Talk:Free Religious Association

Major overhaul is planned

I am proposing an overhaul and expansion of this article. A draft of the proposed new version can be viewed at User:Bilpen/sandbox. I will leave it there for a few days and then, if there are no objections, I will post it here.

Before I do that, I need to discuss the description of the Free Religious Association (FRA) in the current version this article as an organization that "was opposed not only to organized religion, but also to any supernaturalism." That is not accurate. According to the citation, that statement is sourced from pages 304-305 of Religion in Victorian Britain by Gerald Parsons. (The citation says it is based on volume 2 of that book, but that volume does not have that many pages of text. Parsons discusses the FRA on pages 304-305 of volume 1.) Those pages do not say that the FRA opposed organized religion. They do say that the FRA aimed to "demolish Christianity', which is a serious misrepresentation by Parsons. It would be much more accurate to say that one of the FRA's goals was to discredit claims that Christianity is the universal religion. Regardless of that quibble, the cited source does not say the FRA was opposed to organized religion and supernaturalism, and the standard sources for information about the FRA do not say that either.

Parson's brief mention of the FRA has another problem. His account of the relationship between the FRA and Charles Darwin differs in significant ways from the one I found in one of Darwin's biographies. Because I consider Parson's brief treatment of the FRA to be an unreliable source of information about that organization, I removed all four citations in the current article that are based on his book.

I rewrote large sections of the article from scratch, making extensive use of the book-length study of the FRA by Stow Persons plus two lengthy pieces of research into the FRA by George Willis Cooke. Their work, fortunately, is freely available in full on the web.

I have already taken the first step in overhauling this article, which was to remove the section in the current article about the Free Association of Religious Teachers, which is a spoof based on the acronym of the organization's name. The account of the person who added that section to this article has been blocked.

Here are the major changes I am making to the current version of this article in addition to expanding it:

I removed Nontheism from the list of categories because most of the FRA's founders and members were theists,

I altered the part about "the humanists Felix Adler and Moncure Conway". Adler is now described in more detail elsewhere in the proposed new version. I moved the mention of Conway to the "Notable members" section.

I dropped the sentence, "It [the FRA] caught on, and many FRA members helped lead communes based on their values of equality and self-organization" because it has no citation and does not seem to be supported by the material on the FRA I have read.

I changed the phrase "The association existed until 1914" to "The FRA continued until at least 1917, when it celebrated its fiftieth anniversary". The source for the citation for the 1914 date doesn't say the FRA folded in 1914, it says it existed until at least 1914.

I dropped the quote "emancipate religion from the dogmatic traditions it had been previously bound to" because it is not found anywhere in the cited source (Potter, 1892). That quote isn't necessary to the article in any case.

I altered the sentence that currently says: "It [The Index] was edited by Francis Ellingwood Abbot until 1873 and then by his assistant A. W. Stevens." What actually happened was that Stevens took Abbot's place briefly in 1873 and then Abbot resumed his role as editor until 1880.

I dropped the book The American As Anarchist as a citation because it is no longer needed.

Comments? Bilpen (talk) 15:23, 26 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I made the update as planned. Bilpen (talk) 15:06, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]