Elmira Slenker and Atheist Edward D. Jervey

lmina Slenker, "Old Gran," "The Old Witch"—the first which impressed her with stories of the sun god and how all woman to openly declare that women were the superior cultures had histories, saviors, and the like congruent to Esex, a leading sex radical and defendant in the most Christianity; and Boston's Investigator and the Banner of Light, famous obscenity trial in the history of the state of Virginia, which spoke to spiritualism and communion with the dead. atheist and freethinker who authored over one hundred books Summing up her pilgrimage into infidelity, Elmina wrote: and articles. How many have ever heard of this woman of the Paine had destroyed the last remnant of my faith in the divinity nineteenth century, a woman who spent the most productive of the Scriptures and led me to Deism. Volney had killed my years of her life in the little country town of Snowville, Virginia, god and made me an Atheist. Taylor had shown me that there in the hills of the Bible Belt? was far more of doubt than certainty, that the man, the Elmina was born on December 23, 1827, in LaGrange, reformer, the Infidel of his day, Jesus Christ, ever existed; . Her father was a Quaker minister who was expelled indeed, he proved to me that he really did not exist. Showing from his congregation for engaging in more freethinking tend- the utter worthlessness and undeniability of all Christian encies than his brethren liked. Although he basically remained history, he went on and told how Christ and his twelve apostles a Quaker, he turned his house into a kind of liberal sanctuary. were but the sun and the twelve zodiac signs, thus destroying the New Testament as a history even. The Investigator had Thus Elmina grew up surrounded by reformers like the feminist brought me into communion with living and Atheists Ernistine Rose and the abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, and her of my own day. But none of them assured me for a certainty father made available to her all the works on sexual physiology that there was no immortality. So, though 1 had almost come that he could obtain. to the conclusion that there was none ... still I wished there In the last forty years of her life, Elmina was deeply was proof of a future .... Now came the "last feather that involved in the sex radical movement and became a prime broke the camel's back!" Joseph Treat, of Vineland, sent me a target of the Comstock forces. But her reputation as a free- small pamphlet called the "Oration." There it was, all in a thinker had been made earlier in liberal circles, and throughout nutshell. No god, no heaven, no hell, no immortality, and the her entire life she continued to write extensively in this vein. natural, common sense proofs that there could be none!

lmina's literary career began at the age of fourteen, when After several unsatisfactory love affairs, terminated because of Eshe had a piece published in the Water Cure Journal. By her beliefs and the inability of her suitors to convert her, Elmina the age of seventeen, she had read widely in science and deistic advertised for a husband in the Water Cure Journal, and out and infidel literature and was questioning many traditional of sixty respondents she chose Isaac Slenker. Christian beliefs. She began to realize that all prayers were not By this time, at age twenty-seven, Elmina was already a answered despite what her father had taught her. When her steady correspondent for the Investigator, and she would later little sister died, despite the prayers of her parents for her to edit a special department for the journal. She was to become a live, and when the preacher prayed that the "Lord giveth and prolific writer in the 1870s and 1880s for Lucifer, The Light taketh, blessed be the name of the Lord," Elmina said that "I Bearer, and the Truth Seeker and periodically contributed to felt that if the Lord had really taken my little sister, he was The Word. She authored four novels with infidelity as the little better than a murderer."* She read in the Bible that "In theme: John's Way, A Domestic Radical Story (1878); The the beginning God made ...," but, she said, "I asked myself, Darwins (1879); Mary Jones, Infidel School Teacher (1885); when was the beginning? What was before the beginning? Who and The Clergyman's Victims (18--). Her critical notes on the made God?" By her early teens she had come to believe that Bible, begun when she was fourteen and later serialized in the much of the Bible was "not of divine origin" and much was Investigator, were finally published as Studying The Bible. She "absolutely false ... being in direct opposition to all of the also wrote a children's book, Little Lessons for Little Folks known laws of nature and science." Then, over the next decade (1887), which centered on nature and natural laws; wrote several she read Tom Paine's Age of Reason and converted to deism; tracts on the Bible, science, and Christianity for the Truth Constantin De Volney's Ruins and Nathaniel Taylor's Diegesis, Seeker Company; and, after editing the Plaindealer of Hastings, , started a short-lived journal called Little Freethinker in 1890.

*Elmina Slenker, "Going to Church," Scrapbook, no page number, no date. Edward D. Jervey is professor of American Social and Reli- The Scrapbook, was found by accident in an abandoned attic in Snowville gious History at Radford University in Virginia. by one of my students, Robert Dunn, to whom 1 am indebted for my initial interest in Elmina.

