The First Church of Charles Darwin

Nick Spencer, Darwin and God

Charles Darwin studied for the priesthood in his youth. Many readers already know this, and have framed this fact to explain or dismiss the idea that Darwin entertained secret religious convictions. Nick Spencer, a British public academic specializing in the intersections of religion and politics, wondered what Darwin’s history meant in context. Fortunately, Darwin wrote extensively on the topic, leaving behind copious primary sources for future scholars.

Darwin came descended from two categories of religious dissidents. His mother’s family, the Wedgwoods, were industrialists with Unitarian beliefs; while his father harbored doubts and became a sort of sceptic, while encouraging young Charles not to voice questions too loudly, because they were rude. Caught between these forces, and unsuccessful in his medical studies, Darwin shrugged his way into Anglicanism, and started studying theology as a career track.

In his youth, Darwin professed “a sort of Christian” belief, a quote Spencer uses generously, because it reflects Darwin’s conflicted position. The future natural philosopher repeated the motions of early Victorian upper-class Christianity, which meant diligent study of books and public politeness, but not necessarily feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Christianity, in the early 19th Century, was simply expected of Britain’s entrepreneurial classes.

But he never had any particular faith. His letters and private journals, which Spencer uses as his chief source, reveal that Darwin questioned whether he could undertake the ceremony of ordination with a clear conscience, since it required him to attest a strongly felt spiritual calling. Darwin was squeamish about telling such a bold lie. When the opportunity to sail on the HMS Beagle as Captain FitzRoy’s confidante came available, Darwin jumped on it.

These early years, Spencer describes only loosely, because Darwin left fewer notes than later, and Spencer appears reluctant to speculate too far beyond his primary sources. His Beagle voyage, however, opens new vistas for Spencer’s documentation. Beginning with this voyage, Darwin began keeping detailed personal notebooks, and sending lengthy letters home to England. His writings began showing increasing doubts about polite Victorian public theology.

Spencer’s remarkably brief (under 130 pages) book doesn’t spend much time on Darwin’s scientific accomplishments; he apparently believes that, if you’re reading him, you’re already aware of Darwin’s science. Rather, he shows foremost interest in how the increasing friction between Darwin’s childhood beliefs, and the evidence he collected from the surrounding world, became something he couldn’t reconcile. One or the other eventually had to go away.

Charles Darwin

Copious correspondence with his future wife, with leading British and American public intellectuals, and with British gentleman clergy, reveals Darwin’s mind brimming with questions. Not necessarily “doubts,” as that would imply moving away from deeply held moral convictions, which he never particularly had. However, he increasingly needed closure on questions about life, suffering, and death, which Christianity couldn’t provide. Especially after Annie Darwin, his favorite daughter, died.

According to Spencer, Darwin never became an atheist, unlike his most vocal adherents today. Indeed, though he saw the enforced cheerfulness of Victorian Christianity as untenable, he couldn’t entirely reject the idea that a universe as complex as ours needed a Creator somehow. He just couldn’t accept upper-class Britain’s dominant theology. He happily accepted the newly minted term “agnostic,” because he had no alternate theory to explain his tumultuous world.

Spencer describes Darwin’s move away from religion as paralleling the movements in science in the 19th Century. Previously a spare-time hobby for gentlemen, many of them clergy, science was instead becoming a discipline in its own right. This parting of ways meant that investigations of the physical world needed to emerge from a pursuit of truth, not from one’s existing beliefs. This was a transition which many Anglican churchmen resented.

Despite that tension, Darwin retained an amicable relationship, not only with scientists and academics, but with theologians. He counted many churchmen as friends, corresponded professionally with others, and used these relationships to test his still-changing religious beliefs. He had his children christened in church, and gave generously to the parish; he remained, in short, a proper Victorian gentleman. He just couldn’t believe in any kind of personal God anymore.

In Spencer’s description, Darwin’s falling-off isn’t a “crisis of faith,” because he never much had faith. He simply stopped giving intellectual assent to a particular kind of Christianity, and felt no inner moral pull to any other religion. Told this way, substantially in Darwin’s own words, Spencer makes Darwin’s struggle feel timely and relevant today. Because the old practices are falling away, and there’s nothing much to take their place.