4

THE GREAT DEBATE: CAMPBELL, OWEN, AND THE EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY

Desirous of meeting his future disputant face-to-face before departing for some months to England, Owen detoured from his journey to New York—from where he would sail to Europe—to make a stopover at the home of his opponent. From Wheeling, a natural stopping place on his excursion, Owen traveled the fifteen mile route to Campbell’s home in Bethany. Their meeting in early July 1828 both settled the preliminaries of the debate and established a mutual respect among the two reformers. “Mr. Campbell found [Owen] to be a very affable and pleasant gentleman,” according to his biographer, Robert Richardson.¹ Likewise, Owen noted in a letter written to a friend shortly after his stay in Bethany, “Mr. Campbell is an acute, clever, and I believe, sincere man, who will make the most of his cause.” Nevertheless, Owen continued, “I have no doubt that truth will ultimately prevail.”²

Though Owen’s junior by seventeen years and a figure of considerably less notoriety at that time, Campbell did not fail to make a discernible impression on Owen in their initial encounter. While ambling upon the grounds of Campbell’s estate and chatting about the final arrangements for their debate, Campbell’s guest caught a glimpse of the family cemetery. “There is one advantage I have over the Christian—I am not afraid to die,” Owen noted as they strolled beside the burial site. “Most Christians have fear in death, but if some few items of my business were settled, I should be perfectly willing to die at any moment,” he continued. “Well,” answered Campbell, “you say you have no fear in death; have you any hope in death?” After a solemn pause, Owen responded that he did not. “Then you are on a level with that brute,” Campbell replied, as he pointed to a nearby ox. “He has fed till he is satisfied, and stands in the shade whisking off the flies, and has neither hope nor fear in death.” Unable to reply, Owen could do no more than smile as he conceded the correctness of his new friend’s logic.³

OWEN’S RISE IN THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD

Like Campbell, Owen was a product of the British Empire and a student of the European Enlightenment. Born on May 14, 1771, he was the sixth of seven children in the poor family of a saddler and ironmonger in Newtown, North Wales. Though he received only an elementary education, Owen developed a “strong passion for reading” and became an enthusiastic student of literature and philosophy.⁴ From his studies, Carol Kolmerten suggests, Owen drew upon the ideas of numerous individuals to form a philosophy of his own.

From Locke he took the idea that the character of man is a tabula rasa at birth; from Rousseau, that children collectively may be taught any sentiments and habits because humans are basically good and it is institutions that pervert this natural goodness; from the Utilitarians, the importance of happiness, which can be attained only by conduct that must promote the happiness of the community; from William Godwin, the notion that private property has to be eliminated in order for equality to exist; and from Adam Smith, the premise that wealth results from labor.⁵

The conviction “that the character of man, is, without a single exception, always formed for him,”⁶ became the cornerstone belief of Owen’s social philosophy and a mantra that he would never tire of repeating.

Owen’s childhood life in Newtown ended at the age of ten, when he departed from his parents’ home to become an apprentice draper with James McGuffog in Stamford.⁷ After three years as his apprentice and one year as his assistant, Owen left McGuffog’s company to accept a more profitable assistant draper’s position in Manchester. By age eighteen, however, as new inventions were revolutionizing the methods of cotton manufacture, Owen and a partner set up a business of their own within that industry. When his partner left the business in search of a better opportunity, Owen successfully sustained the operation until a more intriguing position caught his eye. Though not yet twenty, when the managerial position of the modern steam-powered cotton mill of Lancashire became vacant, Owen pursued and received the job. At the age of twenty, Owen found himself leading some five-hundred employees in one of the largest and best-equipped cotton mills in England.⁸ His success at handling the mill, coupled with a reputation for the production of fine cotton, advanced his career as an industrialist. At the behest of three potential colleagues, Owen left the Lancashire mill to become a partner in the creation of a new mill. The birth of the Chorlton Twist Company, in 1794 or 1795, was for the production of “cloths for printing, and ... muslins” as needed by the manufacturers of Manchester and Glasgow.⁹

Because many of the customers for his new company were located north of Manchester, Owen often traveled to Glasgow to seek orders for the new mill. On one of these journeys he met Caroline Dale, the daughter of David Dale, a notable Glasgow businessman who owned the New Lanark cotton mills. Smitten with Caroline, but uncertain as to whether her father would permit her to marry him, the twenty-seven-year-old Owen approached David Dale about the possibility of purchasing the New Lanark mill. Through this tactic he gained a cordial acquaintance with Dale and soon received the permission he sought for Caroline’s hand in marriage. In addition to gaining a wife through his visits with Dale, Owen and his partners agreed to purchase the New Lanark mill as a profit-producing enterprise. Shortly after his wedding and honeymoon in late 1799, Owen assumed the managerial position of the company.¹⁰

OWEN’S REFORMS AND THE REJECTION OF RELIGION

On the first of January 1800, when Owen instituted himself as the “government” of the New Lanark mill, he noted that his intent “was not to be a mere manager of cotton mills.” “My intention...,” he wrote, is “to introduce principles in the conduct of people ... and to change the conditions of the people, who ... were surrounded by circumstances having an injurious influence upon the character of the entire population of New Lanark.”¹¹ Thus he commenced what he referred to as “the most important experiment for the happiness of the human race that had yet been instituted at any time in any part of the world.”¹²

Manufacturers of the early nineteenth century often possessed a strong hold over the lives of their employees. In isolated locations like New Lanark, the long hours of factory work were but a minor part of management’s control over the laborers. Employers frequently owned the houses in which workers lived, and the stores and shops that sold provisions to them. Well aware of his control over the lives of the workers at New Lanark, Owen began “to make arrangements to supersede the evil conditions with which the population was surrounded, by good conditions.”¹³ He improved the wages and working conditions of his employees, provided better housing, enhanced the quality of the food and other necessities sold by the village stores and shops, made the village of New Lanark a sanitary and pleasant place for his employees to reside, and restricted the use of child laborers at New Lanark while providing opportunities for children to gain an education. “No experiment,” Owen was convinced, “could be more successful in proving the truth of the principle that the character is formed for and not by the individual.”¹⁴

Not only did Owen’s experiment at New Lanark produce improved lives for the mill workers and their families, but it made the factory into something of a showcase of profitability and social concerns. The principles of his experiment, “applied to the community of New Lanark, at first under many of the most discouraging circumstances, but persevered in for sixteen years, effected a complete change in the general character of the village.”¹⁵ Throughout his life, Owen would point to New Lanark as proof for the success of his social theories. Furthermore, in 1813 he published A New View of Society to further elucidate his beliefs on the formation of human character and to promote the amalgamation of his ideas into society at large.

