Often ideologically driven, answers to this driving question have been a long-standing feature of how Americans construct narratives about the nation and its path in the world. In Freethinkers she therefore argues that it is 'past time to restore secularism, and its noble and essential contributions at every stage of the American experiment, to its proper place in our nation's historical memory' (11).įreethinkers boldly enters into today's turbulent debates over whether the American government has authentically Christian or secular origins. Freethinking secularists who attained significant influence on the nation and its direction often have been vilified or otherwise veiled. Yet, she contends, this fact has been obscured.

Her core argument is that secular thought formed the root origins of American democracy. By looking to the past, Jacoby attempts to illuminate contemporary debates about the proper role for religion in the public square. In her important and timely new book, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, journalist Susan Jacoby grapples with the history of secular thought in the United States and the fate of Jefferson's much heralded reason-based beliefs. 'I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States,' wrote Thomas Jefferson in a private letter in 1822, 'who will not die an Unitarian.' Only four years before his death, the author of Virginia's landmark Statute for Religious Freedoms clearly envisioned the nation's path as one toward a Christianity based on reason rather than pure faith and denominational dogmatism. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.

Freethinkers jacoby