In 1787, when former revolutionaries met in Philadelphia to draft the U.S. Constitution, they decided in defiance of all custom to make it a government without God. In spite of their decision the United States has never had an entirely secular arrangement. Christians of various stripes have long been leaders within American governance, holding office, directing institutions, dispersing funds, and setting the contours of debate. The religious cast to public life has pushed other groups into a series of difficult decisions, prompting them to criticism, accommodation, or cooperation depending on the issue. The tensions have made the United States one of the central sites in the wider disagreement about how religion and governance should be related.
This book traces the lineaments of the dispute. It shows how people conceptualized a nation based not, as the nineteenth-century agnostic Robert Ingersoll put it, “upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men.” It also tracks how people resisted the secular idea, insisting that all liberties come from God so that religion ought to remain a central pillar of public life.1
To understand the historical debate we need to correct several assertions frequently made by contemporary writers. The first correction is straightforward. It is common to find in both contemporary and scholarly commentary the notion that the United States was born secular. The declaration has a far-reaching political implication. If the United States was set up to be secular, then any religious privilege in public life is both an aberration and a betrayal of founding intention.
There is, to be sure, a core truth in the claim. The godlessness of the Constitution was remarkable for its time. The unwillingness of the constitutional framers to use God for social stability suggests a desire on the part of at least some framers to limit religion’s public role. But that founding desire did not translate into the secular political arrangement that some had hoped. Given the system of American federalism, states were free to support religion in any way they wished. Most early state governments sought to use the Christian religion to uphold social stability. They paid churches. They had religious tests for office. They maintained blasphemy laws, enforced Sabbath laws, and used religious ideas to prohibit divorce, obscenity, and vice. Even at the federal level religious ideas penetrated the government. It took time and effort before the secularist vision gained traction in American political culture. The United States, put simply, was not born secular. It has become more secular over time.2
Other commenters have gone in an alternate direction. They recognize the historic prominence of Christianity in American public life and assert that that prominence was modulated, even overcome, through the determined activities of nonbelievers. Again, there is a vital truth here. From the beginning of American history nonbelievers have grappled with the Christian strictures that defined and limited American life. They approached their position out of a variety of religious traditions, and their posture of dissent supported a remarkable number of political philosophies and persuasions. Regardless of their differences they came together to form a secularist class of activists and intellectuals who critiqued the dominant religious structures of American government.3
But the story of American secularism—and this cannot be stressed enough—is not merely a story of unbelief. Religious people had a central role to play in the history, and not just as antagonists. In a society with a high degree of religious adherence, a secular democracy requires religious support to have success and legitimacy. In the United States, secularism had that support in the past. Religious Jews, ecumenical Protestants, apocalyptic sects, and even Protestant missionaries joined heterodox and nonbelieving intellectuals to promote public secularism for their own reasons. The story of American secularism, in short, is one of religious and nonreligious alliance. Religious advocacy was vital to secularism’s success.