In A New View of Society, Owen expressed the basic principles of his system. “Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even to the world at large, by the application of proper means.”¹⁶ The “proper means” for forming the best character, Owen went on to explain, is to train children “from their earliest infancy” in good habits, provide them with a rational education, and prepare them for useful labor. “Such habits and education,” he claimed, “will impress them with an active and ardent desire to promote the happiness of every individual, and that without the shadow of exception for sect, or party, or country, or climate.”¹⁷ Using New Lanark as a model for the success of his system, Owen argued that it could no longer be “said that evil or injurious actions cannot be prevented, or that the most rational habits in the rising generation cannot be universally formed.” The experiment at New Lanark, he suggested, proves that his system “is not hypothesis and theory.”¹⁸ Thus, he remarked, “the members of any community may by degrees be trained to live without idleness, without poverty, without crime, and without punishment; for each of these is the effect of error in the various systems prevalent throughout the world.”¹⁹

A central component to Owen’s plan was the construction of a building at New Lanark, which he called the New Institution, as a center for training the village’s inhabitants in his new system. The New Institution provided the inhabitants of New Lanark with the necessary facilities and administrators of the proper forms of infant training, recreation, childhood education, evening lectures, and church, all in accordance with the Owenite plan. The implementation of this system, he surmised, would result in the formation of characters “that in true knowledge, and in every good and valuable quality, will not only greatly surpass the wise and learned of the present and preceding times, but will appear, as they really will be, a race of rational or superior beings.”²⁰

The church established at the New Institution would not teach “uncertain legends of the days of dark and gross ignorance,” according to Owen, but “universally revealed facts, which cannot but be true.”²¹ “A religion of this character,” he wrote in an 1823 editorial, “must be devoid of forms, ceremonies, and mysteries; for those constitute the errors of all the existing systems, and of all those which have hitherto created anger, and produced violence and bloodshed throughout society.” In the place of religious doctrines, Owen’s religion would seek the undeniable and consistent truths of nature. “Such religion will possess whatever is valuable ... and exclude whatever is erroneous,” according to Owen, “and, in due time, a religion of this character, freed from every inconsistency, shall be promulgated.”²²

While yet a child of age ten, Owen noted in his autobiography, his personal studies constrained him to believe “that there must be something fundamentally wrong in all religions, as they had been taught up to that period.”²³ In an effort to discover “the true religion,” Owen carefully studied and compared the various religions of the world. “Before my investigations were concluded,” he wrote, “I was satisfied that one and all had emanated from the same source, and their varieties from the same false imaginations of our early ancestors.”²⁴ All religions, he later commented, “contain too much error to be of any utility in the present advanced state of the human mind.”²⁵ As a result, Owen claimed to have rejected Christianity and all other forms of religion.²⁶ His frequent references to natural law, rationalism, and the Creator, however, indicate that he was actually a deist who rejected all formal religious sects and organizations.²⁷

Owen’s animosity toward religion advanced beyond mere disagreement; he ultimately sought the total annihilation of religion. “There is no sacrifice at any period, which I could make, that would not have been willingly and joyously made to terminate the existence of religion on earth,” he wrote.²⁸ “In everything I attempted for the advance and permanent benefit of the human race,” he explained, “I was always checked and obstructed in my straightforward and honest progress by religion.”²⁹ The doctrines of religion “create and perpetuate... a total want of mental charity among men,” and “generate superstitions, bigotry, hypocrisy, hatred, revenge, wars, and all their evil consequences.”³⁰ Therefore, Owen argued, rational thought and permanent happiness can only be attained when “the human mind shall be cleared from all religious fallacies and all dependence upon religious forms and ceremonies.”³¹

OWEN’S SOCIAL SYSTEM IN THE NEW WORLD

Certain of the ultimate success of his plan for social reform, Owen abandoned his normal activities by 1817 and began a crusade for the restructuring of British society into a series of “villages of unity and cooperation” modeled after the community he formed at New Lanark.³² If the money used for public support of the destitute would be applied to the creation of self-supporting villages of between 500 and 1,500 residents, he insisted, his plan would be so successful that “no complaints of any kind will be heard in society” and “evils . . . will permanently cease.”³³ Moreover, he asserted, “one of these new associations cannot be formed without creating a general desire throughout society to establish others, and ... they will rapidly multiply.”³⁴ Historian G. D. H. Cole contends that Owen’s social system became “the germ of Socialism and of Co-operation.”³⁵

With little progress having been made in Europe by 1824, however, the news that the New Harmony settlement of the Rappites was for sale in America left Owen wondering whether a fresh start in a new land might be the impetus he needed to bring his system into reality. Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877), the second of Owen’s eight children,³⁶ recounted in his autobiography the occasion when Richard Flower, an English agriculturist who had emigrated to the United States, approached his father with information about the Rappite desire to sell New Harmony. “The offer tempted my father,” the younger Owen recalled. “Here was a village ready built, a territory capable of supporting tens of thousands in a country where the expression of thought was free, and where the people were unsophisticated.” To the utter shock of Flower, who found it unfathomable that Owen would surrender his wealth and position in Great Britain to move to the American west, Owen agreed to purchase New Harmony as the site for his social system. “My father’s one ruling desire,” Robert Dale Owen wrote, “was for a vast theatre on which to try his plans of social reform.”³⁷ On January 3, 1825, the deal for New Harmony was sealed, and by April 1825 Owen’s social experiment began at his newly purchased settlement in southwestern Indiana.

