There’s a difference between satire of the faithful and a denial of faith. Twain’s description of the fly as God’s most beloved creature in Letters from Earth is wonderful satire, as is his mockery of faith healing in Christian Science, or his sneering descriptions of “the pilgrims” in the Innocents Abroad. I also don’t think Twain believed in time travel because he wrote a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court.
It wouldn’t bother me one wit to find out that a recently uncovered will of Mark Twain includes the phrase “I deny the existence of God.”, since I don’t draw upon him as a testament to my own faith. Stating he was an atheist by cherrypicking his works doesn’t work for me though since he didn’t live the life of an avowed atheist. Setting his self identification as a Presbyterian aside, Twain was a Freemason (belief in a higher authority is a prerequisite to membership), he also spent many years researching and writing a respectful biography of Joan of Arc, whom by all accounts he deeply admired due to - not despite - her faith.
Mark Twain. “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so,”
The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one’s religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one’s religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life—hence it is a valuable possession to him.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
I have a religion—but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.....Perhaps your religion will sustain you,will feed you—I place no dependence in mine. Our religions are alike, though, in one respect—neither can make a man happy when he is out of luck.
- Letter to Orion Clemens, 10/19-20/1865
Was he an Atheist? We will never know. Oh you might know someday, at least that is what you believe I am sure.
Twain needed acceptance by an overwhelmingly Christian community. Even though it’s been decades since I’ve read St. Joan or a Conn. Yankee (not to mention Letters which I finally forced myself to get through), I remember well the almost uncountable snide comments he managed to insert about the Church—notoriously, of course, the Catholic Church, but just as often Christianity as a whole. If he respected Joan, it was because of the strength of her belief ridiculous as it was. Satire? Of course. But it’s Bill Maher’s version rather than Jonathan Swift’s.
He was practically worshipped and prodigiously used by communists—Ho, in particular, who cited in On Revolution whole passages as fact, proof of the evils of American democracy and hypocrisy of Christianity.
Most importantly, though, his life with all its intentions and philosophy ended. His works survive. The words are all that’s left, and the words point to his obvious disdain for what de Tocqueville found redeeming about America.