A person might easily miss the religious component of American secularism, given the way that “secular” and its analogues are used in contemporary discussion. Many people tend to conceive of the secular or of secularism as a personal irreligious stance. It is in that sense that the atheist writer Susan Jacoby speaks of “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.”4
Atheist or agnostic intellectuals who share Jacoby’s sense have often engaged in a quasi-evangelistic endeavor. They have taken upon themselves the obligation to dispel illusion, to free others from the stranglehold of religion, and to counter a religious establishment that relies upon the simple credulity of the masses. The institutionalized version of secularism that they have supported is one of widespread irreligion, the social embrace of heterodoxy and antireligious opposition, what the intellectual historian Wilfred McClay has called “ ‘positive secularism,’ the secularism of established unbelief.”5
Other writers, more critical, have reinforced this notion. In the past twenty years a large, difficult body of literature has sought to interrogate secularism’s supposed benefits. These writers contend that because the secular takes its meaning from an opposition to the religious, however defined, the secular project necessarily seeks to regulate religion, to define it, and to suppress it; in the process secularism takes aim squarely at the management of human difference. The People’s Republic of China, Cuba, North Korea, the formerly communist countries of the Eastern bloc of Europe, autocratic countries like Egypt, and the long history of secularism in France, dating back to the French Revolution, serve as exemplars of secularism’s oppressive tendencies. The resulting literature questions what the anthropologist Talal Asad has called “the triumphalist history of the secular.” Imagine, if you will, a militant atheist as the head of a government agency tasked with deciding a religious exemption to federal law, and you get a sense of why, as Asad has put it, “a secular state does not guarantee toleration; it puts in place different structures of ambition and fear.”6
Yet those who construe all forms of secularism as established unbelief are, in the American case, simply mistaken. In contrast to the secular arrangements in Egypt, Cuba, and even France, the secularism of the United States emerged out of a history of conflict and bargaining between religious and nonreligious groups. The result of their bargaining is a political arrangement in which exclusive religious ideas have, in theory, no authority outside an organized religious community but are not otherwise subject to state hostility. Wilfred McClay calls this “ ‘negative secularism,’ the secularism of non-establishment.” It requires a style of political discourse that in many cases has used the language of constitutional rights as a form of public reason. It includes an embrace of pluralism, of free exchange and disagreement on religious matters, of freedom of inquiry in public life, and of freedom from any official or established perspective, whether religious or nonreligious.7
The distinction between positive and negative secularism is crucial to understanding the particularities of the American experience. At bottom, negative secularism requires a separation between an individual’s conception of metaphysical reality and the collective notions within the social and political order. The gap between the personal and the collective explains how religious intellectuals could make secular political arguments. Their public political reasoning involved a rhetorical conversion: from the language of the religious to that of the secular, from the private or communal stuff of one’s religious identity to the public and therefore shared stuff of American civic and political ideals. Once converted, the language and the reasoning can be adopted by people with various commitments, whether they are conservative or liberal, religious or irreligious. A person who can speak only in the language of his or her faith is not likely to become a secularist, even of the negative kind. But for the religious people engaged in the secular project secularism did not demand the abandonment of belief. It needed only a commitment to mutual political exchange and, perhaps, to the privatization of religious ideas and rhetoric when they became unpersuasive to others in the debate.
This final obligation of religious privatization has led some writers and polemicists to allege that secularism is really a form of unacknowledged sectarianism. By conceiving of religion as a voluntaristic and easily privatized set of personal beliefs, these writers argue, the secular state defines religion in essentially Protestant terms. The result is a damning indictment of the secular project, if the argument holds up. Not only is secularism a new form of oppression, in this view, it is the worst kind of oppression, deriving from an essentially false consciousness. It purports to be neutral but actually promotes a specific religious ideology over others.8
There is much to say about the last contention, and in some sense the rest of the book is devoted to the task. But suffice it to say that even if the resulting system of secularism has occasionally taken on a Protestant cast, that does not make the system itself a form of Protestantism. If so, it would be difficult to understand how so many religious and nonreligious Jews became ardent supporters of the secular order. Nor would it explain why so many conservative Protestants were opposed to the growth of that order—hostile even to the idea of secularism—and remain so. Secularism is simply too complicated to see it as a form of Protestant sublimation.
This book, then, seeks to clarify the history of American secularism, to uncover its foundation and development, and to analyze its subsequent tensions and ambivalent results. There are many ways to go about the task, each of which might have merit. But in the main I tell the story of American secularism through its most prominent proponents and detractors, tracking its emergence as a political order through the social negotiation between groups. Put succinctly, I offer a story focused on the social history of secularist ideas within the American political tradition.
The attention to ideas requires some justification. As Walter Lippmann wrote in his classic 1914 book Drift and Mastery, “There is to-day a widespread attempt to show the futility of ideas.” The same sentence would hold true over a hundred years later. Both then and now there are many who suspect that beliefs, arguments, and philosophies have little or no relevance to political life. What matters are not ideas but interests, the rational calculation of financial and personal gain in a complex system of winners and losers. Social scientists have spent the past seventy years building sophisticated models exploring the role of interests in politics. They have often simultaneously dismissed the notion that culture or ideas possess a motive political force in their own right.9
If correct, their claims would require an extensive shift in perspective. The interest-based conception of politics views public debate as froth churned up by deeper forces. Politician X says one thing to reporters. Politician Y criticizes her. Columnists and writers support or disavow the original statement. Individual citizens express their own thoughts. The conversation dies down or changes or produces some transitory political effect, and then it starts over. Proponents of an interest-based conception have asserted that ignoring the rhetorical foam produced by the convulsive concatenation of interests allows a person to understand the actual, deep workings of politics.
