Ingersoll.

As modern scientific thought percolated through American society, religious belief became genuinely optional for the first time in American history. Before 1878 religious skepticism made little impact on American life. Under the influence of both Darwinian biology and popular evolutionary thought, however, it became possible for Americans to reject religion forthrightly without negative consequences in genteel society. One popular strain of the new agnosticism (a belief that neither accepts nor denies the existence of God) moved beyond religion in the name of higher moral evolution. Robert Green Ingersoll, whom one admirer called "the Dwight L. Moody of Free Religion," was loosely associated with this movement. In a public career that spanned the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Ingersoll traveled the country promoting agnosticism as a morally superior replacement to conventional Christianity and attacking the hypocrisy of organized religion. A veteran of the Civil War...