Transatlantic Difference in Religious Politics

Jacoby, Susan, Freethinkers – A History of American Secularism, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004

Book review by Mike King, February 2005

Journalist Alexander Chancellor, writing in the Guardian during the 2004 US elections suggested that “In Britain, flaunting religious faith is a political liability; in America, it is a political necessity.” Anyone intrigued by the transatlantic difference in religious politics and the place of religion in public life will find Jacoby’s Freethinkers invaluable: it should also be a primer for all political opponents of George Bush. Jacoby’s book gives a detailed account of the historical forces that create the US/UK paradox – why is religion central to the politics of the US (when its founding Constitution separated church and religion), whereas religion is a ‘political liability’ in the UK (which has never disestablished its national religion)?

Jacoby, herself a journalist, introduces key figures and arguments to clarify her account, many of which might be unfamiliar to British readers, but at the same time apparently need reinstating in the popular understanding of the US. She clearly holds dear both the values of freethought and those of women’s liberation (her accounts of women’s suffrage in the US is a bonus of the book), and so is unsparing of the Christian right and its attempts to rewrite American history. The key battleground is the “wall of separation” that Thomas Jefferson helped erect between church and state, initially in Virginia state legislation, and then in the American Constitution of 1787. At the start of her book she points out that George Bush Jr. was the first US president to give a major national address from a church when he made his response to September 11. The religious tone of his speech and those other faith leader he invited meant that there was no speaker to represent the secular views of Jacoby or the millions of Americans like her: “most of his predecessors would have regarded the choice of a religious sanctuary for a major speech as a gross violation of the respect for separation of church and state constitutionally required of the nation’s chief executive.” At the end of the book she states: “For the past four decades, the militant religious right has mounted a tireless assault on the separation of church and state …” So how is it that, in some sense, the US is now less secular than it was in 1787?

Jacoby shows us that the key to this paradox is that at the time of the Constitution “honest differences of belief had been considered so potentially disruptive to the fabric of society that only a secularist government could guarantee public stability and private liberty of conscience.” Freethought in the Enlightenment, Voltaireian tradition, partly brought to America through Thomas Paine, was part of the intellectual framework of the Constitution’s founding fathers, particularly Jefferson and Madison, the 2nd and 3rd presidents respectively. It is here that a detailed knowledge of that key mode of thought of that period – deism – is needed (deism is also at the heart of the Christian response to science). Deists like Hume, Voltaire and Jefferson are falsely assumed to be atheists by both the Christian right and by secularists: indeed the accusation of ‘atheism’ in the US remains damning to this day. A Gallop poll showed that a “majority of Americans say they would refuse to vote for an atheist for president even though they would consider voting for an African American, a woman, a Jew or a homosexual.” Jacoby is sceptical that the public would indeed vote for a president in the latter categories, but her point is that it is still socially acceptable to voice prejudice against an atheist. But a deist is not an atheist; rather they adhere to what Karen Armstrong calls the “God of the philosophers,” or a more Hellenic than Hebraic conception of the divine. Freethought is therefore a spectrum of views from the unconventional religion of the deist to the rejectionist position of the atheist. What the religious right have succeeded in doing, according to Jacoby, is to associate freethought (and ‘liberalism’) in the US, not only with a crude atheism, but also with un-American allegiances such as communism.

The early battlegrounds on which the Constitution were tested include the Sunday post and the prohibition of state funds for religious schooling. The former is no longer an iconic struggle, partly because the religious right also succeeded in melding God and mammon into their ideology – losing the Sunday post would mean lost business –, but the issue of schooling is still very much alive. The locus of power ebbed and flowed over the period since 1787 between the secularists and the religious conservatives. The Constitution was the product of an uneasy alliance between freethinkers, and evangelicals who objected to any one religious grouping holding dominance (though it was not until 1818 that the last state church was disestablished). The early 1800s saw a religious backlash, and then, the period from 1875 to 1914 saw, as Jacoby puts it: “the high-water mark of freethought as an influential movement in American society.” This Golden Age of American freethought was spearheaded by Robert Green Ingersoll, a man that Jacoby would like remembered as the “American Voltaire.” It is another success of religious conservatism that he is now a largely forgotten figure, but his great contribution was to bridge the theoretical deism of the founding fathers with the practical politics of his time. Jacoby then documents the steady retreat from this Golden Age, a victim of historical events that associated patriotism with religious conservatism and sedition with atheism, liberalism and freethought. The rise of Catholicism as a political force in the US was another key factor, particularly in the McCarthy era: its strident linking of communism with atheism created a bridge to the non-Catholic religious right. Catholics now had a visible Americanism, but they also had the best-organised church hierarchy, and it is a testament to their acceptability that Kennedy, a catholic, was elected in 1960.

A useful companion to Jacoby’s book would be Susan Budd’s Varieties of Unbelief – Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850-1960, though sadly out of print. It covers a shorter period, but shows how radically different the British experience is of religious politics. Religious tolerance was such that Britain never required disestablishment; while religious indifference today is at a level apparently never seen in the US. Yet the struggle for British secularism was intense in the mid-late 19th century, and was epitomised by the UK counterpart to Ingersoll: Charles Bradlaugh, founder of the British Secular Society (coincidentally both men were born in 1833). Another key difference is that a horror of communism never became a weapon of religious conservatism in the UK, instead early socialist and secular groups competed with each other in their anti-clerical efforts, both gaining widespread support.

To conclude: Freethinkers is essential reading as we reflect on the rise of religious fundamentalism in the world at large, and in particular in the US. Religious conservatism cannot be countered without contemplation of the complex forces of its historical origins and relation to US society, so admirably presented here by Jacoby.