Looking Back on Liberal, the Midwest's Failed Atheist Utopia

[rug]

By Thomas Gounley
September 19, 2016

Liberal, Missouri looks indistinguishable from any other tiny town in the Midwest. There's a sleepy business district and a single gas station that serves its 750 residents. There are rows of houses and more than half a dozen churches interspersed between them. This part of the state, after all, is one of the most religious parts of the country, with a sizable evangelical Christian population.

But it wasn't always like this. The clearest remaining indication is the street signs: There's Darwin Street (as in Charles Darwin), and Ingersoll Street (as in Robert Ingersoll, the famed 19th-century agnostic). When Liberal residents drive to church on Sundays, they're driving on avenues named after the heroes of what became the atheist movement.

The origin of these streets goes back to 1880, when George Walser, a wealthy attorney from nearby Lamar, purchased 2,000 acres to build a town exclusively for those with a mindset similar to his own—people who at the time were commonly called "freethinkers" or "liberals." The town of Liberal, he advertised, "shall have neither God, Hell, Church, nor Saloon." It would be an atheist oasis in Bible country. And for a brief period, despite pushback, it managed to meet those parameters. But Walser's beliefs changed with time, and the town did so as well.

"There's not much left," Willis Strong, a volunteer with the county historical society and a former owner of The Liberal News, told me on a recent visit. "Everything's been torn down."



http://www.vice.com/read/looking-back-on-liberal-the-midwests-failed-atheist-utopia

[Jim__]

1. No saloon? Why the hell not?

[rug]

2. No wonder it collapsed.

[stone space]

3. That's No True Atheist Utopia!

No saloon?

[Wednesdays]

4. Back then, the progressive movement was heavily allied

with the temperance movement.