Introduction

This is a book of lives, not of arguments. Each chapter follows one person from the faith they were born into, through the moment that faith first failed to fit, to the day they said so out loud, and on through what it cost them and what they made of it. The question is the same in every chapter: what made this person stop believing, and how did that unbelief get expressed, and revised, over the rest of their life?

That question is worth asking because the usual books about unbelievers are either arguments or lists. The arguments tell you why the person was right. The lists tell you what they wrote and when they died. Neither tells you how a child who sang the hymns became an adult who would not swear the oath, or why one person's doubt hardened into a public campaign while another's softened into a private hope. Those are the interesting stories, and they are stories about people before they are stories about ideas.

How the chapters are built

Every chapter has the same shape, because the lives, for all their differences, turn on the same handful of moments. There is the world the person was given: the religion of the family, the town, the era, and what they were taught to be certain of. There is the crack, the first thing that would not fit. There is the break, usually a matter of reading, or a mentor, or a loss, or an argument that would not go away. There is the declaration, the moment the private doubt became a public position, and the consequences that followed: a lost place, a prosecution, a seat denied, a family divided. And there is the revision, because almost no one's unbelief at seventy is what it was at twenty-five. Some grew harder and some grew humbler, and a few turned round and went back.

Those turning points are marked in each chapter on a simple timeline of the person's life, the same device that appears in the films from which this book grew. The marks are not a template imposed on the lives. They are the places where the person's own words show a change, and each chapter says what the change was and what drove it.

The rules of the book

Three rules govern every page. The first is that the subject's own words come first. Wherever possible the position at each stage is given in what the person actually wrote or said, from a scholarly edition or the original printing, with the source in a note. Famous unbelievers attract fabricated quotations the way famous believers do, and the book says so when a well-known line is doubtful or trimmed.

The second rule is that believers and critics are treated fairly. Every chapter quotes at least one contemporary who thought the subject wrong, for the argument they made and for the effect it had, and gives them the same care as the subject. The point is not to score the debate. It is to show the reader the room the subject was standing in.

The third rule is that the research shows. Every factual claim in these chapters carries a note. The notes are kept short and plain: the first time a source appears in a chapter it is cited in full, after that in a short form, and where the evidence is thin the note says so in ordinary words, such as that a biographer is the only witness, or that a remark survives only in a later reprint. Where the accounts disagree, the chapter says "accounts differ" and gives both. A reader who wants to check a claim can follow the note to a scan of the page, since nearly every source used here is freely available online, and the companion website links to them.

Words

Labels matter in this subject and they changed over the lifetimes described here, so the book uses the word the person used at the time. Ingersoll never called himself an atheist and insisted, late in life, on "agnostic." Bradlaugh called himself an atheist from 1859 and spent thirty years explaining that the word did not mean what his opponents thought. Others were deists, freethinkers, secularists, materialists, or several of these in turn. The shift in label over a lifetime is often the heart of the story, and each chapter tracks it.

"Unbelief" and "unbeliever" are used here in their plain sense, the absence of belief in a god, without any claim about what the person believed instead. Several of these people believed a great deal: in law, in evidence, in free speech, in one another.

The pictures

Every picture in the book is in the public domain or is published under a licence that allows its use here, and each is credited with its creator, source and licence at the end of the book. They are the real documents: the pages the subjects wrote, the halls they spoke in, the cartoons their enemies drew, the newspapers that reported the trial. Nothing has been invented, staged or altered beyond cropping.

The films and the website

Each chapter began as an episode of a documentary series, and the chapters keep the series' habits: the timeline, the quotation set in the subject's words, the fair hearing for the other side. But a chapter is not a transcript. The narration of a film is written for the ear, at the pace of speech; these chapters are written for the eye, and say more. The companion website carries, for each person, the full list of sources with links to the scans, every quotation with its page reference, the pictures with their credits, the places on a map, and, as each episode is released, the film itself.

The order of the book is by era and then by date of birth. New lives are added as they are finished, so the edition in your hands is one stage of a longer project.

Every claim traces to a named source and every quotation is checked against an original or scholarly edition before it is used; where biographers disagree, the page says so. Believers and critics are quoted for their arguments, with the same care as the subject.

Rights

The site build refuses any image unless its asset-log licence is one of these: public domain, Public Domain Mark, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA (web only); the book build allows only public domain, Public Domain Mark, CC0 and CC BY. Every Creative Commons image is shown with creator, title, source link and licence, as the licences require. Quotations are from public-domain editions or are short, attributed extracts. Map tiles are OpenStreetMap under its attribution. Fonts are open-licensed. The site loads no third-party scripts other than the map tiles and the video embed.

Every image on this site is credited, on the page where it appears, with its creator, source and licence.