Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

by Susan Jacoby

Book Overview

"Jacoby accomplishes her task with clarity, thoroughness, and an engaging passion."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review

At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805077766
• ISBN13: 9780805077766
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
• Length: 417 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

America's Greatest Gift to the World...

....is secular government, the separation of church and state. Jefferson said it most eloquently when he spoke of a "wall of separation," and for once his actions fully complemented his words. Author Susan Jacoby recounts: "In 1799, Jefferson proposed a bill that would guarantee complete legal equality for citizens of all religions, and of no religion, in his home state of Virginia." Jefferson himself wrote that his bill "meant to comprehend, within the mantel of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel..." It took seven years of debate to pass Virginia's 1786 Act for Establishing Religious Freedom, urgently supported by James Madison but opposed by the Episcopalian and other mainline churches. Curiously, the "evangelical" Christian denominations of Virginia SUPPORTED this separation of church and state, seeing it as in their interest. Jacoby continues: the Jeffersonian Act, "much to the dismay of religious conservatives, would become the template for the secularist provisions of the federal Constitution." But the orator of freedom, Patrick Henry, who opposed Jefferson's Act with a counter-bill to assess taxes on all Virginians for the support of "teachers of the Christian religion," continued in opposition to the ratification of the Constitution. Jefferson and Madison were recognized Freethinkers, commonly accused by their opponents of being atheists. "Freethinker" is a much more gracious term than the A-word, which has always been used dismissively and pejoratively. It was the term in common parlance, throughout most of America's history, for a menagerie of disbelievers in the established faiths: deists, universalists, agnostics, skeptics and honest atheists. Jacoby argues that it was an appropriate term in its times, and that "freethinkers" have until recently been significant players in the political and social development of the United States - among the leaders of reform movements including abolition, universal suffrage, women's rights, labor rights, and civil rights. It would not embarrass Ms. Jacoby to have it said plainly that she earnestly admires such freethinkers as Jefferson, Thomas Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abe Lincoln, the almost forgotten Ernestine Rose, Robert Ingersoll, Emma Goldman, John Dewey, and Clarence Darrow. Much of Joacoby's book is devoted to brief biographies of these crusading freethinkers. An alternate title for this review might be "The Theocratically Incorrect Guide to American History." Jacoby insists, again and again, that the critical role of freethinkers and free thought movements in American history has been marginalized, deliberately at times, over the last 80 years of historiography. The greatest triumph of free thought, unfortunately, came first, with the writing of the Constitution on behalf of "We, the People" rather than "under God." Jacoby's discussion of the writing of the Constitution is

As American As Apple Pie

There is a movement among atheists and agnostics to have themselves referred to as "brights". It is unnecessary. There has been for over three centuries the honorable and laudatory term "freethinker" to designate unbelievers. It often encompasses the beliefs of deists, so many of whom played a role in founding our nation. In _Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism_ (Metropolitan Books) by Susan Jacoby, both freethinkers and open-minded religious believers will find a history of remarkable contributions that freethought has brought to our nation over the centuries. Jacoby is squarely in the freethinker camp, and her book could be seen as one of advocacy, especially as she regards the current government and its faith-based programs. The history revealed here, however, shows that American freethinkers have been in the advanced guard of good ideas from resisting governmental religion through abolition through birth control. There are many who say that America's greatness lies in its religious devotion, but even if that is true, its nonbelievers helped found a nation where different religions could be expressed and tolerated, and they have continued to advocate religious civil rights to the current day. Encroachments by those who want religion to be sponsored by government had been attempted long before the nation was founded; Patrick Henry himself introduced a bill in the Virginia General Assembly that would have taxed all citizens to support teachers of Christianity. Our Constitution quite famously has no reference to Jesus, or even to God, within it. The Founding Fathers invented the first government that was based on the consent of the governed and not on any claim to a divine foundation. This was quite deliberate; those at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia explicitly considered, and rejected, putting God in the document. It is little appreciated that the famous revolutionary Ethan Allen was strongly against organized religion; he wrote a summary of his beliefs in 1784 as _Reason the Only Oracle of Man_. More influential were the writings of the deist Tom Paine, frequently cited in these pages as a deist with a particular antipathy for the Bible and certitude that Christianity was a ridiculous distortion of true religion. Another freethinker looming large on these pages is Robert Ingersoll, "The Great Agnostic," a Civil War veteran, booster for the Republican party, and spellbinding orator. It is unimaginable that an avowed freethinker these days might be called upon by his party to speak to any political convention, but Republicans were eager to recruit Ingersoll's oratorical talents. Ingersoll and others were eager to fight censorship of Whitman's _Leaves of Grass_ or birth control information, and were on the front lines in the Civil Rights movement. The tolerance expected by Jefferson ("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 le

