http://www.newsday.com/features/booksmags/ny-bkjacoby0516,0,3445045,print.story
Pleading the First
BY SCOTT MCLEMEE
May 16, 2004
FREETHINKERS: A History of American Secularism, by Susan Jacoby.
Metropolitan, 417 pp., $27.50.
--------------------------------------------------
For the past few years a friend of mine in the Midwest has been engaged in
a war of words in the columns of a local newspaper. Every so often someone
writes a letter to the editor claiming that the United States is a
Christian nation and that, as the formula goes, "freedom of religion
doesn't mean freedom from religion." In response, my friend writes a
letter pointing out that the Founding Fathers tended to be deists, not
Christians. They saw God as, essentially, a watchmaker. He created the
universe, wound it up and then stood back to let it run. If Franklin,
Washington, Jefferson and Paine had a religion, it was a faith in reason,
not in the Bible.
It was a pretty avant-garde notion for the 18th century. And even, it
seems, for the 21st, at least in certain regions of the world (some of
them within our own borders). It hardly matters that my friend, a history
professor, knows what he is talking about. Fundamentalist groups circulate
leaflets containing stock responses to such arguments -- including
quotations that, torn from context, "prove" that the separation of church
and state was never a basic American value. (After all, even the least
orthodox of the Founding Fathers occasionally said something nice about
Jesus.)
All of this is, in effect, just the latest chapter in the story told by
Susan Jacoby in "Freethinkers." It is a lively, if sometimes
one-dimensional, survey of those Americans determined to keep God and
government at a safe distance from one another. The expression lending her
book its title has a slightly old-fashioned quality: Calling oneself a
"freethinker" today is rather like capitalizing abstraction nouns, such as
Reason or Progress. Her book rings with echoes from the lecture halls of
19th century America, where religious skepticism had its place alongside
the causes of abolitionism, free love, women's suffrage and a shorter
workday.
Jacoby's argument is that all such movements embodying Reason and Progress
were influenced, if not guided, by secularists. The latter term subsumes
agnostics, atheists, anti-clericalists and those whose religious beliefs
coexist with an "insistence on the distinction between private faith and
the conduct of public affairs." The role such figures have played in
American history has been erased from public memory by what Jacoby often
calls the "religiously correct" mentality -- a turn of phrase that would
be slightly witty, if used no more than once, but that soon proves
irksome.
So I grumble. But its tics notwithstanding, "Freethinkers" provides a
readable chronicle of the ebb and flow of American commitment to the
divorce between political and religious authority. Jacoby conveys the
essential radicalism of the Constitution -- which asserted that the new
government was formed by and for a sovereign "We, the People," with no
reference to God as the ultimate authority.
Religious leaders protested this at the time. Nor were they happy when
Jefferson declared, "The legitimate powers of government extend only to
such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my
neighbor to say there are 20 gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket
nor breaks my leg." And when Thomas Paine went from writing the pamphlets
that fueled the revolutionary cause of 1776 to publishing works of deist
philosophy, he was practically written out of the story of the founding of
the republic.
And so secularism plays a dual role in Jacoby's telling of history. It is
built into the infrastructure of society itself (at least insofar as the
Constitution serves as the founding gesture by which the United States
defines itself). And yet, it also is a counterculture, an underground. Her
chapters on the 19th century are devoted to tracing the influence of
secularism on the dissident movements of the day. Abolitionist editor
William Lloyd Garrison, for example, read Paine's "The Age of Reason"; and
in the 1890s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, militant suffragist, published a
skeptical work called "The Woman's Bible" that probably would earn her
death threats if she went on talk radio today.
When Jacoby recounts the lives and struggles of freethought journalists
and orators of the 19th century, her pages have a nostalgic quality. I
suspect that their defiance and courage is only part of it.
----end of excerpt-----
.
|
