Houston Southard

Jonathan Kidwell - The philomath encyclopedia

My 4th great grandfather Jonathan Kidwell wrote The Philomath Encyclopedia. It's 12 volumes of his collected opinions and debates he had with others on the correct interpretation of universalism, first published in the newspaper he founded in the Sentinel outside Montgomery, Indiana (a town he helped found in the early 1800s) where my mom grew up. I leafed through the only known copy inside the Indiana State library vault over the weekend with half-hearted plans to steal it, but as I read, that ambition dwindled.

He was a journalist, a radical, an enterpriser, but most of all, an asshole. The apple doesn't fall far. Jon started a universalist church, rejecting the creationism, observance of sunday worship, inspiration of scripture, and all supernatural occurrences his presbyterian brethren preached. He was a hoosier Alexander Hamilton catching beef with anyone dissenting his opinions, challenging people to fights, calling them stupid, critiquing their grammar, and pretty much disparaging them in any way he could.

He was enchanted with phrenology and its assertion that head shape was causal to intelligence. He thought abolitionists had no right to interfere with the state in the same breath he'd condemn the clergy for trying to monopolize education.

He suffered the same arrogant misgivings of all revisionists: trying to argue reason within the confines of the same babble bullshit fiction. He was a man of his times, as most of us are bound to be, but even in his time there were abolitionists and those who understood influence was as much about listening as it was conviction.

I appreciate that he not only tried to convert the baptists and presbatarians, but that he failed terribly at it. There are only 150k universalists in the US today, and while it's the most palatable christian denomination second only to quakerism, continuously undercutting his opponents solidified his limited influence. Proud to have an ancestor who, while not spreading atheism, was at least really bad at proselytizing his version of christianity. Here I am 200 years later doing a better job of converting people away from nonsense, and if that’s not a legacy, I don’t know what is.