Winter 1984/85 41 Her attacks upon the Bible were prolonged and frequent. holiness, then no one will "quarrel with its old forms of expres- Many of her articles contrasted Ptolemaic and Copernican sing ideas," but it will take its true place in literature as a science and carried the theme that the Bible and science were curiosity—a treasured and precious relic of a long past and totally incompatible. She believed that man's inhumanity to almost forgotten age. ["Grand Old Book," Scrapbook, October man came about because he created for himself an "angry 5, 1873] vengeful God" and that the Bible fostered this idea. Elmina said that anyone with a cultured mind could only shudder at "all the horrid barbarities authorized and commanded by the savage and heartless God of a savage and ignorant race of Jews, and sanctioned by his equally savage and revengeful vice-regent Moses the meek" ("Letters to a Christian," Scrap- book, January 3, 1874 to May 1874). As long as the Bible "is the foundation of all law, all virtue, and all morality," she wrote in "Man's Inhumanity to Man Makes Countless Mourn," Elmina Slenker 1827-1908 (Scrapbook, 1868), "just so long will brutes, slaves, children, and women feel the lash, which arbitrary power will not fail to

i wield. The belief in an angry and vengeful God fosters a vin- Un

d dictive character in man, and he abuses all who venture to

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Ra cross his desires."

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Studying the Bible (Josiah P. Mendum, 1870) was written f as "brief criticisms on some of the principal scripture texts," o

tesy and it was published mainly to try to discredit the Bible as r being a book of superstition and fraud. One example will Cou suffice: lmina's books were never a financial success, but of those she wrote, John's Way Now, as we read on farther, we come to the Ark story—a F.I (1878) was her most popular and well received. The novel tells the story of an infidel family who whopper of a story it is, too. A small vessel like that containing all those men, women, and children, all those animals, birds moves to a community where they are viewed with suspicion reptiles, insects, and creeping things, together with all the food and even fear, much as Elmina was when she moved to Pulaski, necessary for the maintenance of them all for so many days, Virginia. But through a series of incidents, the community weeks, and months! Then, too, it was pitched outside and in, learns from them what true virtue and goodness are, and many all air-tight save one little window at the top. How did they all in the town come to see the "truth" about the Bible. One of the get air to breathe? And what an amount of labor to care for Christian girls reads the Bible: "She was astonished to find and feed them all—to preserve peace and harmony among this how many things came as stumbling blocks in her path. Much "happy family!"—and what a regular cleaning-house time they was unreasonable, much puerile and ridiculous, much actually must have had of it, every day, and a dozen times a day for blasphemous, indecent, and vulgar." Part of Elmina's purpose that matter, and all the dirt and filth to carry up and throw in writing the novel, then, was to contrast the Bible and science. out of that little window! On asking a friend of mine a short time ago how he supposed the ark could hold all the animals, As she said: he said, "Why, the little ones could stand under the big ones!" Our moral is simple and plain as the day A bright idea that! All to stand wedged tightly together all `Tis, Always do right, and, like John, have a way, those weeks! Yet how many there are, even in this day, who That is wholly your own, so you may not be led THINK they believe it! Think so, because they have never To accept or reject because it is said allowed themselves to question or to doubt it. That the Bible commands, or the priest calls it true And dubs it a fact, saying, "Swallow it too" Later, in a kind of summary of her ideas about the "Grand Old But search Nature's volume, her secrets unfold, Book," Elmina wrote that infidels did not deny that there is And you'll find in her bosom a treasure untold. much that is good in the Bible or that it is a form of expressing She'll tell you all things result from her laws, ideas. But: That there was never effect without adequate cause.

We only protest calling a book which contains so much that is Throughout 1879, the novel was serialized in the Truth Seeker, contemptible, coarse, vulgar, obscene, sanguinary, warlike, and scores of letters were published from readers praising it. A impossible, contradictory, puerile, etc., the holy and divine writer from Connecticut commented, typically: word of a God of wisdom, virtue, love, truth, peace.... We "I hope that protest against being taxed by law to help support a Mrs. Slenker will keep on in the good work with her strong which has for its foundation, basis, and cornerstone only a pen, and that she will live long enough to convert all Virginia book like this.... We only protest against our children being and the rest of mankind to good sense." compelled to waste their precious time in our public schools in Her other novels had basically the same theme. The reading and listening to such a mass of balderdash ... it is Darwins (1871), for example, suggests how a family of infidels simply a collection of fables, traditions, maxims, and the helped to develop many young girls in the community into legendary lore of the ancients.... Once divest it of its fancied "enthusiastic, earnest workers for the highest good of humanity"