Though Owen’s hopes for New Harmony came to a costly and miserable end in April 1828, his aspirations for reforming society and expectations for future success were largely left untarnished. During the summer of 1828—following both the demise of New Harmony and his agreement to debate Campbell—Owen considered an even grander experiment for his social system. In his Memorial of Robert Owen to the Mexican Republic, and the Government of Coahuila and Texas, published in September 1828, Owen requested that the Republic of Mexico award him the Provinces of Coahuila and Texas as the new proving ground for his ideas. From his past experiments in Great Britain, he explained, he had “ascertained the principles of the sciences by which a superior character can be formed... and by which a superfluity of wealth can be created and secured for all without injury to any.” Furthermore, his more recent experiments in the United States have shown him “the difficulties which the existing institutions and prejudices have created in the present adult population to make the change from the old to the New State of society under any of the existing laws or forms of governments.” Therefore, to insure the success of his plan, Owen requested that the government of Mexico provide him with “a new country,” independent of interference from the United States or Mexico, “in which the laws and institutions shall be formed in conformity with the principles on which the great amelioration is to be achieved.”³⁸

From England, where he had sailed in July 1828 following his meeting with Campbell to establish the preliminaries of their debate, Owen traveled to Vera Cruz, Mexico. Vincente Guerrero, the newly installed president of Mexico, and Antonio Lopez Santa Anna, Mexico’s military leader, met with Owen when he arrived in their country in December 1828. According to Owen’s recounting of the incident, both Guerrero and Santa Anna were favorable to his proposal and promised him a large tract of land upon which his social experiment could be enacted. The dream of testing his system in Mexico, however, came to an abrupt end before it ever began. No land was ever offered to Owen by the Mexican government, and he soon had to depart for Cincinnati, Ohio, where he and Campbell agreed to begin their discussion on the second Monday of April 1829.³⁹

PRELIMINARIES TO THE DEBATE

The months preceding the debate were no less hectic for Campbell than they were for his opponent. “Mr. Campbell had but little time to prepare for the approaching debate,” his biographer wrote. “In addition to his editorial duties and his immense correspondence, as well as his ministerial and other engagements, he had on hand a new edition of the Testament in a more portable form, demanding great attention.”⁴⁰ Nevertheless, Campbell did not regard Owen lightly. As a social philosopher and a champion of unbelief, Owen was highly acclaimed in both America and Europe, and Campbell recognized him as a capable adversary. “When we consider his superior opportunities from age, traveling, conversation, and extensive reading for many years, added to the almost entire devotion of his mind to his peculiar views during a period as long as we have lived,” Campbell wrote, “we should fear the result of such a discussion.” Nevertheless, he went on to say, victory will result from “the invincible, irrefragable, and triumphant evidences” for the Christian religion.⁴¹

Excitement ran high in Cincinnati as the two disputants made their way to the Queen City of the West. The week before the debate’s onset, Cincinnati’s newly elected mayor, Isaac G. Burnet, called a meeting of some of the city’s leading citizens to make final arrangements for the event. Burnet appointed a committee of ten to request use of the First Presbyterian Chinch, the largest facility in the city, to house the debate.⁴² Dr. Joshua L. Wilson, the church’s minister and a leading figure among the Old School Presbyterians, however, forthrightly declined their appeal.⁴³ Frances Trollope, a British visitor to America who observed the debate, noted that Wilson’s “refusal was greatly reprobated, and much regretted, as the curiosity to hear the discussion was very general, and no other edifice offered so much accommodation.”⁴⁴ Application was next made to the Methodists for use of their largest structure to house the debate. Permission was readily granted for the event to be held in the Old Stone Church, a building with a seating capacity of approximately one-thousand people.

The widespread publicity that the debate received, when coupled with the topic and the noteworthy adversaries, brought spectators to Cincinnati from as far away as New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi. Overflowing audiences of “more than 1,200 persons” attended each session of the debate,⁴⁵ and Campbell reported that “many were forced to return to their homes in a day or two from the difficulty of getting seats.”⁴⁶ Amid such a large audience, all of the available sources report that the spectators were courteous and attentive throughout the course of the debate.

Upon their arrivals in Cincinnati, Campbell and Owen each selected three moderators, who then selected a seventh moderator.⁴⁷ The propositions to be discussed were the five issues of Owen’s challenge to the clergy of New Orleans:

1. That all the religions of the world have been founded on the ignorance of mankind.
2. That they are directly opposed to the never-changing laws of our nature.
3. That they have been, and are, the real sources of vice, disunion, and misery of every description.
4. That they are now the only real bar to the formation of a society of virtue, intelligence, sincerity, and benevolence.
5. That they can be no longer maintained except through the ignorance of the mass of the people, and the tyranny of the few over the mass.⁴⁸

Preliminary to the debate’s commencement, it was agreed that each of the disputants would alternately speak for half an hour. Owen, having taken the affirmative positions, would begin the discussion. Charles H. Simms, a stenographer from Cincinnati, was employed to record the arguments of the disputants for future publication.

