Who was Robert Roberts?

by Phynnodderee

Growing up, I had an image of Robert Roberts as a clear-sighted, intelligent man who cut through the tangle of religious ideas that had accumulated over the centuries to establish a simple, rational, authentic religion. But I actually knew very little about him. Years later, when I decided to find out who he really was, I discovered he wasn’t quite the man I was taught to believe.

 

Brief bio

Robert Roberts was born on 8 April 1839 in Aberdeen, Scotland. As a child he heard John Thomas preach and a few years later he started reading the magazine The Herald of the Kingdom and the Age to Come. So excited was he by this new take on religion that he eagerly read Elpis Israel, which began a lifelong obsession. At 14 he was baptised (the first of two immersions, as he would later decide that this first baptism was incompetent). At 20 he moved to Edinburgh, where there was an ecclesia, and married the similarly serious and devout Jane Norrie. The couple moved to Huddersfield and – encouraged by Dr. Thomas – eventually settled in Birmingham, where RR made a living as a reporter.

Zealously supported by his wife, he devoted the rest of his life to preaching. He did a phenomenal amount of lecturing and writing, with an intensity which sometimes put considerable strain on his health. He became the editor of The Christadelphian and the de facto leader of the Christadelphian community in Britain. He died in San Francisco on 23 September 1898, aged 59, on the way back from his second preaching tour of Australia and New Zealand. He is buried in New York beside John Thomas.

 

What sort of man was RR?

RR’s defining characteristic was his intense preoccupation with the Bible and promoting his own understanding of it. The Thomasist approach to religion – rigid and brutally logical – seems to have appealed to his type of mind. Above all, he desperately wanted Christ to return. With his single-minded belief that the only thing in life that mattered was preparing for the Kingdom, he had no time for frivolity. Everything had to be about Bible study and preaching. He did not appear to need or want any other form of mental stimulation. In his biography of RR, Islip Collyer notes how frequently he slipped into discussion of the Bible from ordinary conversation.

RR was a plain, unsophisticated kind of man. In photos, he always seems to need a haircut. I believe he was rarely insincere; it seems to me that he was only trying to convince people of what he genuinely believed was true, in the only way he knew how (clumsy and insensitive though it may have been). He did not care about giving offence so long as he could make his point. As a result, he could turn friends into enemies. He was also very stubborn and would not tolerate opinions that differed from his. He was involved in disagreements with other brethren that essentially amounted to personal rivalries. Although he claimed not to have any authority, he behaved as though he did.

Although Collyer’s biography is rather fawning, he is not always blind to RR’s faults and notes that it was all too easy for him to imagine “that his personal prejudices [had] a scriptural sanction which in point of fact [was] wholly lacking. … A candid critic could have shown that there was a much stronger Scriptural case against that somewhat too long hair than against many of the little things which RR condemned.”

Like Dr. Thomas, RR favoured a style of religion that was intensely logical almost to the exclusion of all humanity. He disliked the contemporary trend towards what he considered ‘effeminate’ religion, which allowed for more nuance and acknowledgement of uncertainty. He had no time for contemporary social concerns or the desperate plight of the Victorian poor; his job was far loftier, the exalted task of getting the right doctrines into people’s heads.

I suspect that RR had Asperger’s. He had a straightforward, rather literal way of thinking. His all-consuming focus on the Bible (and John Thomas’s interpretation of it) seems like the kind of intense special interest that people with Asperger’s sometimes have. He also had a degree of naivety and gullibility (as demonstrated by the fraudulent investment schemes he fell for in the 1880s and 1890s). His social skills seem to have suffered not only from his intense religiosity, which made him turn every conversation towards his beliefs, but also from his tactlessness. It’s possible that Collyer was inadvertently describing the artlessness of many autistic people when he wrote: “He was almost devoid of dignity as it is usually understood in the world.”

 

Family life

RR had a lifelong affection for his wife. They seem to have been well suited in terms of character and tastes, both being very zealous and serious-minded. They weren’t, however, a particularly endearing couple: in my opinion the pair of them needed a serious grounding in reality and perhaps even in ordinary humanity. Collyer points out that, lacking a close circle of friends to provide him with tactful criticism, RR had no source of feedback except his wife. She was probably the only one who could have persuaded him to broaden his thinking, but instead she reinforced his beliefs and encouraged his obsession.

The couple had seven children, three of whom survived to adulthood. Commenting on the deaths of two of their children within days of each other, Collyer says:

“Robert Roberts gave to some of us the impression of being a hard father with a Victorian firmness reinforced by an exceptionally severe religious discipline; but taking a distant view from very different times we can understand. He regarded human life as of very little value except as a possible preparation for the Kingdom of God. Always he took the long view, and no doubt he expected too much from his children, but there could be no question as to his love for them.”

Two of the children grew up to be good Christadelphians – but there was one who got away.

 

Final journey and death

Some time after leaving England on his second trip to Australasia in 1897, RR received word from his son Edward that he and his wife Mary no longer wanted to be Christadelphians. (We can speculate on whether the timing was significant: did Edward deliberately wait until his father had departed on the long voyage in order to avoid a scene?) By the time he finally landed at San Francisco on his way back to Britain, the shocking news seems to have been weighing heavily on him. According to RR’s own intransigent doctrine, there could be nothing but annihilation for his son and daughter-in-law at Christ’s return unless they had a change of heart. His daughter Sarah Jane believed that this burden of sorrow contributed to his death. On the morning of 23 September 1898, some local brethren found him dead in his hotel room. He had apparently succumbed to heart failure.

 

Influence on subsequent generations

Now I know more about RR, the culture I grew up in makes a lot more sense. The insistence on study and correct doctrine; the inflexibility; the lack of emotion; and the general dreariness. Along with the Bible Companion, which he drew up aged 15, RR bequeathed to subsequent generations of Christadelphians a very particular mindset. Much of the culture (at least in Britain) seems to be the product of his personality.

 

What do I think of RR now?

During the course of my reading I felt ambivalent about RR. Sometimes I felt downright contempt and dislike for him, at other times I felt sorry for him in his narrow, cold isolation. If I were being brutal I would say he was a narrow, ignorant, small-minded, self-righteous, irritating, unimaginative, stuffy, humourless bore. If I were being more charitable, I would say he had the misfortune to have the kind of mind that is prone to obsessiveness, and to encounter early in life a form of religion that seized hold of his mind and wouldn’t let go, depriving him of a normal life.

I used to hold him in high regard, but now I can see he was just an ordinary person – an odd, obsessive little man. His fanatical commitment to his religion was almost like an addiction. He spent his life in a self-inflicted loneliness, separated from the vast majority of other human beings by what he would doubtless have called his ‘love of the truth’. And at the end of it all, to die alone in a hotel room in a foreign city thousands of miles from home, perhaps broken-hearted with the knowledge that his only surviving son had rejected the religion that he, RR, believed was the only acceptable way to think, the only acceptable way to live.

Robert Roberts, the energetic driving force behind the spread of Christadelphianism in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, was largely divorced from reality and saw the world through a very limited, distorted lens. Rather than looking up to him as someone gifted with wisdom and unique insight, I now realise he had no more of a clue than anyone else.