This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 21st, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

H.L. Menkin had a complicated relationship with religion.

He skewered religious pieties and famously despised some high-profile

religious figures, but he took religion and religious people seriously.

E.G. Hart is author of Damming Words, life and religious times of H.O. Menkin.

We spoke earlier this month.

At one point in your book you describe Menkin's naysaying as one part village atheist and one part town drunk.

Could you expand on that a little bit?

Well his objections to Christianity particularly. on that's what the book is mainly about are the kind of criticisms that's

what the book is is mainly about are the kind of criticism that you would find in 19th century skeptics of from the Robert Ingersoll

variety or Mark Twain variety but then he did it with a kind of flare, a kind of swagger that I guess that's what I was trying to capture with the drunk analogy.

And but depending on the degree of his his his drunkenness it could

have a it had a charm to it, I think. I mean, my sense is that the Christian readers of Manken just never really came around to having much regard from because he was just too irreverent and too skeptical.

Obviously he had a following, especially in the 20s among secularists of various kinds, but I think probably even some sort of nominal Protestants

of a kind, which I think is really unfortunate that the serious believers didn't try to engage him more.

And it's a style that prevented that from happening and it was it was a it was an abrupt change of style.

It was a sort of style that wasn't even well received in literary circles.

I mean, he was engaged in literary criticism that the academics, whether at Harvard or at University of Illinois,

you just didn't do literary criticism that way.

And it cut down in some ways on Mankin's engagement by serious people, but it also gave him a much wider audience.

Now when you talk about his audience, it's worth noting, as you do in your book, that Mankin was one of the early, earliest

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