THE DEBATE BEGINS

Owen’s opening remarks on Monday, April 13, 1829, inaugurated eight days of debate that Trollope described as “a spectacle unprecedented ... in any age or country,”⁴⁹ and which Timothy Flint referred to as “the combat, unparalleled in the annals of disputation.”⁵⁰ “Dressed in Quaker plainness; wearing his customary, undaunted, self-possessed, good natured face,”⁵¹ Owen imparted to the audience his reasons for believing in environmental determinism and the events that led to the present meeting between himself and Campbell. In rejoinder, Campbell read a manuscript—the only document he used in the debate that had been prepared in advance of the event—extolling the value and defensibility of Christianity. “For the present generation and the succeeding I have been made willing to undertake to show that there is no good reason for rejecting the testimony of the apostles and prophets,” he exclaimed, “but all the reason which rational beings can demand for the sincere belief and cordial reception of the Christian religion.”⁵²

In his second speech, Owen began reading a lengthy document that listed and described what he referred to as “the divine, unchanging laws of human nature.” These twelve “fundamental laws of human nature” (see Appendix A) were an outgrowth of Owen’s doctrine of circumstance and the basis of his argument in the debate. If properly carried out, he believed they would “produce, in practice, all virtue in the individual and in society, sufficient to enable man ... to ‘work out his own salvation’ from sin or ignorance and misery, and to secure the happiness of his whole race.”⁵³ Using the phraseology of a Christian revival preacher, Owen further announced that the change that “can be wrought simply by acquiring a knowledge of these eternal and immutable facts” is that “you can be born again” and receive “the regeneration which you and past generations have been looking for.”⁵⁴

Figure 4 – Robert Owen (c.1823)

In a famous Fourth of July oration to the inhabitants of his New Harmony settlement, Robert Owen (1771-1858) claimed there were three great evils that must be eradicated so that a universal period of peace and prosperity could be introduced to the world. Owen's three great evils were private property ownership, individual marriage, and religion. His objections to religion led to the 1829 debate with Campbell in which the evidences of Christianity were discussed.

Figure 5 – Alexander Campbell (c.1829)

At the age of forty-one, Alexander Campbell publicly defended Christianity against the skeptical attacks of Robert Owen in an eight-day debate in Cincinnati, Ohio. Campbell, at the time, was a relatively unknown leader of an antebellum movement to restore Christianity to its primitive form. His opponent, however, was the unrivalled champion of unbelief on two continents.

As the contest proceeded, Owen failed to address the issues raised by Campbell, but used his time to repeat, explain, and emphasize his twelve natural laws and their bearing on individual and social development. “These twelve fundamental laws of human nature (divine in every sense of the word),” he stated, “demonstrate that all the religions of the world have been founded in ignorance, and are opposed to our nature.”⁵⁵ In the course of the discussion, Owen repeated these laws no less than twelve times, sending a wave of laughter throughout the audience each time he revisited his listing of these “gems” of human nature. “All that Mr. Owen said or read,” an observer of the contest wrote, “was predicated upon these twelve laws.”⁵⁶ Moreover, “to outline these twelve laws,” Bill Humble contends, “is to summarize every argument made by Owen during the course of the entire debate!”⁵⁷

Campbell reacted to Owen’s inventory of natural laws by questioning his opponent’s approach to debate and challenging the significance of the information he had imparted. To which of the five propositions, he asked, are the twelve laws offered as evidence? “What may logically prove the first position,” he explained, “cannot, ex necessitate, prove the last.”⁵⁸ The rules of debate require the disputants to provide logical argumentation upon each individual proposition. “The same matter cannot be received in evidence of each position,” he contended, “it must apply to some one [proposition] in particular; it cannot [be applied] to all, unless they be identical positions.” Furthermore, argued Campbell, even if all of Owen’s laws were acceded to, it would still fail to offer a rational verification for his propositions. “All this time I should have been proving or disproving some position bearing upon the great question at issue,” he stated. “Instead of this, I must hear Mr. Owen reading upon a variety of topics having no legitimate bearing upon the subject matter before us.”⁵⁹

During a midday intermission, the moderators discussed Campbell’s concerns and agreed with his assessment of the debate’s proceedings. Upon returning for the afternoon session, the chairman of the moderators announced that Owen’s challenge contained five distinct propositions that should be individually addressed. “It is therefore expected,” he continued, “that the discussion, this afternoon, will be founded on, and confined to, this first proposition, viz.: ‘that all religions are founded in ignorance.’”⁶⁰ Their directive for the procedure of the contest, however, had little impact on Owen. He continued to expound his fundamental laws of human nature as the only argument he carried in his arsenal against religion.

Throughout the discussion, Campbell consistently appealed to a modified form of the Ontological Argument for God’s existence—a classical Christian apologetic.⁶¹ Campbell’s philosophical defense of theism grew out of his epistemological belief that all knowledge and understanding derives from sensory perception and the operation of the mind upon these perceptions. Locke, Hume, and the metaphysical philosophers, he maintained, “agree that all our original ideas are the result of sensation and reflection.” Thus, “our five senses are the only avenue through which ideas of material objects can be derived to us.” With this in mind, he asked, “how can we have any idea, the archetype of which does not exist in nature?”

We have an idea of God, of a Creator, a being who has produced the whole material universe by the bare exhibition of physical creative power. This idea, we contend, can have no archetype in nature, because we have never seen anything produced out of nothing. But we have the idea of the existence of this creative power. It is to be found in almost all religions. If we appeal to traditionary or historic evidence, we shall find that all nations had originally some ideas of the existence of a Great First Cause. But the difficulty is—how did the idea originate? By what process could it have been engendered? Where was the archetype in nature to suggest... the remotest idea of a Creator, or any other idea concerning spiritual things?

