Kersey Graves (November 21, 1813 – September 4, 1883) was a skeptic, atheist, rationalist, spiritualist, reformist writer, who was popular on the American freethought circuit of the late 19th century.

The Goschen Meeting House was a centre of the Congregational Friends and were involved with Temperance and Peace, health reform, anti-slavery, women's rights and socialistic utopianism.

Graves' Quaker background conditioned him to the philosophy of the Inner light, whereby all clergy, creeds, and set liturgy in worship were irrelevant, and a hindrance to God's work.

I desire to impress upon the minds of my clerical brethren the important fact, that the gospel histories of Christ were written by men who had formerly been Jews (see Acts xxi.

20), and probably possessing the strong proclivity to imitate and borrow which their bible shows was characteristic of that nation ; and being written many years after Christ's death, according to that standard Christian author, Dr. Lardner, it was impossible, under such circumstances, for them to separate (if they had desired to) the real facts and events of his life from the innumerable fictions and fables then afloat everywhere relative to the heathen Gods who had pre-enacted a similar history.