The Peculiar Truth about America’s Last Blasphemy Trial

• Morristown, NJ, May 19, 1887: Charles B. Reynolds was a defendant in a trial. His charge was blasphemy - irreverence toward God - a crime so rarely adjudicated that few Americans at that time had ever heard of such a case.

• Reynolds was a New York City native who became a Seventh Day Adventist. He settled in Rochester, an area known at the time as the Burned Over District - an area of Upstate New York so overtaken by various religions that it was said to have been set ablaze with spiritual piety. Reynolds became a minister.

• By middle age, however, he lost his religious fervor and instead became a freethinker - today we would use the term agnostic or atheist.

• 1882: Reynolds began lecturing as a freethinker, espousing opinions in opposition to conventional Biblical thought. He even spoke before the New York State Freethinkers’ Association, a group that also sprang up in the Burned Over District as an alternative to religious doctrine.

• Reynolds decided the best way to spread the word of agnosticism was to operate in the same manner as revival preachers. So he purchased a tent and traveled from town to town to give anti-religion lectures. He spoke about a “religion of humanity,” which equated with secular humanism.

• He began in Kalamazoo and worked his way east to Upstate New York. He gave nearly 1,000 lectures in the span of a few years.

• The public was generally open-minded about his topic. Long before radio or TV, public speakers were welcome forms of entertainment, even if the subject matter was at odds with one’s beliefs.

• However, small town residents in New Jersey weren’t so welcoming.

• July 1886: Reynolds tent was vandalized in Boonton, NJ during a three-night stay. Rather than seeking the perpetrators, the local police threatened Reynolds with arrest for blasphemy. He fled town without his tent and with an angry mob chasing him away.

• Undeterred by the encounter, Reynolds kept lecturing in various towns throughout the Northeast.

• In October, he returned to New Jersey, this time visiting Morristown, which was just nine miles south of Boonton. Again, he was arrested, charged with blasphemy, and held for trial.

• Reynolds hired as his legal counsel one of the nation’s most well-known speakers on the topic of atheism: the attorney and author Robert Green Ingersoll. He took the case pro bono.

• Ingersoll was as famous in his era as modern atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or the late Christopher Hitchens. He was called the Great Agnostic. His lectures questioned nearly every aspect of the Bible, Old Testament and New, and he spoke with the eloquence of an attorney, which he was.

• When Ingersoll took Reynolds’ case, newspapers took notice.

• The brief trial lasted two days, and Ingersoll called no witnesses. Instead, he essentially gave the jury one of his more long-winded lectures on the constitutionality of freethinking.

• The next morning, the all-male jury gave its decision. They found Reynolds guilty of blasphemy.

• The judge, for reasons unknown - perhaps out of embarrassment for his townsfolk or the bad publicity their verdict would bring or because he understood the First Amendment to the Constitution - chose not to jail the defendant. Instead, he gave Reynolds a fine of a few dollars.

• Ingersoll paid it out of his own pocket.

• Reynolds left New Jersey for the Pacific Northwest where he would live the rest of his life lecturing about atheism. He was never again accused of blasphemy.