Secularism and the Limits of Universal Progress

Abstract

Secularism was at root a universalist vision of human progress. Nevertheless, freethinkers were influenced in their understanding of empire and its colonial subjects by both the scientific racism and civilizational assumptions of the period. This chapter examines the tensions between racial hierarchy and universalist progressivism as it appears in secularist press. These ideas and responses were shaped by emigration to settler colonies like New Zealand. The freethinkers largely retained their universalism and did not fully embrace biological and anthropological ideas of fixed racial difference. However, they did so from within a framework that viewed progress as the advance of secular and scientific reason. From this perspective, Christian missionaries posed a particular threat to the universality of progress. Conversion to Christianity by Indigenous colonial subjects such as the Maori was used as evidence of an irrationality that would doom the Maori to racial extinction. This chapter thus traces the limits of secularist universalism.