If you want to read American intellectual history I would suggest Gura's fabulous book American Transcendentalism and also Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. Or just go straight the horses' mouths: the works of James, Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau are all readily available and highly readable. Or if you wanted to consider the place of religion in politics, I would suggest Madeleine Albright's carefully written The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God and World Affairs.
What I would not recommend is Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. It is not what the title suggests. If you read this book, you will walk away knowing that:
- Religious people are only driven by concepts of rewards and punishments in a fantasy afterlife.
- Religious people have been given a warped sense of American history such that they only know of people like Susan B. Anthony and not of people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. (My educated readers are likely aware of both of them, but I would defy you to find an average person on the street that could name either of them regardless of their thoughts on religion.)
- "...freethinkers made a powerful case for a secularist approach to public affairs [There's a word for that- "civil".] rooted in an Enlightenment heritage unfamiliar to many in late-nineteenth-century America." (Alrighty, they don't even know they are Protestants.)
- Religious people are somehow created with religious dogma implanted into them, without the benefit of individual choice (Martin Luther would be so proud.)
- The ethical thinking of religious people does not count. "...it is a theological position that should not be permitted to masquerade as a general ethical principle." (p. 362) It would be quite convenient for the history of philosophy if Ms. Jacoby were able to settle the problem of what defines a "general ethical principle." Maybe the next book.
- Religious people lack intelligence and reason, and consequently need to be force-fed it by superior secularists. "Important as separation of church as state is to American secularists, their case must be made on a broader plane that includes the defense of rational thought itself." (pp. 359-360)
The book is a romp through the prejudices of Ms. Jacoby's own mind, without the practical experience of Dr. Albright. Reading the book left me desiring the academic paranoia of Burge's Heloise and Abelard, recently discussed. Burge, writing of events 1,000 years old, is looking over his shoulder for those who disagree with him. Jacoby, writing of events hot on the contemporary conscience, seems to have never submitted her ideas to review by anyone who disagrees with her. To label the "other" are more stupid and less humane than you are is a lazy prejudice that ultimately permits the writing of a book which lacks intellectual rigor. Panning a book published by a Holt subsidiary should not be this easy.
Fundamental to the careless discussion of ideas is a carelessness with language. On page 2 she presents a footnote stating that she has chosen to use the word "secular" prior to it's historical usage in places were "civil" would otherwise be used, since really they have the same meaning anyway. I think this is the ultimate tragedy of the book, because when she gets to her discussion of the 1950s she makes some very good arguments about the value of civil society. Unfortunately, they are lost in a book which describes secularism as a building facing down theism instead of as the public square between the buildings in which American ideas reside.
She presents the history of the world "fundamentalism" but throughout the book uses the terms "fundamentalist," "orthodox [Christianity]" and "conservative [Christianity]" interchangeably, at one point writing, "They [America's founders- secularists all, of course] did not anticipate the tenacity of religious orthodoxy, or what would today be called religious fundamentalism..." (p. 34) "Reactionary" is one of her favorite words, used with lush abundance throughout the book. She scolds Fulton Sheenfor "defining a liberal as the opposite of a reactionary" as a "pollution of American political dialog" (p. 282) but continues to freely use reactionary as the opposite of liberal.
She also seems to have a problem with counting. In the introduction she confuses minorities and majorities while trying to make some kind of point. On page 344 she has an abortion face-off between "The protestant right and the Catholic hierarchy..." vs. "most Jews, mainstream Protestants, liberal Catholics and atheists." The conservative Catholics have conveniently disappeared from the equation. Given that we live in a 50/50 country, the Protestant right remains to carry the majority of the pro-life burden, yet it is the smaller pro-choice Protestant wing that is labeled "mainstream." What it comes down to is the majority is always going to agree with her. Even while simultaneously religiously repressing her.
