A faith like any other.

Freethinkers 

A History of American Secularism 

Susan Jacoby

Metropolitan Books, $27.50, 352 pp.

President George W. Bush begins his cabinet meetings with a prayer; Al Sharpton passes the hat in African-American churches while on the campaign trail; and Judge Roy Moore grouses about the removal of the Ten Commandments from his Alabama courthouse. St. Louis archbishop Raymond Burke threatens to deny Communion to Catholic politicians unwilling to limit abortion rights; the Vatican denounces gay marriage in almost apocalyptic terms; and the California Supreme Court orders Catholic organizations to provide contraceptives as part of employee health plans.

Clearly, a measured discussion of the relationship between churches, belief and unbelief, and public life is in order. Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers will not fulfill that need. As much manifesto as history lesson, Freethinkers is aimed at revivifying the "robust creed" of American secularism, powerful in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but silenced more recently by a "religious correctness" that virtually prohibits criticism of religious ideas, leaders, and institutions.

Catholic bishops reading that last sentence--just finishing their morning diet of stories on sexual abuse in the local paper--will presumably find it difficult to finish their breakfast.

Another precis might prevent indigestion: Jacoby sketches a history of American free thought or secularism in which, she intones, her heroes made "noble and essential contributions at every stage of the American experiment." The men who wrote the Constitution, Jacoby writes--condensing a complex historical literature into a misleading point--were "secularists." (Foolish efforts by contemporary Evangelicals to portray the American founders as beginning a "Christian nation" along lines suggested by Pat Robertson should not distract us from the fact that John Jay, James Madison, and other founders, while opposing any government establishment of religion, did see religious belief as an "indispensable support," in George Washington's words, to the new government.) For Jacoby, the abolition of slavery and the women's movement in the nineteenth century should be understood as a battle between "reactionary authoritarian religion" and an "individualistic concept of moral duty." (But this notion of moral duty, as Jacoby acknowledges, often stemmed from deeply held religious impulses, as any reader of the impassioned debate over the relationship of the Bible to slavery would attest.) The civil-rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, she pleads, even as she admits its origins in African-American Christian churches, had "many heroes animated by nonreligious humanism."

Surprisingly, Jacoby, a journalist, devotes little attention to contemporary secularism, much of it only tangentially connected to a self-conscious tradition of "free thought." That the United States is the most religious of industrial nations is well known. That the United States--especially among certain social groups (such as intellectuals) and regions (such as the Pacific Northwest)--is also an increasingly secular nation needs further emphasis. Here the more general American detachment from institutions of all sorts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would bear scrutiny, as would the widespread preference among young adults for the "spiritual" over the "religious."

Instead, the most convincing section of Freethinkers is an analysis of free thought's "golden age," the period from 1875 to 1914 when Walt Whitman's poetry and Robert Ingersoll's oratory, along with a revival of interest in the godfather of American free thought, Thomas Paine, created a lively social movement. At times this native radicalism blended with that of immigrants like Emma Goldman, who had come to secularism by different routes altogether. (Goldman first read Whitman in a prison library.) This is an important and neglected story, and Jacoby's recovery of Ingersoll, now forgotten but one of the most controversial figures of his day, illuminates an era, unlike our own, when a captivating public speaker could make a good living mocking Catholic belief in purgatory and the dour atmosphere of the Protestant Sabbath.

Why did this free-thought network--dozens of prairie radicals churning out newspapers and sponsoring Ingersoll on his many lecture tours--collapse? One possible explanation is that an almost obsessive focus on the individual placed free-thought advocates outside a reform mainstream increasingly concerned about political economy and poverty. As immigrant, urban life became more the American norm, editors in rural Kansas pouring out free-thought tracts struggled to adjust their message to new audiences. Even Ingersoll, after all, remained a staunch Republican, joining corporate leaders defending the sanctity of the gold standard when confronted by William Jennings Bryan and efforts to redistribute wealth. By the 1940s, in countries devastated by depression and war, Thomas Paine seemed less relevant to intellectuals and political leaders than either Adam Smith or Karl Marx.

Jacoby's explanation for the collapse of the free-thought movement takes a different tack. Free thought, she concludes, proved ill suited to the era of modern communications because of its reliance upon "facts, rather than emotions." Later she contrasts the "measured, objective" tone of free-thought supporters when confronted by the "emotions that move religious believers."

Well, there we are. Since Jacoby views "orthodox" religion as entirely and mistakenly dependent on obedience and emotion, one can hardly blame her for frequently blurring distinctions between religion and "hard-core fundamentalism."

Given these premises it is unsurprising that Jacoby endorses the idea that Jefferson's offhand mention of a "wall of separation between church and state" in an 1802 letter renders government connections to any religious institution unconstitutional. (She needs to read University of Chicago law professor Philip Hamburger's demolition of that fable, Separation of Church and State, published in 2002 by Harvard University Press.) Or that she thinks that the late-nineteenth-century debate over public aid to religious schools can be disentangled from a vigorous anti-Catholicism. Jacoby's absence of empathy for religious actors, perhaps especially twentieth-century Catholic leaders, is striking. She views Fr. Charles Coughlin and Bishop Fulton Sheen as emblematic figures, but doesn't touch on John Courtney Murray or Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. John Paul II's opposition to the ordination of women makes sense because it is "based on theology, not sociology." But Jacoby conveys no sense that she understands that the pope's views on consumer capitalism and capital punishment also rest on theological claims.

A different history would sketch multiple intellectual traditions, not simply one. Jacoby concludes with a heartfelt plea for secularists to unite around the banner of "think[ing] for themselves instead of relying upon received opinion." But this anti-authoritarian rallying cry is an intellectual tradition too, with its own moments of irrational excess. To mark free thought, an important aspect of the intellectual heritage of the United States (although probably less salient here than in most of Europe), as the tradition of reason and religion as blind faith in the supernatural is to stack the historical deck, placing Jane Addams and Martin Luther King Jr. outside the path of historical progress, not to mention George W. Bush. In this sense, Jacoby is an evangelist and Freethinkers an apologetic. Such books have a legitimate and honorable place. But it may be closer to the religion section of the local bookstore than Jacoby cares to admit.

John T. McGreevy is the author of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (Norton) and chair of the history department at the University of Notre Dame.