Adapted from Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Freethinkers in the Government?

By SUSAN JACOBY

We have retired the gods from politics. We have found that man is the only source of political power, and that the governed should govern.
—Robert Green Ingersoll, July 4, 1876

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, America’s secularist tradition has been denigrated by unremitting political propaganda equating patriotism with religious faith. Like most other Americans, I responded to the terrorist assaults with an immediate surge of anger and grief so powerful that it left no room for alienation. Walking around my wounded New York, as the smoke from the ruins of the World Trade Center wafted the smell of death throughout the city, I drew consolation from the knowledge that others were feeling what I was feeling—sorrow, pain, and rage, coupled with the futile but irresponsible longing to turn back the clock to the hour before bodies rained from a crystalline sky. That soothing sense of unity was severed for me just three days later, when President George W. Bush presided over an ecumenical prayer service in Washington’s National Cathedral. 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.

Bush would surely have been criticized, and rightly so, had he failed to invite representatives of non-Christian faiths to the ecumenical ceremony in memory of the victims of terrorism. But he felt perfectly free to ignore Americans who adhere to no religious faith, whose outlook is predominantly secular, and who interpret history and tragedy as the work of man rather than God. There was no speaker who represented my views, no one to reject the notion of divine 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.

It is one of the great unresolved paradoxes of American history that religion has come to occupy such an important place in the communal psyche and public life of a nation founded on the separation of church and state. Even though more Americans may be viewing public issues through a secular lens, the influence of religion at the highest levels of government has never been stronger or more public. The battle over abortion, now extended to stem cell research, is the longest-running dispute in which not only private religious beliefs but the official teachings of various churches permeate public debate and influence legislation. The Republican majority, joined by a fair number of Democrats, not only supports government funding of religious charities but insists that churches should be able to use public money to hire only members of their own faith.

Today it is impossible to imagine an avowed atheist or agnostic winning or being nominated for the American presidency. In a nationwide poll released in the summer of 2003, fully half of Americans said that they would refuse to vote for an atheist for president—regardless of his or her other qualifications. When Senator Joseph Lieberman, a devout Orthodox Jew, was running for the vice presidency on the Democratic ticket in 2000, political pundits indulged in interminable self-congratulation about the growing tolerance of the American people. While the positive response to Lieberman’s candidacy certainly attests to the diminution of antisemitism, it was Lieberman’s open religiosity, not his ethnic Jewishness, that enabled him to mix so effectively with evangelicals, High Church Episcopalians, and Roman Catholic bishops. An avowedly secular, non-observant Jew—one who considered himself Jewish in a cultural rather than a religious sense—would never have been selected for a major party’s national ticket.

In the Bush White House, the institutionalization of religion has reached an apotheosis. His cabinet meetings routinely begin with a prayer, as the public learned from a startling front-page photograph in the New York Times several years ago. Yet the religiously correct continue to speak of a “naked public square,” a space in which secular humanists supposedly have succeeded in muzzling the voices of faith. In The Culture of Disbelief, Stephen L. Carter asserts that “the truth—an awkward one for the guardians of the public square—is that tens of millions of Americans rely on their religious traditions for the moral knowledge that tells them how to conduct their lives, including their political lives. They do not like being told to shut up.” But no one is telling them to shut up—not that anyone could. And no one denies that all public policy issues, whether they involve scientific research or the conduct of foreign affairs, have both a moral and a pragmatic component. For individuals, morality is never a matter of consensus: your countrymen may go to war, but you may not follow if your conscience forbids you to do so.

Today, the one minority left outside the shelter of America’s ecumenical umbrella is the congregation of the unchurched.¹ This is the case despite the proud tradition of freethought (the lovely term that first appeared in the late 1600s and flowered into a genuine social and philosophical movement during the next two centuries) in American life and politics. On the centennial anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Robert Ingersoll, the foremost champion of freethought and the most famous orator in late-nineteenth-century America, paid tribute in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois, to the “first secular government that was ever founded in this world.” Also known as “the Great Agnostic,” Ingersoll praised the framers of the Constitution for deliberately omitting any mention of God from the nation’s founding document and instead acknowledging “We the People” as the supreme governmental authority. This unprecedented decision, Ingersoll declared, “did away forever with the theological idea of government.”

Of course, the Great Agnostic spoke too soon; it is impossible to imagine such a forthright celebration of America’s secularist heritage today, as the apostles of religious correctness attempt to infuse every public issue, from the quality of education to capital punishment, with their theological values. This tension between secularism and religion was present at America’s creation; a secular government, independent of all religious sects, was seen by founders of diverse private beliefs as the essential guarantor of liberty of conscience. The descendants of passionate religious dissenters, who had fled the church-state establishment of the Old World in order to worship God in a multiplicity of ways, were beholden to a godless constitution. America’s great leaders have honored that fact in their spirit and their rhetoric. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not try to assuage the shock of Pearl Harbor by using an altar as the backdrop for his declaration of war, and Abraham Lincoln, who never belonged to a church, delivered the Gettysburg Address not from a sanctuary but on the field where so many soldiers had given “the last full measure of devotion.”

Those who cherish secularist values have too often allowed conservatives to frame public policy debates as conflicts between “value-free” secularists and religious representatives of supposedly unchanging moral principles. But secularists are not value-free; their values are simply grounded in earthly concerns rather than in anticipation of heavenly rewards or fear of infernal punishments. No one in public life today upholds secularism and humanism in the uncompromising terms used by Ingersoll more than 125 years ago. “Secularism teaches us to be good here and now,” Ingersoll declared. “I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just.... Secularism has no ‘castles in Spain.’ It has no glorified fog. It depends upon realities, upon demonstrations; and its end and aim is to make this world better every day—to do away with poverty and crime, and to cover the world with happy and contented homes.”

These values belong at the center, not in the margins, of the public square. It is past time to restore secularism, and its noble and essential contributions to every stage of the American experiment, to its proper place in our nation’s historical memory and vision of the future.

NOTES

¹ According to a nationwide opinion poll of Americans’ religious identification, conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the fastest-growing “religious” group in the United States is composed of those who do not subscribe to any faith. From 1990 to 2001, the number of the unchurched more than doubled, from 14.3 million to 29.4 million. Approximately 14 percent of Americans, compared with only 8 percent in 1990, have no formal ties to religion. 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.