It is this very separation, she says, that has allowed all religions to flourish in the United States. She is encouraged that many secular and religious people find important common ground in a here-and-now, secular approach to public affairs - defending the deeply American idea that church and state are best kept in distinctly different realms. Jacoby says, noting they can also be the values of religious people. These powerful secular values are grounds for a solid morality, Ms.

Jacoby says, quoting Robert Ingersoll, one of the most influential voices in the 19th century, a person now largely forgotten. Secularism teaches us to make the world a better place every day, to attempt to cover it with happy and contented homes,’” Ms. Secularism teaches us to be just, here and now. “‘Secularism teaches us to be good here and now. So she set out to revivalize this deeply American tradition in Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.

She is a secularist, scholar and reporter proud of the vital role secularism has played in the American democratic experiment. Now the secular has faded from center stage with the rise of what Susan Jacoby calls the “religiously correct.” For too long, she says, secularists have allowed others to define - and demonize - them. Constitution “We, the People” and left “God” out. America’s Founding Fathers, many of them “Freethinkers,” deliberately created the world’s first secular nation when they began the U.S. Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, and the once-famous Robert Green Ingersoll, Freethinkers restores to history the passionate humanists who struggled against those who would undermine the combination of secular government and religious liberty that is the glory of the American system.“We, the People.” are revolutionary words, now under attack in the very country which famously gave those words to the world. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected achievements of secularists who, allied with tolerant believers, have led the battle for reform in the past and today. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby traces more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. 'Jacoby accomplishes her task with clarity, thoroughness, and an engaging passion.'Īt a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason.

Wild justice susan jacoby