For a decade, books like Richard Neuhaus' The Naked Public Square and Stephen L. Carter's The Culture Of Disbelief have dominated the discussion of religion's place in public life, arguing that American government banishes all religious discourse and creates inequality for religious speakers. As a result, those espousing civil rights, equality for all, or social justice must take great pains to prove they aren't hostile to religion. Yet, as Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers shows, hostility toward religion is a vital part of the American heritage. Organized religion, in one or another of its Catholic, Protestant, and evangelical forms, has opposed just about every advance in freedom and equality Americans have achieved since the country's founding: an intentionally God-free Constitution, the abolition of slavery, and civil rights for blacks, as well as women's suffrage, reproductive freedom, and economic equity.
If past leaders hadn't been hostile to religion, the overwhelming Christian opinion of their times—that God appoints worldly powers, slaves should be obedient to their masters, and women needn't vote—never would have been challenged. Jacoby profiles the complex story of American free thought, a once-thriving Enlightenment movement that urged emancipation from the authoritarian shackles of the supernatural. Thomas Paine, the patriot who stirred thousands to revolution against England with Common Sense, suffered in exile after writing The Age Of Reason, an attack on Christianity, until his friend and fellow freethinker Thomas Jefferson invited him back to America. Then, as now, the suggestion that religion is mostly or completely bunk means an invitation to the pillory, and few public figures were willing to risk publishing their feelings on the matter. (Jefferson is a notable exception.) America's heartland wasn't always deaf to secularism's appeal, however. Robert Ingersoll, the greatest orator of the 19th century, drew sold-out audiences for his lectures excoriating Biblical faith, and rural folk often traveled for hours to hear him.
Jacoby recounts this history with passion, and without shying away from its messy details. Especially noteworthy is her claim that secularism serves as a faith in itself, rather than the absence of one. What distinguishes it from religious belief is that it's the only faith suitable as the official basis of a democracy: It places authority in human beings rather than above them. Religion may or may not be foolish on its own; those whom Jacoby quotes disagree on that point. But they are united in the recognition that it's dangerous when yoked to power, and that democracy suffers when decisions of state are subordinated to rulers' interpretations of the divine will, or their confidence in divine favor.