I saw a bumper sticker on my way to class the other morning. It read, “If you think Jesus… I saw a bumper sticker on my way to class the other morning. It read, “If you think Jesus doesn’t exist … You’d better be right!” The latter half was engulfed in cartoonish flames, indicating that special corner of hell reserved for liberals.

I was raised Catholic, but today I refer to myself as an agnostic — a designation most people view as a kind of religious flip-floppery for closet atheists. But agnosticism wasn’t always such a dirty word, something to mutter with shame as if we’d been picked last in religion class.

One of the most notorious agnostics of all was, in fact, once the most popular speaker in America. His name is Robert Green Ingersoll, and his legacy deserves to be studied, remembered and enshrined.

In 1924, the social critic H.L Mencken concluded, “What this country lacks is obviously an Ingersoll … What I contend is that hundreds of thousands are beginning to be acutely aware of the fact that there is much more native decency in them than is to be found in their ecclesiastical masters.”

What was then for Mencken a bold assertion is today widely accepted as a given. Priest sex-abuse scandals are as commonplace on the evening news as reports of corrupt CEOs.

Eight decades after Mencken’s clarion call, however, nobody has taken up Ingersoll’s reigns. Now is the time for an Ingersoll to emerge, to shake the foundations of organized religion to its core, to preach a gospel that finally elevates reason over mythology — a liturgy fully compatible with the revelations of scientific pursuit.

“There is no figure today who is courageous and influential in the way Ingersoll was,” said Pulitzer-nominee Susan Jacoby, author of “Freethinkers: A History of Secularism in America.” “[There is] nobody who makes it his business to challenge religion. What we tend to have is people challenging right-wing religion on narrow issues, like creationism or school vouchers for religious schools or abortion.”

Consequently, the distinction between church and state has never been so blurred as it is today. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Bush adamantly declared, “I don’t see how you can be president, at least from my perspective, how you can be president, without a relationship with the Lord.”

Not only is Bush’s flippancy incredibly narrow-minded, but it also reflects the kind of stubborn bigotry that his administration has come to represent for half a decade. Why are no atheists or agnostics qualified to hold public office? What of those who worship a different Lord than his? Forget Roe v. Wade — a stigmata is the new litmus test for Bush’s cabinet.

Ingersoll was the most popular speaker in his time because he preached against such a tide that threatened to flood the heartland with its increasingly distorted and outmoded religious views. He stood beside Walt Whitman and is responsible, in part, for the commercial success of his now-classic “Leaves of Grass.”

On Whitman’s death, Ingersoll preached, “He wrote a liturgy for mankind, he wrote a great and splendid psalm of life, and he gave to us the gospel of humanity — the greatest gospel that can be preached.”

These are not the words of a godless heretic unfit for public office. They are the words of a man who understands and values life to a degree that our elected officials, who treat soldiers more like cannon fodder than human beings, do not understand.

“Let us be true to ourselves,” Ingersoll once wrote, “true to the facts we know, and let us, above all things, preserve the veracity of our souls. If there be gods we cannot help them, but we can assist our fellow men. We cannot love the inconceivable, but we can love wife and child and friend.”

Such is the true essence of agnosticism.

Robert Ingersoll delivered hundreds of speeches, many of which are available online at www.infidels.org. Send feedback to [email protected].