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2/25/2005

In her introduction to Freethinkers, Susan Jacoby recounts her horror and unity in sorrow with the other residents of New York City in the hours and days after the 9/11 attacks. She goes on to recount feelings that many secularists felt when, three days after the attacks, George Bush gave a speech at a prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washingon.

“Delivering an address indistinguishable from a sermon, replacing the language of civic virtue with the language of faith, the nation’s chief executive might as well have been the Reverend Bush.” Jacoby expresses her outrage at the lack of even so much as a nod to secular America in those days of grief and outrage, and says “…there was no speaker who represented my views, no one to reject the notion of divince purpose at work in the slaughter of thousands and to proclaim the truth that grief, patriotism, and outrage at injustice run just as deep in the secular as in the religious portion of the American body politic.” Jacoby goes on to point out that no other American president had before so grossly disregarded the separation of church and state as to give such an address from a religious venue, and she cites FDR’s address following Pearl Harbor and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as examples.

Jacoby goes on to tell us that non-christian minorities are often invited to share public platforms – secularists are not, even though “the secularist minority is much larger than any non-christian religious group.” She quotes an opinion poll conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York which showed that in 2001, over 29.4 million Americans claimed no formal ties with religion, and that “Sixteen percent, and it is reasonable to assume that they make up essentially the same group as the unchurched, describe their outlook on the world as entirely or predominantly secular.” One percent claimed to be atheist/agnostic, but Jacoby suggests while those numbers may be higher, she points out that atheism/agnosticism are no prerequisite to being a secularist.

Jacoby draws a comparison between the freethinkers of the 17th – early 20th century and today’s America – she claims that we secularists have allowed the Anti-Progress Party (formerly the conservative/Republican party - see my blog of 2/24/2004 for a new liberal lexicon) to frame the debate and demonize American secularists in the eyes of the entire nation. She is right. We have. But she shows us a way to reclaim America’s true heritage – a heritage of secular men and women who fought and died for and went to prison for basic freedoms and liberties rooted in the grounds of the separation of church and state, of the freedom OF and FROM the changing whims of religious belief.

In an age when the Religious Reich would have us believe that the founders, Jefferson, Adams, Washington, etc., were born-again Christians in the vein of today’s Falwell, Robertson and Van Impe, Jacoby provides us ample evidence that:

“What did distinguish the most important revolutionary leaders was a particularly adaptable combination of political and religious beliefs, constantly subject to revision in an era when modern views of nature, science, and man’s place in the universe were beginning to take shape. These views included skepticism vis-à-vis the more rigid and authoritarian religious sects of their day, the conviction, rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, that is God exists, he created human rationality as the supreme instrument for understanding and mastering the natural world…The logical extension of such beliefs was a civil government based not on the laws of God, as promulgated by self-appointed earthly spokesmen, but on the rights of man.”

Jacoby takes us on a ride from this point in the opening chapter through a long and distinguished history of American secularism, including Thomas Paine, the abolitionists/anticlericalists/feminists connections and the “belief and unbelief of Abraham Lincoln.” She takes us through the introduction of that age old anathema to the fundamentalist Christian, Darwin’s theory of evolution and it’s supporters. Jacoby has stories to tell of people we’ve never heard of, such as the engaging story of Philo D. Beckwith, prominent and wealthy citizen of Dowagiac, Michigan, who in the 1800’s tried to turn his town into a bastion of freethought haven and virtual museum. Beckwith, who managed through his generous management practices to insulate his town and industry from the mass protests and strikes occurring in other parts of the country and nearby Chicago, opened a theater, festooned with red sandstone patheon of his personal heroes and heroines: “Ingersoll, Paine, Voltaire, Susan B. Anthony, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, George Sand and Walt Whitman.” Ingersoll, “The Great Agnostic”, dedicated the theater, and it was popular even in “the buckle on the Bible Belt.”

Jacoby takes us through the “culture wars” of 1870 through the first world war, in a time of intense conflict between the traditionally disregarded women, blacks, immigrants, laborers and the rich white men who ruled the country, and into the 20th century with the “red scares” where communist was the buzzphrase for feminism, the suffrage movements, the civil rights movement, atheism and agnosticism, not entirely unlike the word liberal is bandied about by the Reich today. We see the birth of the televangelist, the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era, and in the midst of this Post WWII resurgence of revivalism, we see important battles being won based upon the First Amendment, women’s rights and civil rights.

Jacoby ends the story of American Secularism with another look at our modern resurgence of revivalism, and gives a harrowing view of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s frighteningly theocratic views that America’s government needs to be closer to his idea of religious belief.

Susan Jacoby raises the call for secularists, both of the religious and non-religious variety, to stop allowing the Religious Reich to call the debate shots. We need to stop running from our heritage and defending ourselves, and proclaimed as “a robust creed worth of the world’s first secular government.” She tells us that “it is crucial for today’s secularists to find a way to convey the passions of humanism as Ingersoll once did, to move hearts as well as minds.”

I agree with Jacoby’s insistence that we secularists, freethinkers, atheists, agnostics, ‘unchurched’, defenders of the separation of church and state, defenders of the constitution, need to reclaim the language of the people, and celebrate our long heritage of the fight for rights of man and woman in this country. Jacoby certainly does an excellent job of giving us plenty of examples to choose from.

This book is a must-read for anyone who is disgruntled or downright frightened at the intrusion of narrow religious belief into every facet of American life, from medical care to prison management to the Bible-thumping of the White House itself.

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