Freethinkers: a History of American Secularism.

• Author: Kellman, Steven G.
• Position: Book Review

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...