Ginnie's review of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
by Susan Jacoby

Ginnie's review

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bookshelves: history

status: Read in February, 2008

A lively history of American antispiritualism, with a stellar cast. "The first six presidents of the United States did not invoke the blessings of the deity as frequently in their entire public careers as President Bush does each month," writes freelance journalist Jacoby. Bless their innocent souls, those six presidents took the constitutional separation of church and state seriously, even as a couple of them-Jefferson and Madison-harbored deistic notions (God may not be dead, but he's probably not well) that weighed against their invoking the divinity. Jacoby hails Thomas Paine as our exemplary "revolutionary secularist," omitting God whenever he could as certain compatriots in the new US worried that unless the chief executive took an oath to some organized Protestant church, "a Turk, a Jew, a Roman Catholic, and what is worse than all, a Universalist, may be President of the United States," as one speaker at the Massachusetts constitutional convention...more A lively history of American antispiritualism, with a stellar cast. "The first six presidents of the United States did not invoke the blessings of the deity as frequently in their entire public careers as President Bush does each month," writes freelance journalist Jacoby. Bless their innocent souls, those six presidents took the constitutional separation of church and state seriously, even as a couple of them-Jefferson and Madison-harbored deistic notions (God may not be dead, but he's probably not well) that weighed against their invoking the divinity. Jacoby hails Thomas Paine as our exemplary "revolutionary secularist," omitting God whenever he could as certain compatriots in the new US worried that unless the chief executive took an oath to some organized Protestant church, "a Turk, a Jew, a Roman Catholic, and what is worse than all, a Universalist, may be President of the United States," as one speaker at the Massachusetts constitutional convention put it. Jacoby examines the opaque religious beliefs of the Founders, recalling that Jefferson excited opposition in the 1800 presidential campaign for his apparent indifference to religion, as well as his remark that "it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." She enlists Abe Lincoln in the secularist roll, although some scholars will object. She traces the origins of state mottos like "In God We Trust" and "one nation under God," the one a sop to clerics during the Civil War, the other one of "a new, bland, and compulsory set of quasi-religious rituals" meant to serve as a Cold War repudiation of Soviet atheism. Jacoby closes by remarkingthat although the line between church and state now seems to be fading, most Americans regard that separation as desirable and "oppose the religious right's attempts to sacralize decisions on such matters as biomedical research."

Balm for doubting Thomases-and a welcome addition to American cultural history....less

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message 1: by Mark

02/23/2008 05:31PM

Interestingly enough, Alan Wolfe of Boston College had a great piece in the latest Atlantic which basically tells everyone to stop fretting over the coming religious wars, because history not only has shown that increasing global wealth tends to lower religious intensity, but recent surveys of religious focus among national populations show that the trend is actually toward moderation despite highly publicized examples to the contrary such as Pakistan or Iran (or the completely anomalous U.S.). The point of your review that made me think of this, though, was his interesting contention that almost all religions today owe a great debt to secularism, particularly its values of individual choice and autonomy, and that most successful Christian evangelical churches have adapted to that way of thinking, if they haven't already crossed over into the latest version of the prosperity Gospel, a la Joel Osteen. Here's the link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc...

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message 2: by Lena

02/24/2008 08:04AM

Very interesting article, Mark. Thanks for that.

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Ginnie's review of Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

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