Remove Christianity and civilization would soon smell better.

[Confused Ape]

In that it was a failure. I'm speaking of the whole town, not just the founder. A place was set aside for freethinkers and it didn't last. If OTOH it had thrived that would have been evidence in favor of the OP.

Maybe it failed because they were overrun by Christians of the obnoxious bigot variety who were determined to convert them - The Founding Of Liberal

He bought 2,000 acres (8 km2) of land and advertised across the country for atheists to come and

"found a town without a church, [w]here unbelievers could bring up their children without religious training," and where Christians were not allowed. "His idea was to build up a town that should exclusively be the home of Infidels...a town that should have neither God, Hell, Church, nor Saloon." Some of the early inhabitants of Liberal even encouraged other infidels to move to their town by publishing an advertisement which boasted that Liberal "is the only town of its size in the United States without a priest, preacher, church, saloon, God, Jesus, hell or devil."

Walser should have known that this would be like the proverbial red rag to a bull.

Christians found Liberal to be a perfect mission field.

As news spread about Liberal, Christians came to convert the town. Walser tried to keep them out by posting his followers at the Liberal train station to tell passengers that if they were Christians they were not welcome, according to an 1896 article in The Kansas City Star. They came anyway. Some Christians quietly bought homes and began holding religious services. Walser would interrupt them and even put a stop to it after he proved to a court that the services were being held on properties he still partly owned. The Christians then bought land next to Liberal and moved more than a dozen houses there from Liberal. The last building had a sign attached that said: "And the Lord said: Get thee out of Sodom." Walser then built a barbed wire fence to keep them out of Liberal. It was time to fulfill the original aim of the town to "enjoy the full benefits of free American citizens without having some self-appointed bigot dictate to us what we should think." (Kansas City Star on Saturday, December 22, 2001)

I was amazed to read this bit of reporting from 1938.

Regarding the adjoining town that the Christians created:

In an effort to throw off the yoke of Walser the Christians purchased an eighty-acre tract of land adjoining the town, called the place Pedro and moved their houses and places of business out of Liberal. (Sikeston (Missouri) Herald, December 1, 1938)

How could the Christians claim they were throwing off the yoke of Walser? He'd made it perfectly clear that he didn't want Christians in his town and yet they'd infiltrated by buying homes and holding religious services on property which wasn't theirs.

I haven't found any information about what happened to the other freethinkers in the town. This suggests that there wasn't a mass conversion for the Christians to crow about. I'm guessing that most of them got fed up with all the hostility and moved elsewhere.