Freethinkers: a History of American Secularism

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), July, 2004 by Steven G. Kellman

FREETHINKERS: A History of American Secularism BY SUSAN JACOBY METROPOLITAN BOOKS 2004, 352 PAGES, $27.50

Though the almighty dollar bill proclaims: "In God We Trust," the Constitution, by design, omits any mention of a deity. Article 6, Section 3 declares that "No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States;' and the First Amendment guarantees that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." Yet, though Americans created the world's first secular government, the incumbent president begins Cabinet meetings with a prayer, Congress funds faith-based agencies, and millions pledge allegiance to one nation "under God." Flaunting their religious beliefs, politicians bear witness, at least to their awareness that, according to polls, a majority of citizens never would vote for an atheist.

In Freethinkers, Susan Jacoby attempts to recuperate a national tradition of lucid judgment and human empowerment. She locates the origins of the Republic in religious dissenters who resisted ecclesiastical tyranny and in the rationalist and secular--even anticlerical--ideals of the Enlightenment. The history of independent thought and insubordinate thinkers that she traces shadows the growth of religious fervor and church authority since 1776. Freethinking, as Jacoby defines it, is "a phenomenon running the gamut from the truly antireligious--those who regarded all religion as a form of superstition and wished to reduce its influence in every aspect of society--to those who adhered to a private, unconventional faith revering some form of God or Providence but at odds with orthodox religious authority." Her pantheon of freethinkers shares "a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence adduced from the natural world."

Jacoby examines how a commitment to common sense and an aversion to theocracy led many of the Founders, especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, to create and maintain a wall of separation between church and state. She portrays Abraham Lincoln as a religious skeptic and many of the most important figures in literature, including Wait Whitman and Mark Twain, as adversaries of orthodox piety and ecclesiastical domination. She emphasizes the freethinking credentials of William Lloyd Garrison, Eugene Debs, Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, and WE.B. Du Bois, and she rescues Ernestine L. Rose, a Jewish immigrant who became an outspoken and influential atheist during the 19th century, from undeserved obscurity. She identifies the 1880s and 1890s as the golden age of freethinking, when religious skeptics drew large audiences to lecture halls and newspapers such as the Truth Seeker spread a variety of unconventional ideas to an eager national readership.

Jacoby singles out three figures for special prominence in her history--and celebration--of American secularism: Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Though Paine's Common Sense and other revolutionary pamphlets made him the leading propagandist for independence from Great Britain, he died impoverished and reviled, denounced by contemporaries and then descendants as a dangerous infidel for daring to declare, in The Age of Reason, that Christianity was invented by human beings, not God. Known as "the Great Agnostic," Ingersoll was a stunning orator and brilliant thinker who sacrificed a promising political career in order to become the outstanding champion of secularism during the 1800s. Stanton was the driving force behind the movement for women's suffrage, but many of her disciples, including Susan B. Anthony, attempted to distance themselves from her insistence, most notably in her book The Woman's Bible, on holding organized religion responsible for sexual oppression.

Jacoby's book is not the work of a neutral observer. Her history is grounded in the present moment, when geopolitics increasingly is conceived in terms of theological polarities, dividing the world between Islam and Christianity, as if each monotheistic faith also were monolithic and monopolistic. Religious principles have set the terms of debate on a wide range of contentious issues, including abortion, euthanasia, stem-cell research, capital punishment, censorship, evolution, civil rights, and war and peace. Jacoby's heroic freethinkers stand in stubborn opposition to dogmatism, obscurantism, and coercion. "The combination of free and thought," she concludes, "embodies every ideal that secularists still hold out to a nation founded not on dreams of justice in heaven but on the best human hopes for a more just earth."

STEVEN G. KELLMAN

Literary Scene Editor