivium and Quadrivium, they include the Mastery of Grammar, Rhetoric, logic then mastery of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy as well as other arts such as the Artes mechanicae, reflecting Enlightenment ideals in the goal of making its members Masters of their thoughts and opinions thus making them Freethinkers. This distinguished Freemasonry from other fraternal orders focused on chivalry or Christian morality.
Influential early Speculative Masonic writings by James Anderson and Jean-Theophile Desaguliers frequently cited Isaac Newton and promoted Newtonian scientific ideas. Desaguliers was a close friend and student of Newton, further spreading Newton's theories to lodges. Geometry textbooks and lectures were common in early lodges, aligning with Enlightenment interest in mathematics and science.
Freemasonry's multi-tiered system of Initiation allegorically used the tools, stages, and concepts of architecture and mechanics to represent enlightenment and self-improvement through education and reason. This resonated with freethinkers' belief in perfecting society through spreading knowledge.
This religious tolerance attracted Enlightenment thinkers, like Voltaire, who viewed organized religion as upholding oppressive traditional monarchs and hindering free thought. Benjamin Franklin praised Masonic principles of "liberality, tolerance and unity in essentials, leaving each Brother to his own opinions on non-essentials" in his writings.
However, most Masonic lodges mainly aimed to promote morality, sociability, freedom and philanthropic causes rather than radical politics. Values of freethinking, liberty, equality, and opposition to tyranny were also celebrated in Masonic rituals and writings, many rituals have for motto "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". This intellectual spirit likely contributed to many Freemasons supporting independence movements and participating as Founding Fathers of the United States.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, some authoritarian states were against Freemasonry, suspecting it of encouraging freethinking philosophies and suppressed Masonic lodges and members.
Attaining mastery is presented as freeing a man's mind from blind reliance on Authority and Dogma so he can autonomously reason and have educated opinions. The perfectibility of human nature through education and liberty is a key theme. This aligns with freethinkers' views on thinking for oneself using logic and empiricism.
However, this does not mean that a Freemason cannot follow a dogma rather that as a Free-thinker, the Mason can, if he wants, decide to follow a dogma on his own free will and accord, not because he is told to do so but by his own enlightened choice.
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, free thought 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.
Switzerland
With the introduction of cantonal in the 1870s, anti-clericalism 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
In the last years of the Ottoman Empire, free thought 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 Turkey. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk –field marshal, revolutionary statesman, author, and founder of the Secular state 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 DeismReşat Kasaba, "Atatürk", The Cambridge history of Turkey: Volume 4: Turkey in the Modern World, Cambridge University Press, 2008; ; accessed 27 March 2015.; or an Atheism,, Brief Insights Series by Julian Baggini, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc., 2009; , p. 106., John Calvert John, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008; , p. 19....Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the secular Turkish Republic. He said: "I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea..." , Graham Oppy, Lexington Books, 2011, , p. 146. who was antireligious and anti-Islamic in general.Phil Zuckerman, John R. Shook, The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, Oxford University Press, 2017, , p. 167.Tariq Ramadan, Islam and the Arab Awakening, Oxford University Press, 2012, , p. 76. 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.
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.
United States
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 Free Thought 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 Locofocos'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.
Anarchism
United States tradition
Freethought influenced the development of anarchism in the United States. In the U.S., "free thought 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 free thought 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 free thought 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."
European tradition
In Europe, a similar development occurred in French and Spanish individualist anarchist circles: "Anticlericalism, just as in the rest of the libertarian movement, in another of the frequent elements which will gain relevance related to the measure in which the (French) Republic begins to have conflicts with the church...Anti-clerical discourse, frequently called for by the French individualist André Lorulot (1885–1963), will have its impacts in Estudios (a Spanish individualist anarchist publication). There will be an attack on institutionalized religion for the responsibility that it had in the past on negative developments, for its irrationality which makes it a counterpoint of philosophical and scientific progress. There will be a criticism of proselytism and ideological manipulation which happens on both believers and agnostics".
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".
Freethinking in Freemasonry
Freemasonry served an important purpose in the spreading of the freethinking movement, Freemason lodges in 18th century Europe served as sites for enlightenment thinking and discussion of new ideas, helping spread freethought philosophies. The informal, secretive nature of the lodges allowed intellectuals and elites to gather and debate radical topics away from the scrutiny of church and state.
Rationalism and science
Due to Freemasonry utilizing extensive symbols and allegories related to mathematics, geometry, and architecture, conveying the importance of reason and science, and the central Masonic symbol of the compass and square represented logic and rigor as well references to the "Great Architect of the Universe", these concepts were interpreted as a deist scientific creator by Enlightenment freethinkers.
Religious tolerance
Unlike most contemporary fraternal orders, Freemasonry did not require its members to follow a specific religious creed. This openness allowed men of diverse faiths, including deists, to join local lodges throughout Europe and United States in the Enlightenment era allowing Free-thought to flourish. While utilizing religious imagery and themes, Freemasonry intentionally avoided dogmatic disputes and focused its moral lessons on shared values of virtue, charity, and righteousness thereby allowing its members to think for themselves.
Political liberalism
Many Enlightenment freethinkers perceived established dogmas as oppressing free thought. Consequently, the secrecy and hierarchical Initiatory structure of Freemasonry alarmed some authoritarian states, concerned it could encourage free and revolutionary ideas.
Pursuit of mastery
A core goal of Freemasonry's initiatory system is to guide men's intellectual and moral development towards mastery and self enlightenment. Masonic rituals and degrees symbolically depict the passage from an Apprentice to Fellowcraft to Master Mason as a metaphor for independent learning and self-improvement to the goal of becoming a Master of himself, thus a full freethinker.
See also
Notes and references
Further reading
External links
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