While admitting with Locke and Hume that the imagination “can abstract, compound, and combine the qualities of objects already known, and thus form new creations ad infinitum,” Campbell also noted that the imagination “borrows all the original qualities from the other faculties of the mind, and from the external senses.” Therefore, “to form ideas concerning spiritual things, imagination has to travel out of her province.” Carrying this argument further, Campbell proposed five questions that he requested his opponent attempt to answer:

1. Can man, by the exercise of his mental powers, originate language? And even suppose he could invent names for external sensible objects, could he also originate the terms peculiar to religion, for which he has no types in the sensible creation?
2. Must not the object or idea exist prior to the name or term by which it is designated? For example, the term “steamboat,” a word invented in our time—was not the object in existence before this name was found in our vocabulary?
3. Must not the idea of the existence of any particular object, be prior to the idea of any of its properties? Or can we conceive of the properties of a thing, before we have an idea of that thing’s existence?
4. How, then, do we become conscious of the idea of spirit, our consciousness being limited to the objects of sensation, perception, and memory; and, consequently, all our mental operation being necessarily confined to the same objects?
5. Does not our belief, as well as our knowledge and experience depend upon our mental operations?⁶²

Claiming Campbell’s questions were irrelevant to the issue at hand, Owen refused to even consider them, but continued to expound his twelve laws of human nature. Campbell countered Owen’s assertion by stating that the questions he had posed in his previous address were the natural outflowing of the topic under discussion. “He proposed to prove all religions human,” Campbell quipped, “therefore he must show that human beings could invent them.”⁶³

Campbell further responded to Owen’s persistent exposition of his twelve laws of nature by calling upon his opponent to explain “who, or what is nature?” The skeptics claim “man is the work of nature,” Campbell explained, thus he is bound by the “laws of nature.” Yet, these same skeptics render nature to be nothing more than “an abstract being” consisting of “the great whole that results from the assemblages of different matter, of its different combinations, and of their different motion which the Universe presents to view.” As nothing more than a combination of matter and motion, Campbell asked, can nature truly be a creator or a lawgiver?⁶⁴ Once again, Owen refused so much as even to attempt an answer to Campbell’s question, but continued the delineation of his twelve natural laws. Campbell later explained that the one who created the matter and motion of nature is himself the “God of Nature” and the universal lawgiver who is found in the pages of the Bible.⁶⁵

Aggravated by Owen’s incessant repetition of his twelve laws and wanting to prod his opponent into a proposition-by-proposition discussion, Campbell responded to Owen’s eighth address by conceding that his natural laws have some value. “They are true in very many instances,” he admitted, “but are false in his universal application of them.”⁶⁶ Owen, he went on to say, seems to believe that “the Christian scriptures must tumble to the ground” if his twelve laws can be proven correct. “I have very little scruple or hesitancy in admitting all his facts, save one,” Campbell claimed, “and yet I cannot perceive how they contravene any part of Christianity.”⁶⁷

While Owen remained unwilling to enter into a proposition-by-proposition foray, he did, after another restatement of his twelve laws, begin an explanation of the social reform that he believed his system would introduce to humanity. Religion, he proclaimed, would be divested of its rites and ceremonies in his system, and truth would make itself known in the hearts of all men.⁶⁸ In addition, Owen suggested that his social system would render private property (which he deemed to be the source of all selfishness, poverty, and jealousy), human laws, wars, marriage, and government totally unnecessary. The enactment of this social system, he told his audience, would inaugurate a secular millennial society that would generate the characteristics of life that Owen considered essential for genuine human happiness.

MILLENNIAL OPTIMISM

Reflecting the optimism that permeated America’s early antebellum period, both Owen and Campbell were certain that the reforming impulse of their society was laying the foundation for an approaching period of millennial perfection. To Owen, the implementation of his social scheme was the final component that would be necessary for the creation of a secular millennium throughout the world. He was convinced, however, that the world’s religions “are now the only obstacles in the way of forming a society over the earth, of kindness, intelligence, sincerity, and prosperity in the fullest sense of the term.”⁶⁹ Even so, Owen was confident that his contemporaries would reject religion and accept his plans for universal improvement. Thus, he unwaveringly declared his work and the other reform activities of his era as “the commencement of a search into the real nature of existing facts which will bring about the millennium.”⁷⁰ He also noted that Campbell would ultimately accept the Owenite system and “assist in hastening [the millennium’s] arrival, for he has a strong yearning after an improved state of society which he calls the millennium.”⁷¹

With a similar optimism about society’s advancements, Campbell saw his era of humanity progressively moving forward toward a golden millennial age. He refused, however, to accede to Owen’s prophecies about the future. “How comes it that Mr. Owen talks with so much certainty about what will come to pass hereafter! No man can speak of the future, pretending any certain knowledge, but the Christian. Here the infidel’s candle goes out, and except he obtains some oil from the lamp of revelation, he must continue in perpetual darkness.”⁷² Campbell also refused to believe that the final and perfect millennial state could be inaugurated by anything other than the advancement of the Christian religion. Owen’s belief that society could only reach its final stage of improvement with the demise of religion was fallacious to Campbell. “It is surely a novel species of logic,” he insisted, “to argue, that, because we shall have better houses, and better schools, and must have new bridges, etc., therefore the Christian religion must be false.”⁷³ To the contrary, Campbell contended, “let the Christian religion be taught in its purity, and cordially embraced, and it will exalt man higher, and render him incomparably more happy than Mr. Owen has ever conceived of.”⁷⁴

In addition to identifying religion as the enemy of the millennium, Owen repeatedly criticized religion—with particular reference to Christianity and the Bible—as the enemy of nature and humanity. “The systems of religion... are derived from the wildest vagaries of fancy; they are but the air-built fabrics of imagination,” he claimed.⁷⁵ The devil, along with many other personalities and events recorded in the Bible, are merely “fanciful notions” accepted only by those whose circumstances have taught them to believe thusly.⁷⁶ As a result, religion’s only real contributions to society, according to Owen, are vice, human disunion, poverty, insanity, ignorance, and anger. Should religion be extricated from society, the millennium would arise out of necessity, he claimed, because the problems of society would be abolished.

QUESTIONING OWEN’S DOCTRINE OF DETERMINISM

Taking Owen’s doctrine of environmental determinism into consideration, Campbell asked his opponent to explain how he alone managed to escape his circumstances and recognize the rational and perfect system of nature that he propagates as the source of human happiness and fulfillment.

