Giving credit where it’s overdue

For more than two centuries, the United States has avoided the bloody religious wars that have ravaged other nations from time immemorial. But under the umbrella of this immunity, we have suffered through our own “culture war” -- increasingly contentious and unforgiving -- about what role religious belief and religious institutions should play in our government and the shaping of public policy. In recent years, the metaphoric wall between church and state has suffered some erosion. We have a born-again Christian president who openly seeks divine inspiration, aggressively pushes for religious institutions to receive government funding for their social service programs and routinely invokes the Bible and religious settings to advance his and the nation’s political agenda.

Where 45 years ago John Kennedy had to disavow the significance of his Catholicism to win election, today openly expressed religious belief is a litmus test for the highest reaches of elective office. Candidate Al Gore went so far as to announce that he approaches difficult decisions by querying: “What would Jesus do?” And although Joseph Lieberman’s vice presidential run may have signaled a welcome decline in anti-Semitism, his acceptability as a candidate rested on his profound religiosity and his attendant commitment to Judeo-Christian values.

Against this backdrop, an intellectual response from embattled secularists was probably to be expected -- and has now arrived in the form of “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism,” by respected social critic and historian Susan Jacoby.

Jacoby can now add “foot soldier in the culture war” to her resume. With a combination of incredulity and outrage, she assails religiously observant scholars like Stephen Carter, the author of “The Culture of Disbelief,” who contend that religiously based moral convictions play too small a role in determining national policy. And Jacoby reserves special vehemence for attacking the way political conservatives have, in her view, revised U.S. history to cast every triumph from the Declaration of Independence to the flowering of a civil rights movement as the product of religious belief and motivation.

Jacoby’s antidote for this perceived religious triumphalism is a detailed counter-history celebrating the accomplishments of the nation’s longstanding secular tradition and recalling the individual courage and contributions of that tradition’s leading lights. (These include iconic figures like Thomas Jefferson and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with those more obscure, like 19th century polemicist Robert Ingersoll.) While it is hard to issue a clarion call without sounding some shrill notes, Jacoby generally accomplishes her task with clarity, thoroughness and an engaging passion.

Beginning at the beginning, Jacoby’s discussion of the Revolutionary era usefully reminds us that the nation was founded at the waning of the Age of Faith and the waxing of the Age of Reason. Many of the founding fathers were deeply religious and viewed the new Republic as a product of divine providence. But many others, even if not aggressively anti-clerical like Thomas Paine, had drunk deeply at the well of rationalist Enlightenment thinking and viewed the government they were creating as embodying the ingenuity of man, not God.

Jacoby’s point is timely. As the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of Congress’ 1954 decision to insert the words “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, it is worth recalling that secularists such as Jefferson and James Madison joined forces with minority religious sects to separate religion from government.

Indeed, as Jacoby relates, the current version of the pledge reflects a skewed view of history. Thanks to Jefferson and others, the Constitution, in addition to prohibiting religious tests for public office, and in contrast to the Articles of Confederation, nowhere invokes the sanction of God. Instead, to the great dismay of many leaders at the time, the Constitution identifies “We the People” of the United States as its supreme authority and the wellspring of all government power.

In many ways, however, the founding era was a zenith for American secularists, who, Jacoby admits, underestimated the tenacity of religious orthodoxy. For disbelievers, the great run of American history has turned out to be an uphill battle against the forces of “unreason” to achieve rationalist enlightenment.

Jacoby’s effort to resurrect secularist contributions focuses largely on the social movements for racial and gender equality -- and on these topics she excavates some important historical truths.

On the issue of race, as might be expected, Southern white religious denominations defended slavery in religious terms and denounced abolitionism as a godless enterprise. Perhaps more surprising, the Northern churches, led by the leading Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher, were slower to the abolitionist cause than is commonly thought and for a long while subverted this moral imperative to more parochial concerns, like imposing a universal Sabbath. Jacoby’s secularist heroes, like the radical publisher William Lloyd Garrison, brooked no such compromises and surely deserve more credit than they have received for goading the nation to sever the chains of human bondage.

A century later, this history repeated itself. Many traditional Southern churches defended Jim Crow with all the fire and brimstone they could muster, denouncing the civil rights movement as, Jacoby writes, “a conspiracy of atheists, political radicalism and sexual libertinism.” In this instance, too, most Northern denominations, even relatively liberal ones, embraced the cause of racial equality with far less fervor and purpose than the freethinkers and nonobservers who in significant numbers flocked south to ride for freedom.

Nowhere has the contribution of secularists been more decisive than in the long march to women’s rights, where from the founding at Seneca Falls in 1848 to the fight over abortion rights, women alienated from religion -- the likes of Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Betty Friedan -- have blazed the trail. As Jacoby notes, the emancipation of women, even more than that of slaves, presented a serious challenge to religious orthodoxy and was met with widespread religious condemnation.

The risk of a book like Jacoby’s is the creation of a simplistic scorecard marking the moral righteousness of secular thinkers and denigrating religious institutions as bastions of anti-progressivism and sometimes morally abhorrent views. The truth, as Jacoby intermittently recognizes, is that neither secularists nor any religious creed have gained a monopoly on wisdom or morality.

Secularist thinkers have made plenty of mistakes, not least the flirtation of some with Communism long after the bloom was off the Moscow rose. By the same token, religious institutions have often proven essential to inspiring the better angel within our national character. The modern civil rights movement, to cite but one example, drew its leaders, its strength, even its metaphors, from the African American houses of God.

The more pressing issue raised by Jacoby’s book is not the historical accounting of credit and blame but the question of the proper relationship among religion, secularism and government. Jacoby tells us that “reason” is “embattled” by religiously inspired assaults on the teaching of science, abortion rights and the basic notion of government separate from religion.

Surely there is some truth to this charge and an appropriate urgency to Jacoby’s call for secularists to match the intensity of their religious counterparts. But the threat to free thinking and social progress can also be overstated. In an era when a conservative Supreme Court provides express constitutional protection for homosexual relationships, the sky is not yet falling.

Despite pressure from the religious right, there seems strong reason to trust the vitality of the consensus that has held sway with periodic variations since the time of the founding: Excessive entanglement of religion with government is bad for both religion and government. When government embraces godliness in a nation with the religious diversity of this one, the result inevitably is a dilution of the concept of God. And when religious institutions enmesh themselves with the business of government, the passion that is the essence of religious belief is, in anything but a theocracy, inevitably muted.

Thus while the culture war will no doubt rage on over issues such as abortion, gay rights and government subsidy of parochial schools, it is unlikely ever to vanquish the secularist hope -- so vital to our history -- that America remain what Jacoby quite poetically describes as a “nation founded not on dreams of justice in heaven but on the best human hopes for a more just earth.” *

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From Freethinkers

The religiously correct version of American history has never given proper credit to the central importance of the Enlightenment concept of natural rights -- or to the anticlerical abolitionists who advanced that concept before the public -- in building the case against slavery. Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who frequently trotted out the specter of the French Revolution and even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.