Heresy Is the Only True Religion: Richard Lynch Garner (1848–1920), A Southern Freethinker in Africa and America

Abstract

Atheists are not the first group that comes to mind when one commonly thinks of late nineteenth-century southern Appalachia. Richard Lynch Garner (1848–1920), a self-taught scientist from southwestern Virginia who moved to southern Gabon in 1892, sought to bind together conventional southern middle-class views on race and manhood with religious skepticism. Studies of unbelief in the United States have almost entirely ignored the South as well as the ways that freethinkers engaged with race, thereby leaving out men like Garner. Though Garner drew on northern and midwestern freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll for critiques of Christianity, he also saw himself as a defender of paternal southern views of race from northerners and from Christian missionaries. Still, he distanced himself from other southern agnostics, especially the race-baiting William Cowper Brann, by presenting himself as a fatherly protector of Africans and African Americans. Garner used his observations on Gabonese societies to critique colonialism and missionary work as denials of biological differences between the races. Interestingly, Garner contended that Gabonese spirituality was materialist and lacked a notion of divinity. Ultimately, Garner downplayed his freethinking and his anti-colonialism in his published work—probably to ensure his ability to continue his research in colonial Africa and perhaps to better market himself in the United States.