Mr. Owen was himself educated in a family of Episcopalians; is he now an Episcopalian? We see that the circumstances of his education could not shackle his active mind. We see that he has broken his chains, and that his emancipated mind now walks abroad, as if it had never known a fetter. This shows that there are some geniuses formed to overcome all disadvantages, to grasp a whole system, as it were by intuition; that in some minds there is a renovating and regenerating power, paramount even to the influence of circumstances, omnipotent as my friend represents them to be. Now if this be true, in Mr. Owen’s regard, why may it not be equally so with respect to countless other persons?⁷⁷

Furthermore, Campbell solicited his adversary’s clarification of the source of the “irrational and anti-natural” system that now prevails upon society. If man originated in and is governed by the rational and perfect laws of nature, as suggested by Owen, and man is unable to change the circumstances that have formed his character, then how did man enter into the present system of irrationality and unnaturalness? Christianity provides an explanation for this dilemma, Campbell explained, but the Owenite system cannot.⁷⁸

Not only does Christianity provide an answer to the problems that Owen cannot handle, Campbell argued, but Christianity is also the fountainhead of many deistic principles and beliefs. While deists talk about the “light of nature” and “the great God of nature,” Campbell went on to state, they have no basis upon which to establish their philosophical claims when they deny the validity of divine revelation. The very premises of their system, he insisted, show that their conclusions do not logically follow. Deists present their system as a philosophical midpoint that avoids the extremes of atheism or Christianity, he added, but “there is no stopping place between Atheism and Christianity.”⁷⁹

Keenly aware of Owen’s background at New Lanark and the circumstances that influenced him, Campbell went on to ask if Owen’s system was not actually a product of the Christianity that he condemns. Did the Owenite social system actually arise from the observations of human nature, he inquired, or did it originate in the Christian circumstances of Scotland? In response to his own question, Campbell alleged that “it was the Christian benevolence of Mr. Dale which prompted him [Owen] to invent a plan for the education of the children of the poor. By instituting a system of co-operation, Mr. Dale was enabled to sustain five hundred poor children at one time, who were collected in the manufactories, which he controlled, and were there maintained and educated by his philanthropy. And to these circumstances, instituted by Mr. Dale, is Mr. Owen indebted for the origination of his new views of society.”⁸⁰

Owen conceded to Campbell’s “surmise that the Christian religion was the foundation of this system,” but went on to suggest that it “was not founded in the truth of the Christian religion.” Upon studying Christianity and various other religions, he assured the audience, he became convinced that religion was not true and “that something else must be true, and it is highly important to discover what it is.” This conviction, he explained, inspired him to embark on a search for truth that ultimately produced the social system and the twelve natural laws that he proceeded to elucidate yet again.⁸¹

CAMPBELL TAKES THE OFFENSIVE

Disappointed that Owen again returned to a listing of his twelve natural laws, Campbell announced in his sixteenth response to Owen that he would move from a defensive to an offensive posture. “I did expect to have matters of fact plainly, rationally, and logically presented,” Campbell explained, and “I did expect to witness a powerful display of that reason which skeptics so much adore.” Yet the only thing Campbell professed to have received from his adversary was “intangible verbiage.” “I see plainly that there is nothing left for me but to proceed to avail myself of this opportunity of presenting the true grounds and solid reasons on which we Christians build our faith.”⁸² The mere recognition of Owen’s arguments as being worthy of notice, Campbell thought, was a deprivation of the “opportunity to advance any good arguments in favor of Christianity.”⁸³

Having little more than his oft-repeated-and-explained natural laws to support his debate objectives, Owen concluded his twenty-second speech by giving Campbell permission to prosecute his arguments without interruption until he satisfactorily completed his case. At that point, Owen said, he would be prepared with a rejoinder.⁸⁴ This opened the door for what Jesse James Haley has obsequiously described as “the historic speech of the century, not only in duration but in illuminative and constructive power of solid and brilliant argumentation.”⁸⁵ In a masterful twelve-hour discourse—delivered over three days in two-hour speeches from 10:00 a.m. to noon and 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.—Campbell displayed a vast knowledge of nearly every aspect of the debate’s content.⁸⁶ At the outset of this lecture, Campbell told the audience that he would address four issues: the historic evidences of the Christian religion, the prophetic evidences of Christianity, the arguments formed from the “genius and tendency” of the Christian faith, and the faults associated with the Social System of Robert Owen.

So impressive was Campbell’s address that even Owen conceded that his opponent “appears to me to have done his duty manfully, and with a zeal that would have been creditable to any of the primitive fathers of the church.” “His learning, his industry, and some very extraordinary talents for supporting the cause which he advocates,” Owen went on to say, “have been conspicuous.” Most impressive to Owen, however, was Campbell’s

downright honesty and fairness in what he believes to be the cause of truth. He says to his opponent: “I am strong in the cause I advocate: it is from heaven; and I fear not what man can do against it. I am ready to meet you at any time and place, provided I may reply to you, and that our arguments shall go together to the public, to pass its ordeal, and await its ultimate calm decision.” Now, this is a straight-forward proceeding in the investigation of truth which I have long sought for, but which, until now, I have sought for in vain. The friends of truth, therefore, on whichever side the question it may be found, are now more indebted to Mr. Campbell than any other Christian minister of the present day.⁸⁷

Nevertheless, Owen also made it clear that Campbell’s arguments had failed to deter him from his mission to create a new society devoid of all religion. “Christianity is not of divine origin,” he further stated, and “its doctrines are now anything but beneficial to mankind.” Moreover, he proclaimed Christianity “the greatest curse with which our race is at this time afflicted” and said the weekly preaching of Christian ministers in the nation’s churches is “the most despotic power in the world.” Yet, in the midst of the grim circumstances that Owen accused Christianity of producing, he steadfastly maintained that his system would yield “the most mighty change which the world has yet experienced.” “There is no power on earth that can resist its progress,” he announced.⁸⁸

