Viktor Emanuel Lennstrand (30 January 1861 - 31 October 1895) was a Swedish Freethought activist and writer. A former evangelical Christian, Lennstrand gave up his religious doctrines while studying 19th-century philosophy at the University of Uppsala in the 1880s, from which he resigned as an outspoken atheist in 1887. He became committed to the cause of secularism and spent most of the last ten years of his life writing pamphlets, lecturing against Christianity, and campaigning for the abolition of the state church. A friend of Swedish Social Democratic Party leader Hjalmar Branting and a supporter of the Swedish workers' movement, Lennstrand actively supported universal suffrage and participated in Swedish political life as a Social Democrat in the 1890s. Biography Viktor Emanuel Lennstrand was born to master coppersmith Johan Lennstrand and his wife Ewa in Gävle, Sweden, in 1861. Both parents both held devout Protestant convictions, and Viktor received an upbringing steeped in Christianity. Ewa's ambition was that her son would become a missionary. Aside from his mother, one influence on young Viktor Lennstrand was his tutor Paul Petter Waldenström, a theologian and influential figure of the Swedish free church movement in the 1800s. Deeply religious by young adulthood, Lennstrand went off to the University of Uppsala to pursue further studies in 1881. Lennstrand's horizons were broadly expanded by his university experience. He was afforded the opportunity to study the works of Ludwig Feuerbach, Ernst Haeckel, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mill. The philosophical pursuit soon brought Lennstrand to analytically peer at his own conviction in religious faith, and he came out as an open atheist in 1886. Lennstrand's first lecture on the subject of religion as an atheist came in 1887, when he proceeded to argue on the negative side of the question "Is Christianity a religion for our time?" at the great hall of the university. He was prevented from finishing the lecture by the police. When the university administrators threatened him with expulsion, Lennstrand resigned and left Uppsala for Stockholm, where he took advantage of the opportunity to promote his atheistic and secularist views as a Freethought lecturer in 1887-1888. Strongly attracted to the utilitarian philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Lennstrand organized the Stockholm-based Utilitiska Stamfund (Utilitarian Society) in 1888. He founded the Fritänkaren (Freethinker) in 1889. Such activism was regarded with great social hostility and met with a series of attacks from the establishment, who