42 while they learned that the preachers imposed bad ideas and churches and all are evil ... all their efforts enforce untruths on them from the Bible. Two boys who are whipped the system of superstitions." Heaven, she believed, was created by the deacons of the local church leave home forever, and one in one's own heart, and the "only chance of heaven is to make of them says that "we shall never go to church or read that it here and now, and the only hell to be feared is that which is hateful Bible again." After reading The Darwins, one reader made here, and which results from mistaken and erroneous wrote to the Truth Seeker: "All hail, then, Elmina, who is ideas and practices that can only be remedied by right knowl- teaching our women by her beautiful life, as well as by her pen, edge." As for Jesus Christ, he was a fictitious figure, said how to live so as to be a blessing to the world, herself, and Elmina. He "was created, because there is no evidence aside posterity." from the Bible, that is reliable, to prove that he ever existed!" The missionary movement was a disaster according to ("Letter to a Preacher," Truth Seeker, February 1, 1875). And Elmina. In one Truth Seeker tract she wrote that Christian as for God, as for heaven and hell, they are all "born of man's missionaries to the heathens exaggerate the few local errors desires,' hopes, and fears, and are but man-made phantoms— and ignorance they find there, "and generally introduce half a creations of a defective education" ("A Story for the `UNCO' dozen new crimes or vices for every old one they eradicate." Guide"). Before the missionaries came, Elmina said, the natives wor- Men and women need immediately to give up all "Christ- shiped a God who made them innocent, peaceable, and happy, worship" and "God-worship." The only thing needed, Elmina but the missionaries taught them a God who was angry, jealous, wrote in the Scrapbook, is "good, sound organizations, good and revengeful. The only hope for these heathen people, she education, and good training, to make us anything which concluded, was for infidels and atheists to go to them "teaching human nature is capable of becoming ... in man alone is the them morality without religion, science without religion, spirit and essence of all good." Indeed, for Elmina, infidelity economy without religion." Indeed, "the missionary cause is alone was the pathway to truth: "The infidel is the grown-up one of almost unmixed evil to the world." woman who sees that the myths and aircastles she once built Elmina wrote several "Little Lessons for Little Folks" for on the temple of the goddess of beauty are . . . visionary, Truth Seeker, many of which were later put into book form. illusive, and undesirable ... on man alone depends his destiny. They dealt mainly with nature and natural laws and contrasted The gods are nothing" (Truth Seeker, February 7, 1880). As science and the Bible as well as attacked some theological for children, Elmina declared that we should endeavor to ideas. In "Snakes" she suggested to her little readers that infidels educate them all into "the pleasant path of realities, truths, and use only reason as their guide to knowledge. This contrasts, facts—into Infidelity, unbelief, and ...." They "should she argued, with "cheerless dogmas and blighting creeds of not be taught to believe in . . . angels, devils, saints—in ancient fable" that suggest that an "All just, and All-wise Being, imaginary spirits called Gods, Jehovahs, Lords, Great I Ams, could create a literal hell of the most agonizing horrors a or Holy Ghosts; for I hold that all these things are as much distorted imagination could conceive. . . ." In discussing the creation of the fancy as are ... Mother Goose and other fairy plague of frogs in the Bible, she told the children that "no child tales of our childhood" ("Extract of a Letter and a Reply"). who has been educated rightly will believe that this frog story ever happened." One correspondent to Lucifer, The Lightbearer lmina died in early 1908 and was buried in the cemetery wrote to the editor: " `Little Lessons' are grand.... I am FJ at Graysonville near her home in Snowville. Some of the running two Sunday Schools. The children are slow in learning people were convinced that she would appeal to God on her the mystery of the Godhead; in comprehending the Trinity; but deathbed. When she was dying, one of the respected towns- their eyes brighten and they take kindly to discourses on snails, people went into her room and stayed there during her last toads, spiders, and lizards, so I think I'll keep it up." hours. But at no time did she ever give any indication of a In her writings, Elmina criticized and rejected the entire religious "death-bed repentance" or mention God in any way. spectrum of Christian theology. Indeed, "it is absolutely neces- Did Elmina have much influence? Her faith in the perfecti- sary," she wrote in 1875 in a "Letter to a Preacher," "that all bility of human nature, in the continuous growth of goodness belief in gods, christs, heaven, and hells shall be eradicated and morality without religion, may have been typical of some from the minds of the people, before we can expect to become thinking in her day, but eighty-four years of this century have receptive to all the real facts of nature." "When we die, we are hardly borne out her contention. A lot of readers of the dif- not annihilated; we are only changed into lifeless clay ... as an ferent periodicals for which she wrote praised her. Yet, certainly identity we are dead and gone forever," she wrote. Besides, if she had little, if any, influence in and around Snowville, and immortality were true, then millions of mortals would be filling that area of southwest Virginia is today about as conservative up eternal space. "Why man alive! no brain can conceive of the theologically as it ever was, Elmina nothwithstanding. No reli- result of immortal existence of identities," she wrote in the gious periodicals ever bothered to answer her as far as my Truth Seeker. Prayer was absolutely useless. If people would perusal of various issues has revealed. become self-reliant, self-confident, and wise and learn to work But in light of the growing advancement of science, many for what they want, they would quit praying. Elmina was con- today would welcome her back. She would surely have had a fident people were becoming thus: "... the light daily grows grand time had she been at Dayton, Tennesee, and more brighter, and old superstitions are fading away before its recently in Arkansas. She was no Robert Ingersoll, no Clarence brilliancy. We will be too honest to pray." Indeed, she never Darrow—just a woman who dared to be different in her com- went to church, she wrote in "Going to Church," because "all munity and her time. •

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