Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

American public culture insists that it is and always has been a religious nation — that the Founders were Christians, that secularism is a recent and imported deviation, that godlessness is un-American. Susan Jacoby’s project is to demonstrate that this self-portrait is a historical falsification. There is a continuous and substantial American tradition of freethought that was at various periods a genuine mass movement, and the dominant narrative has suppressed it with considerable success.

The Core Claim

From Thomas Paine through Robert Ingersoll to the secularist battles of the twentieth century, America sustained a freethinking tradition that mainstream historiography has systematically underremembered. The suppression was partly deliberate — religious institutions and their political allies worked to marginalise the tradition — and partly the result of tactical accommodations made by secularists themselves, who often found it expedient to de-emphasise their unbelief when building political coalitions. The result is a collective amnesia about the depth and breadth of American scepticism.

Where the Argument Is Strongest

The material on Robert Ingersoll is the book’s most original and most valuable section. “The Great Agnostic” was a touring lecturer who drew audiences of thousands across the 1870s and 1880s, argued against orthodox Christianity before working-class audiences as well as educated ones, and was one of the most prominent public figures of the Gilded Age. He has been almost entirely erased from American cultural memory. Jacoby’s recovery of his career makes a compelling prima facie case that freethought was once a mass movement, not a marginal intellectual tendency confined to universities and drawing rooms.

The analysis of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible and the relationship between freethought and nineteenth-century feminism is similarly valuable. The systematic critique of religious patriarchy was a significant current in the women’s movement, and later feminist historiography — more accommodating of religious sensibility — has tended to de-emphasise it. Jacoby restores the connection.

Where It Strains

The book was written in the early 2000s with an eye on the religious right, and the contemporary polemic periodically intrudes on the historical argument. Jacoby is not a neutral historian — she is a secular humanist writing advocacy history — and the evidence is sometimes framed accordingly. The definition of “freethought” is expansive enough to gather figures who considered themselves deists, agnostics, anti-clerical, or simply privately sceptical into a tradition they might not have claimed or recognised.

The geographical scope is also under-theorised. Jacoby’s America is largely an East Coast, anglophone affair. The relationship between freethought and immigrant communities — German rationalists, Jewish secularists, Italian anti-clericals — is touched on but not integrated into the main argument, which remains more culturally narrow than the movement she describes.

Verdict

An important work of recovery whose historical argument is stronger than its polemical register sometimes suggests. The Ingersoll material alone justifies the book. Read it as a corrective to the myth of America’s uniformly religious heritage — a companion, on the American side of the Atlantic, to Whitmarsh’s demonstration that scepticism has ancient roots — with appropriate attention to the author’s own commitments and their effect on the selection and framing of evidence.