Jeremy Bentham: Prophet of Secularism

Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), the philosopher and reformer, pointed out that the original Greek term for prophet referred in its most extensive sense to a person who ‘speaks out’, and in a more limited extent to a person who ‘foretells’. Every politician who advocated a measure that he thought was beneficial, noted Bentham, was therefore a prophet. The term, however, had been appropriated by ‘religionists’, who had seized on its ambiguity to further their own schemes and projects. Bentham turned against religion in his early teenage years. He came to advocate religious freedom and the abolition of all formal connection between church and state. Reluctant for many years to make his hostility explicit, by the 1810s he was ready to launch a sustained attack on religion and religious establishments. In ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’, a comparison of the teachings of St Paul with those of Jesus, Bentham offered a critique of the teachings of Paul, with a particular focus on the principle of asceticism (the doctrine that the right action is that which promotes pain and eliminates pleasure). Bentham argued that Paul’s strategy had been to instil credulity in his followers so that they would believe anything he told them. Paul had gone on to attack activities that might divert his followers from following his religion, the most important being the pleasures of the bed and the table. Bentham argued that Jesus had not condemned such pleasures. The religion of Paul was, therefore, different from the religion of Jesus. Bentham proposed that all sexual activity that was consensual – whether with oneself, whether with partners of the same or the opposite sex, whether with partners of different species – should be made free from legislative interference.