Exasperated by Owen’s indefensible claims and failure to tackle the issues of the debate in a logical discussion, Campbell lashed out at his opponent’s tactics. “We met him on his own five propositions, on which he defied the world,” said Campbell, yet “Mr. Owen has only repeated over and over the same dogmas” and “has in every instance refused joining issue either upon his own propositions or mine.” Furthermore, he “has met all sorts of argument by mere assertions, by mere declamation.” “We did most certainly expect,” Campbell confessed, “that he would reason and not merely assert.”⁸⁹ Because of Owen’s inability to support his ideas or offer substantive responses to the arguments presented in defense of Christianity, Campbell acknowledged that he had been led to “entertain some hopes that when Mr. Owen arose, he was about to concede that he had been mistaken; that Christianity is what it purports to be—a revelation from God.”⁹⁰

Figure 6 – Campbell-Owen Debate (1829)

When British author Frances Trollope (1780-1863) embarked upon a three-year excursion through the United States, French artist Auguste Jean Hierveau (1794-1880) accompanied her to produce Illustrations for a book she planned to write about her journey. Among the twenty-four lithographs Hierveau contributed to Trollope's book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, was an India ink sketch of the Campbell-Owen debate in progress. Hierveau's sketch portrays Robert Owen standing behind a desk, Alexander Campbell seated to Owen's left, and stenographer Charles Simms seated on the stage at Owen's right and taking notes of the debate's proceedings. Peering down from the pulpit behind the disputants is the ghostly face of Thomas Campbell.

Unmoved by Campbell’s allegations, however, Owen completed his part of the debate by yet again listing and describing the twelve natural laws. Campbell, on the other hand, brought the contest to its ultimate conclusion by providing a visual survey of the debate’s impact. He first sought to show the success of his arguments by calling upon “all the persons in this assembly who believe in the Christian religion or who feel so much interest in it, as to wish to see it pervade the world,” to signify their belief by standing up. The response was “almost universal.” He then demonstrated the failed contentions of his antagonist by asking “all persons doubtful of the truth of the Christian religion, or who do not believe it, and who are not friendly to its spread and prevalence over the world,” to indicate their belief in the same manner. Only three people rose to their feet.⁹¹ Campbell and his supporters accepted the outcome of this maneuver as evidence of an overwhelming victory in the Christian battle against skepticism.

AFTERMATH OF THE DEBATE

Almost immediately, the media hailed Campbell as the victor in his debate with Owen. While the “Cincinnati papers” were silent on the arguments of the debate, according to the editor of the Ohio State Journal, they stated “that the public voice was unanimous in awarding the victory to Mr. Campbell.”⁹² In addition, the editor of the Cincinnati Pandect expressed his agreement “with the general opinion expressed, that Mr. Campbell had decidedly the advantage over his opponent and managed the defence [sic] of the Christian cause, in an able and interesting manner.” Furthermore, the Pandect editor announced, “more than one individual previously inclined to skepticism, or confirmed in it, have, during the discussion, had their doubts and difficulties entirely solved, and now express a full conviction of the truth of Christianity.”⁹³

Noting that he was “not among those who anticipated any very beneficial results from this meeting,” the editor of The Cincinnati Chronicle and Literary Gazette reported afterward that he envisions “a result from the controversy, more beneficial than was generally expected prior to its commencement.” “All admit,” the editor went on to claim, “that the talent, the skill in debate, and the weight of proof, were on the side of Mr. Campbell.”

With an acute, vigorous mind, quick perceptions, and rapid powers of combination, he has sorely puzzled his antagonist, and at the same time both delighted and instructed his audience by his masterly defense of the truth, divine origin and inestimable importance of Christianity. That Mr. Campbell would bring forward any new facts upon this subject was not to be expected, but he has arranged, combined, and enforced those already existing, in a manner well calculated, to carry, as we are informed it has in several instances, conviction to the doubting and skeptical mind.

Owen’s adherents “appear to be sadly disappointed,” the editor wrote, and “the disciples of infidelity, have either been shaken in their faith, or provoked, that their cause should have been so seriously injured by mismanagement and feebleness.”⁹⁴ Furthermore, the editor of the Washington City Chronicle, when responding to a debate proposal by Robert Dale Owen, suggested that the Owenites reserve “their ammunition for the formidable enemy who has so signally triumphed over the founder of their system.”⁹⁵ Even Timothy Flint, editor of the Western Monthly Review and one of Owen’s choices as a debate moderator, concluded his analysis of the contest by writing: “Campbell left on the far greater portion of the audience an impression of him, of his talents and powers, and his victory over his antagonist, almost as favorable, as he could have desired.”⁹⁶

OWEN’S RETREAT TO EUROPE

Disappointed by his failed efforts at New Harmony, his inability to receive a land grant from Mexico, and the futility of his ideas at the public discussion in Cincinnati, Owen chose to return to Europe in the months that followed the debate’s termination. Before his departure, however, Owen wrote a reply to Campbell that he hoped would rectify the abject perception of his debate performance.⁹⁷ Though largely a reprinting and more complete explanation of his addresses in the debate, Owen also included his observations about the contest and a narrative of his dealings with Mexico. Nevertheless, his book had little influence and added nothing new to the ideas he expressed during the discussion.

With his plans set for his return to Europe, Owen had little time or desire to participate in the publication of the debate. Consequently, he sold his interest in the discussion to Campbell, who immediately began the work of preparing the disputation for publication. Before departing America, however, Owen made “a long visit to Bethany... and wrote off or corrected several of his Speeches.”⁹⁸ Prior to the conclusion of 1829, the written debate made its way through two widely distributed editions. It would ultimately go through five editions and twenty printings, with the last in 1957.

