Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the Scandinavian freethinker movement of the 1860s and 1870s. Constituted by the socialist workers' movement and the radical intelligence, the paper explores the rapidly changing plausibility structures by which secularity became a "modern" cultural identity.

Paper long abstract:

By the second half of the nineteenth century, the term «freethinker» which had denoted adherents of a «rational religion» or alternative faith was repurposed to denote proponents of radical secularism. In the Scandinavian countries, this radical secularism emerged at the interface of the socialist workers' movement and the radical intelligence. What it means to be secular was defined through socio-political opposition as much as through new literary aesthetics. By the early 1870s, the movement created a narrative culture that provided detailed scripts of how free thought was to be embodied, enacted, and used to engage with the world in a new way. Here, religious and secular people were presented as belonging to different species, marked by irreconcilable perceptions of the world. Using a cognitive history framework to approach the descriptive freethinker narratives presented in tabloids, literary works, polemics, and treatises as prescriptive attentional protocols, this paper explores the rapidly changing plausibility structures that allowed secularity to be developed into a decidedly "modern" cultural identity that "came natural."