Electoral Reform

[Jester]

The Quakers were instrumental in getting slavery banned everywhere, but from what I can tell, in Britain, it was really Thomas Clarkson who persevered, and along with MP William Wilberforce eventually turned the tide of public opinion to the abolitionist side. Can you name a deist or atheist that anything significant to do with the abolitionist movement?

Your claim was about the *ethical* change. (It was niggardly of me to restrict it to England, as this phenomenon was very much transatlantic. Apologies.) The thinking of John Locke, David Hume and Erasmus Darwin (Interesting as a freethinker allied closely to a dissenter, Josiah Wedgwood) in England, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Frankin, Thomas Paine, in America, Voltaire and Diderot in France, and a rather lengthy list of other deists and freethinkers form a part of the movement against slavery, in philosophy. Some of them were widely read (Locke, Paine) and others' opposition was more obscure.

But do you really think that without such philosophical underpinnings, that the hectoring of two men turned the tide of public opinion, even just in England? Movements that large are not made of that little. Abolitionism was the result of a long process, and a huge part of that process was the increasing doubt about the church. Sometimes this meant new churches (Quakers, Methodists, etc...) and sometimes it meant no church at all (Deists, Agnostics, Atheists). Some of it came from entirely elsewhere, the beginnings of the labour movement.

If the political muscle came from the churches, that is to be expected. Zealots do tend to be zealous, and atheism neither is nor was popular. Indeed, "atheist" was the great invective hurled at the abolitionists, even at the Quakers on occasion. But politics did not make the ethics, but the reverse.

-Jester