Upon returning to England, Owen continued to promote his social ideas and his certainty of the positive results his plans would have on society. Through an unrelenting barrage of publications and lectures, Owen persisted in his call for the establishment of his cooperative communities and the secular millennium that would follow. As his ideas gaining a hearing among the working classes, Owen’s philosophy assisted the advancement of the trade union movement that swept across England’s industrial centers in the early 1830s. Among his disciples was Frederick Engels, who eventually joined forces with Karl Marx to formulate the revolutionary doctrines of the Communist Manifesto. As an expression of his admiration for Owen, Engels later wrote that “every social movement, every real advance in England on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of Robert Owen.”⁹⁹

Owen also maintained his attack on religion throughout the remainder of his life. Ever the foe of Christianity, Owen engaged himself in three additional debates with Christians after he returned to Great Britain. Opposed by Reverend John H. Roebuck in 1837, Reverend William Legg in 1839, and Reverend John Brindley in 1841, Owen repeated his oft-stated contention that religion is the source of all human misery and that his system would remedy all social ills. Ironically, however, Owen abandoned his total rejection of religion during the final five years of his life. To the surprise of many, he became an active spiritualist in 1853. Claiming to have communicated with the spirits of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the Duke of Kent, and a number of the deceased members of his own family, Owen used his spiritual contacts to confirm “the correctness of his plans for the new moral world.”¹⁰⁰

Though disheartened by America’s rejection of his plans at the time of his 1829 departure for Europe, Owen returned to the United States in 1844 with a renewed confidence and enthusiasm about the plausibility of his social schemes. In a published address that he delivered shortly after his arrival in New York, Owen declared that he had come “to effect in peace the greatest revolution ever yet made in human society.”¹⁰¹ Once again, however, his “revolution” failed to sway the course that the citizens of America had chosen to follow.

During his stay in America Owen had the opportunity to call on Campbell, who was in New York as he prepared for a preaching tour of Europe. Campbell provided a description of the visit to his daughter, who published her father’s letter in the Millennial Harbinger. “The old gentleman shows as few of the scars of time upon his face as any man of his years that I know,” Campbell wrote. Moreover, the failure of Owen’s “ill-digested Socialism,” he remarked, has failed to dim “his unyielding good nature and peculiar indifference as to public opinion.” “He never alluded to the scenes of Cincinnati,” Campbell observed, “but with the most perfect courtesy and kind feelings inquired after every thing interesting to me, and especially after the health and happiness of your grand-father.”¹⁰²

Owen returned to Europe in 1848, maintaining a rigorous schedule for the promotion of his social ideas throughout the remainder of his life. On November 17,1858, Owen died in the Bear Hotel of Newtown, North Wales, next door to the house in which he had been born eighty-nine years earlier. Noting the death of Owen, Campbell wrote:

for gentlemanly courtesy, good nature, and general candor and straight-forwardness as a debatant, Robert Owen excelled all other men with whom I have ever argumentatively discussed any religious question. In our protracted discussion of the evidences and claims of the Christian Gospel, and the Christian Scriptures, he never lost his equanimity or courtesy, and well sustained the character and candor of a gentleman and a philosopher. He spent some time at my residence in reading the proof sheets of the debate while issuing from the press—and not one discourteous or discordant word ever fell from his lips during his sojourn, and our corrections of the proofs. In this respect he excelled every Sectary with whom I presumed to dissent, or to discuss any religious or moral question.¹⁰³

THE IMPACT OF THE DEBATE ON CAMPBELL

For Campbell, the debate with Owen would significantly influence the remainder of both his life and career. Prior to the contest, Campbell had a rather limited reputation in which he was viewed as a suspicious backwoods advocate of a new religious movement. After facing Owen, however, he gained an international reputation as a respectable Christian leader and a stalwart defender of the Christian faith. In 1843, when Robert J. Breckenridge, a prominent leader among the Presbyterians, was asked to defend his denomination in a debate with Campbell, he emphatically declared his admiration for Campbell, saying, “No Sir, I will never be Alexander Campbell’s opponent. A man who has done what he has to defend Christianity against infidelity ... I will never oppose in public debate. I esteem him too highly.”¹⁰⁴

Campbell’s debate with Owen also formalized his arguments against the opponents of Christianity. Not only did he use the same refutations of skepticism throughout the remainder of his career, but he frequently referred to the Owen debate and the value of the contest to Christianity. When an “occasional reader” of Campbell’s “debates and periodicals” complained that he could not fully accept the Christian Scriptures, Campbell observed that the letter writer must have been only an “occasional” reader, “else the difficulties complained of would not at this time beset his mind.” He went on to recommend “not an occasional, but a thorough perusal of the ‘Owen and Campbell Debate’ on the evidences of Christianity,” among several other books.¹⁰⁵ Furthermore, when Campbell re-read the debate in 1852 to prepare it for a new printing, he noted that he had not read the book since his initial reading for its first appearance. “I must say, that I am better pleased with it than I expected to be,” he announced to his readers. “It is yet as necessary to be read by sceptics of all schools, free thinkers, slave thinkers, and no thinkers, and perhaps by weak Christians, and certain other persons who cannot be named, as it was when pronounced and first printed.”¹⁰⁶

Finally, Campbell’s public discussion with Owen also opened the door for additional confrontations with the advocates of freethought. Claiming that the debate “will prove... that no Christian has any reason to blush, or be ashamed of the foundation of his hope, or of his religion,”¹⁰⁷ Campbell confidently challenged the enemies of Christianity to bring their criticisms into the realm of public scrutiny. “I have invited any gentleman who may be in possession of any historic, philosophic, or logical objection to my argument, to adduce it either orally or in writing,” he declared.¹⁰⁸ Thus the opponents of the Christian faith, provoked by Campbell’s widely acclaimed victory over Owen and his fearless defiance of the advocates of skepticism, viewed Campbell as both the leading Christian apologist of his day and an obstacle that must be overcome if they ever hoped to challenge the claims of Christianity.