EER Edward Everett Root Publishers (Brighton 2017). Hbk. 246 pages. £65.
‘Nontheism’ is not an elegant word. Half Latin and half Greek, it lacks the worldliness of one and the beauty of the other. Why substitute it, then, for its pure-Greek antecedent ‘atheism’ which has served its purpose for more than two thousand years? It’s a question some of us wrestled with a few years back when we founded the Nontheist Friends Network. Because the word was for a time at the centre of Quaker controversy, it was thought by some to be an original Quaker coinage. In fact its only true begetter was the nineteenth century self-confessed ‘agitator’ George Jacob Holyoake, better known for inventing the words ‘secularism’ and ‘jingoism’ among many others.
Holyoake was attracted to Owenite socialism and influenced by Auguste Comte’s ‘religion of humanity’. In 1842 he was jailed for six months for saying he didn’t believe in God. At the time he described himself as an atheist, but by 1852 he was troubled by the popular misunderstanding which associated atheism with rampant immorality and hedonism. He wrote: ‘Atheist is a worn-out word. Both the ancients and the moderns have understood by it one without God, and also without morality… Non-theism is a term less open to the same misunderstanding, as it implies the simple non-acceptance of the Theist’s explanation of the origin and government of the world’.
Surprisingly, this quotation is not included in Stephen Yeo’s book, Victorian Agitator, George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906): Co-operation as ‘This New Order of Life’, Volume 1 in a three-part series called A Useable Past: A History of Association, Co-operation and un-Statist Socialism in 19th and early 20th century Britain. A former principal of Ruskin College, Oxford, and former chair of the Co-operative Heritage Trust, Yeo is a dedicated disciple of Holyoake, sharing the old agitator’s passion for what E P Thompson in Out of Apathy called ‘the long and tenacious revolutionary tradition of the British commoner… expressed most naturally in the language of moral revolt’. For Holyoake and for Yeo, the ‘new order of life’, of ‘moral revolt’, was (and is) epitomised in the concepts of co-operation, consent and community.
I confess that for me, the most enlightening pages here were those which freely quoted Holyoake’s own voluminous writings. Take this, at the very beginning, illustrating his concept of ethical secularism (from The Trial of Theism, 1858):
‘Going to a distant town to mitigate some calamity there, will illustrate the principle of action prescribed by Secularism. One man will go on this errand from pure sympathy with the unfortunate; this is goodness. Another goes because his priest bids him; this is obedience. Another goes because the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew tells him that all such persons will pass to the right hand of the Father; this is calculation… But another goes on the errand of mercy because it is an errand of mercy, because it is an immediate service to humanity; this is Secularism, which teaches that goodness is sanctity, that Nature is guidance, that reason is authority, that service is duty, that Materialism is help.’
Secularism for Holyoake, the inventor of the word, was not the binary opposite of religion. He understood it in its original meaning as the life of this world and our times, including freedom for as well as from religion. Yeo asks at the end, ‘Could moral idealism be unearthed once more, as one of the buried assets of the Co-operative Movement?’, answering that ‘it might be best to admit that we don’t know’. Looking back to the Owenite Society, which Holyoake joined in 1838 when he was 21, he wonders whether ‘in our extraordinarily disjointed times’ it is really so quaint. Could it be ‘a seed, ready to be sown for another season?’.
The pleasure of reading this book is its constant reminders that the dilemmas, dreams and preoccupations of those of us who hope to build the republic of heaven now that God is no longer on the throne, have a history. We tread where others have trod – others like George Jacob Holyoake. It’s a pity that Yeo’s hardback is inexplicably priced out of most general readers’ pockets at £65 (though cheaper from some online bookstores).
David Boulton is a broadcaster, journalist and author. His latest book is Through a Glass Darkly, a defence of Quaker nontheism.