According to Jacoby, religiously driven stupidity is responsible for the difficulty in establishing a complete education for a secularist:
"The most regrettable consequence of the discontinuity in the record of American rationalist dissent is that its moral lessons must be relearned in every generation. It is telling that even so voracious a reader as Garrison was beyond the midpoint of his life when he discovered his spiritual ancestor Thomas Paine. When your won mind is your own church, it can take a very long time for future generations to make their way to the sanctuary." (p. 103)
And when your writer is Susan Jacoby, you are left unclear whether this is the fault of the religious muddling of history (the argument made directly prior to this paragraph), the disorder of secularist thought itself (the argument made at the end of this paragraph), or general poor scholarship (how difficult is it to discover Thomas Paine anyway?!). Within 50 pages of this conspiracy of the religious, Jacoby notes the discontinuity of genetic research lost for 40 years while the Darwinian debate was raging. (p. 137)
When she gets to the 1950s, she makes two fine points (p. 302 and p. 313) that could have been the basis of a book as carefully written as that of Dr. Albright. Unfortunately, they are thesis statements presented as throw-away conclusions and the romp quickly advances into the 1960s. There, she quickly sets up some straw religious actors (pp. 326-328) opposed to desegregation, while subsequently explaining (pp. 331-332) that religious desegregationists were marginalized and redefined by religious segregationists. In other words, she takes the prejudices of certain religious people and, knowing that they are historically incorrect, co-opts then into secularist prejudices.
Nonetheless, she recognizes that the strength of the desegregationist movement was its essentially civil character- it was a big tent that included the devoutly religious, the atheist, and every sort of citizen in between. Unfortunately she cannot learn from this fact, having rejected the meaningfulness of "civil" society on page 2. Consequently, she moves into a discussion of women's civil rights that is more secularist than civil, and the only big tent that she can recognize there is the "strong, albeit temporary bridge" (p. 342) of making legal abortion central to the women's rights cause. This is a bridge which of course excluded many religious persons.
Having now trained us in history, she thinks she is going to give us a lesson in ethics. She cites the "We Have Had Abortions" letter of 1972, stating, "Their refusal to accept the burden of sin and shame, coupled with the belief that abortion fell within the domain of individual conscience rather than of religious dogma, laid bare the secularist underpinnings of the new feminist ideals." (p. 343) The lesson (pp. 244-245) is meant to be a description of moral relativism, and unfortunately there are no polite terms to describe the intellectual viability of it- ask your average 14-year-old to explain the abortion debate to you and you'll have your lesson. Please also ask him how a person chooses to confirm to religious dogma without the use of individual conscience. Meanwhile, Ms. Jacoby has moved on to lecturing Senator Joseph Lieberman in what his grandparents would think of the separation of church and state. (pp. 353-354) Presumptuous just a little.
I have to quote this just because it is so bizarre:
"...religious correctness demanded that President Bush deny the existence of any connection between the events of September 11 and "real" Islam, just as far-right religious antiabortion organizations invariably deny any connection between their demonization of abortion [characterizing their absolutism as such contradicts the ethics lesson, but no matter] and the assassination of doctors who perform abortions. The problem, of course, is not religion, of whatever brand, as a spiritual force but religious melded with political ideology and political power. Since the religiously correct do not acknowledge there is any danger in mixing religion and politics, evil acts committed in the name of religion must always be dismissed as the dementia of criminals and psychopaths." (pp. 355-356)
Acts carried through outside of political channels and by the political minority are the responsibility of political ideology. Huh?
Leaving politics direct behind, we move on to the gleeful science: Darwinian evolution. To Jacoby, the defense of the evolutionary theory is fundamental to that "defense of rational thought itself" (p. 360). By p. 361 she has biology as fundamental to science. I would expect that chemistry and physics might come first, but when it comes down to it ignorance about science is as abundant as ignorance about philosophy. Thus the glee in making theory the foundation of scientific debate rather than focusing on those more fundamental scientific facts.
The book closes with these words: "It is time to revive the evocative and honorable freethinker, with its insistence that Americans think for themselves instead of relying on received opinion. The combination of free and thought embodies every ideal that secularists still hold out to a nation founded not on dreams of justice in heaven but on the best human hopes for a more just earth." (pp. 364-365) Ultimately Jacoby's aim in this book appears to be to synthesize a false popular history. The problem is, popular history is popular whether you like it or not. Popular history is popular because it is chosen (not received) by many individuals as they carry out their own lives based on their own hopes and aspirations, whatever they may be.
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A quick survey of some other review of this book can be found here:
http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/07/susan-jacobys-freethinkers-robert.html
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