Robert Ingersoll: Agnostic, Infidel, Sick-Hearted Weakling

The frailty of heart that makes men hate God

Jan 29, 2025

Robert Green Ingersoll was probably the most famous Anti-Christian in the United States, in the 19th century. A trial lawyer and veteran of the American Civil War who earned the nickname “The Great Agnostic”, he travelled the land as an orator, ranting eloquently against religion and heralding the dawn of a supposed “golden age of reason”. He attracted both large admiring crowds and scathing denunciation. He’s as good a figure as any, to serve as the subject of the Monadnock Review’s inaugural “Apologia And Atheism” article, to show that his own weakness of heart played a vastly greater role than “rationality” ever could, in his rejection of God.

In his 1896 speech Why I Am Agnostic, Ingersoll discusses his religious upbringing. He was born in 1833 into a strict Calvinist family, the son of Congregationalist minister and abolitionist John Ingersoll. Much of Ingersoll’s childhood was centered around religious revivals; when the famous revivalist preacher Charles Grandison Finney was away in Europe, John Ingersoll served as his substitute preacher.

Given his environment, Ingersoll’s childhood recollections are very typical and predictable: he clearly and rightfully opposes the culture of joyless dourness that Calvinism often produces: “I was raised among people who knew…that life had one path and one road. They knew that the path…filled with thorns and nettles, infested with vipers, wet with tears, stained by bleeding feet, led to heaven, and that the road, broad and smooth, bordered with fruits and flowers, filled with laughter and song and all the happiness of human love, led straight to hell.”1 2 He also rightly opposes the Sola Fide of the Protestant Reformation, the belief in salvation by mere mental ascent to the idea of Jesus Christ being God and Messiah. “[They knew that] God did not reward men for being honest, generous and brave, but for the act of faith. Without faith, all the so-called virtues were sins. and the men who practiced these virtues, without faith, deserved to suffer eternal pain.”3

Young Ingersoll finds these revivals to be emotionally manipulative, a criticism that liturgical religion has often charged revivals with: “the sermons were mostly about the pains and agonies of hell, the joys and ecstasies of heaven…the emotional sermons, the sad singing, the hysterical amens, the hope of heaven, the fear of hell, caused many to lose the little sense they had. In this condition they flocked to the ‘mourner's bench’ -- asked for the prayers of the faithful -- had strange feelings, prayed and wept and thought they had been ‘born again.’ Then they would tell their experience -- how wicked they had been -- how evil had been their thoughts, their desires, and how good they had suddenly become.”4

Despite these points of agreement, Robert Ingersoll is someone I have absolutely no sympathy for. Not a whit. Because Why I Am Agnostic also describes the moment he became a full-fledged enemy of Christianity.

The moment had its presage, for sure. Robert mentions being turned off from belief by some of the ideas about hell he’d heard: “I heard hundreds of these evangelical sermons, heard hundreds of the most fearful and vivid descriptions of the tortures inflicted in hell, of the horrible state of the lost. I supposed that what I heard was true and yet I did not believe it. I said: ‘It is,’ and then I thought: ‘It cannot be.’ These sermons made but faint impressions on my mind. I was not convinced. I had no desire to be ‘converted,’ did not want a ‘new heart’ and had no wish to be ‘born again.’”5

The breaking point, however, was when he discovered the Parable Of The Rich Man And Lazarus, which the Lord Jesus Christ relates in Luke, 16: 19-31. After living a luxurious and sinful life, unconcerned with the suffering of the beggar Lazarus who stood at the gates of his great estate, Lazarus departs to heaven and the Rich Man departs to hell. The Rich Man’s pleas that someone give him cool water to quench the flames he’s being scorched in are not granted, because there is a great gulf that permanently divides the saved from the damned.

“For the first time”, says Ingersoll, “I understood the dogma of eternal pain…For the first time my imagination grasped the height and depth of the Christian horror. Then I said: ‘It is a lie, and I hate your religion. If it is true, I hate your God’…from that day I have passionately hated every orthodox creed.”6

When I read the Parable Of The Rich Man And Lazarus, my heart hurts for the poverty the beggar endured, my heart rejoices that his pain and suffering has ended, and I feel horror that the Rich Man did seemingly nothing to help the beggar. This is the wise reaction to the Parable, yet Ingersoll says nothing about these things. Yes, Gehenna is an awful place. The Calvinist belief that God predestines people to Gehenna, with no chance of salvation, is also unspeakably awful, it’s a belief that should be revolted against violently. The Orthodox, however have always viewed Gehenna as the consequence of using free will for sin, and we hold out hope for a vastly larger portion of mankind’s salvation than Calvinism ever has. Unlike the Calvinists, we know that Praying For The Dead avails much. If we’re on our best behaviour, we pray for the Salvation of the whole world, as Saint Silouan Of Mount Athos does.