A great contribution to the study of American history

It could be that Susan Jacoby's latest book may finally put an end to the ignorance that most Americans exhibit about the role that secularism has played in the social, cultural, and political development of the United States. It is a fact that Americans are woefully deficient when it comes to knowledge about American history, a lack which permits those with specific socio-political agendas to perpetuate distortions about the part that secularism and religion played in the founding of this nation and continue to play in its evolution. This matter is especially crucial now because of the current issues surrounding church-state separation, including an important case soon to be heard before the U.S. Supreme Court.The importance of Jacoby's book is that it fills a gap which for too long has existed in the study and presentation of American history. It is often forgotten (or ignored?) that America's evolution was influenced by two great traditions, not just one as so many cultural commentators have insisted. The Judaic-Christian religious tradition certainly had a major impact on the development of American moral thinking and practice. But, equally important if not more so, the pagan or secular Greco-Roman tradition had its impact on the formation of American political institutions and the development of American jurisprudence. Many books have been written about the Judaic-Christian contributions (regrettably, some historically inaccurate), but the pagan-secular contributions have tended to be either forgotten or ignored and this problem has now been corrected by Jacoby's treatise.Generally speaking, "Freethinkers" is an historical survey of secularist thought and influence in American history with a special emphasis on the most important actors in this unfolding drama. Included are such luminaries as Thomas Paine, who is just now making a comeback into the American consciousness, Thomas Jefferson, a president who by all accounts seems to be more secular than religious and appears to be a true theological Deist contrary to the declarations of many fundamentalist Christians, Abraham Lincoln, a president who was skeptical of Christianity and denied its divine origins, and Robert Ingersoll, an American philosopher whose absence from virtually all textbooks of American history is a national disgrace.I must commend Jacoby for bringing Robert Green Ingersoll back into the limelight. Known in the latter half of the 19th century as that "Great Agnostic," Ingersoll was truly one of the philosophical giants of that period. He has been largely ignored throughout the 20th century. During my entire academic studies in philosophy, no mention was ever made of him. I took a graduate course in American philosophy without hearing his name. I took undergraduate courses in various periods of American history and never heard a reference to him. I discovered this once-influential philosopher later when I was doing some independent work in American social thought. My react

Superb history of a much maligned group

Much of the religious freedom churchgoing U.S. citizens take for grantedwould not exist were it not for the struggle of freethinkers - atheists,agnostics, deists, rationalists, humanists - to make and keep the U.S. government secular.The evangelical Christians and Catholics who now work to dissolve the wallsbetween church and state find it convenient to forget how the barrier theydespise once protected them from rich and politically powerful sects whenthey were few in number, poor, and unwanted. Even more, they forget howforbearers of the modern freethinkers they condemn so easily and hate somuch, men such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Thomas Paine,struggled and sometimes suffered to promote and defend the radical notion ofa government neutral in religion which respects everyone by not elevatingone belief above another. If you are a non-religious American, this gift to the world is yourheritage. It is one to be proud of.

A really important expose of our freethinking history

I've just finished reading this title, which I would best describe as a very important, thoroughly readable expose of our free-thinking history and the relentless, repetitive attempts to undermine that tradition. It's probably the most thought-provoking book I've read since Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club (If you haven't read it already, look it up), the author of which seems to share the same enlightenment bent as Jacoby. As you can tell, that philosophy reflects my world view as well. In fact, the only downside of this book is that you're most likely to enjoy and appreciate it if you, like me, already consider yourself a free-thinking, secular rationalist with an "enlightenment" perspective on history, including a strong belief in the separation of church and state. If you are a member of the Christian right, you will probably throw this book into the fireplace after the first few chapters (That would be the only alternative to having your views on the mixture of politics and religion painstakingly and devastastingly revealed as narrow-minded and undemocratic). This is a "history" book, and rarely strays from the rationalist, dispassionate course you'd expect, but Jacoby's personal views are made amply clear: church and state were always meant to be and should remain separate institutions under our system of government. It's great to have someone like Jacoby on this (my) side, and to put it in print for the record, because she masterfully and precisely conveys the facts of history which, to put it plainly, make her opponents look silly.For a few examples, she:-catalogs a long litany of misdeeds and injustices that have been carried out in the name of religion, refuting the idea that religion is always a force for good in a political setting.-successfully undermines, as others have done elsewhere, the idea that the Founding Fathers never intended for the wall between church and state to be applied as strongly as we have today.-shows us that current secularist trends where they exist today have NOT arisen only since the 1960s after supposedly being drummed up by hare-brained, dope-smoking hippies who have infected our culture ever since. Instead, she shows us that there is a long, long secularist, even atheistic, tradition in America and that attempts to paint history otherwise are misguided. She instead reveals that the resurgence of the Christian right is just as much a product of "today." (It is only recently that all presidential candidates now publically affirm the strength of their religious faith in order to have any hope of being elected. Most in the past never discussed their faith.)One final plug, the description of the Christian right "utopia" underpinning the culture wars (first two paragraphs of Chapter 7) is among the most eloquent expositions on the thought of mind of those in the Christian right movement I have ever encountered. If you only browse this book in a book store, I would have you take a look at those lines