Yet, this is beyond Calvinism, because it is apparent from his own words that Ingersoll is revolting not merely against Calvinism, but Orthodoxy too. The sin of Origen is upon him. In Ingersoll’s foolish mind, a God who does not institute universal salvation is a monster, and eternal pain can never be justified by anything. Logically consistent with this view, he goes on to claim that the New Testament is vastly worse than the Old Testament, because he perceives the latter as silent about the afterlife, (“Jehovah’s hatred ended at the grave. His revenge was satisfied when his enemy was dead.”), and the former as unveiling the realm of eternal torment.7 Ingersoll was familiar with theologies of free will; he mentions that the preacher who told him about the Parable Of The Rich Man And Lazarus was a Free Will Baptist, and hence would be unsympathetic to the determinism in Reformed Theology. It cannot be the case that he only opposed determinism.8

Of Jesus Christ, Ingersoll writes: “The orthodox God, when clothed in human flesh… uttered these heartless, these fiendish words; ‘Depart ye cursed into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.’ No human being has imagination enough to conceive of this infinite horror. All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood, -- all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death -- all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul. This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of Christianity.”9

Robert Ingersoll was not a physically cowardly man. He saw combat at the Battle Of Shiloh during the American Civil War in April 1862, and in December the Confederates made him and several other soldiers into prisoners of war. He spoke his blasphemies as a famous traveling orator, attracting large crowds. Nor was he a mentally cowardly man, given his primary career as a successful trial lawyer, the Alan Dershowitz or Gloria Allred of his time.

But in heart, Ingersoll’s inability to handle the concept of hell, even when the sinner freely chooses it in the absence of Double Predestination, not exactly a difficult-to-swallow pill10, reveals him to be an incredibly sick little weakling of a man, contemptible and useless to those whose minds care about holy things. I have read, in addition to Why I Am Agnostic, Ingersoll’s much more famous book: Some Mistakes Of Moses (1879) and much of it is simply the hysterical, maudlin bawling of a weakhearted fool. There are some rationalist-style arguments made against the Faith too, but much of it seems to be an exasperated “how dare God do those things He did!” by a heart that’s too weak to tolerate even minorly unpleasant truths. He declares the Deluge immoral, even though the entire human race sans Noah and his family had become completely committed to evil by the time it occurred. That Ingersoll died of congestive heart failure isn’t something I consider a coincidence. A future Monadnock Review article will analyze Some Mistakes Of Moses so we can all have a good laugh at how badly the Anti-Christianity of the 19th century has aged, followed by a cry session over how many of these errors continue into the present.

Why was Ingersoll’s heart weak? Because he chose to weaken it. He saw the problems with what he was raised in, but instead of these problems inspiring him to seek the unperverted truth, he chose to weaken his ability to handle those truths when they appeared, to meet truth with passionate hate. “Hence, they are without excuse”.

Hell is the subject of C.S. Lewis’ novel The Great Divorce. In a rainy grey-coloured town that represents hell, a bus driven by an angel arrives at a stop and gathers damned passengers together, to take them on a voyage to heaven. Upon their arrival in heaven, they find the place very painful. The shining souls of people the damned knew on earth encourage them to repent, so as to gain strength and ease the pain. But most of them love their own sinful perspectives too much to desire to repent, and so they choose to return to the grey town. Heaven is broader than the fire-and-brimstone crowd have declared, but it’s also something that must be seized through sheer hard work, and there is no work more important than crucifying one’s own self-will by gaining humility.

Universal Salvation has been dismissed by the Orthodox Church’s Ecumenical Councils as a dangerous verminous lie, yet Robert Ingersoll loved and cherished this lie too much to make any room for God; God wasn’t something he wanted. If Robert Ingersoll is in hades now, then we know for a fact that he’s exactly where he really wants to be, exactly where he told us he wanted to be when he declared he couldn’t tolerate the idea of hades.

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