But the relevance of ideas to public life becomes more evident when the frame is longer than a news cycle or even an election cycle. Ideas are essential to the creation and maintenance of American public culture—the attitudes, beliefs, and categories that order the social and political process and that provide the primary assumptions or points of dispute within public debate. As the late intellectual historian Rush Welter put it, ideas have mattered in American politics precisely because they have the power to motivate people beyond their narrow interests and toward a collective aspiration. The creation of a collectivity and the engagements that call that collectivity forth are essential to the history of democratic governance.
“To the extent that the United States has been egalitarian in its social aspirations,” Welter wrote, “to the extent that its educational institutions and media of information or persuasion have been popular rather than elite in their bias, to the extent that popular opinion (however misinformed) has been a given within which its political leaders were forced to work, the ideas current in the society at large have had more to do with how it conducted its affairs than have comparable ideas in other societies.”10
In the United States the political culture has had long-standing keywords—liberty and equality foremost among them. Those consistent ideals emerge out of the peculiar fact that, with the critical exception of the American Civil War, American politics stretches back nearly unbroken to the formation of the Constitution in 1787, if not all the way back to the beginning of the Revolution. The United States is one of the world’s oldest democracies still operating under the oldest Constitution. Within American political culture the Constitution operates as a kind of civic scripture.11
In that way the American political order shares characteristics of other creedal communities, with their discursive commitments and practices. A person cannot just invent a whole new way of conceiving of politics given the discursive parameters set by the foundational texts. He or she must work, to some extent, from within. It is not too much of a stretch to say that American politics reflects the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s definition of a tradition. It is, in his words, “an historically extended, socially embedded argument.”12
The endeavor has been undertaken by people in disparate times and places who used the categories available to them for their own ends. The political concepts and the accreted volume of their past use have meant that the debate stayed remarkably stable. The available ideas have shaped outcomes in a variety of ways. Those who have sought to stray outside the tradition or to change it in some fundamental sense—radical socialists are one example—have labored to gain a consistent following in American public life partly because of the discursive limits they have encountered.
But the American political tradition is not singular, even if it has been consistent and long-standing. It involves, as MacIntyre says, an argument, which implies multiplicity and divergence. Like other traditions, it might be best characterized as “a family of disagreements,” to borrow the phrasing of the historians David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper. The dispute was aired in a broader culture that sought to address the nation’s collective experience.13
The public place of secularism was an essential part of the quarrel, which is not a surprise given the standing of Christianity within the United States. One’s position on religion in American life inevitably became a key flash point in the wider dispute over the shape and texture of the nation’s public culture. As the disagreement developed, the claims both invoked and pressed against other ideas within the political tradition—about liberalism, pluralism, legitimacy, authority, democracy, privacy, and governance.
To a considerable extent it fell to the legal system to work out the exact way that these terms fit together. American secularism is therefore inherently constitutionalized, drawing upon the First Amendment and elaborated through the courts. The U.S. Supreme Court has been, until recently, an institutional medium of secularization, serving as a venue in which disparate groups could both build out and contest the secular order.
American secularists turned to the courts to reject the often-unequal distribution of privilege and power in society. They looked with disdain at the Christian or sometimes theistic religious order that got pride of place. They asked jurists to reorder the structures of society to create a system of equality. And as they did so they ran up against the partisans of entrenched Christian power who were often unwilling to relinquish their hold on public life. The resulting conflict was aggregate and layered, taking place at different points in time and involving many people. Sometimes the participants seemed ignorant of previous efforts and of others within the debate. The disputes often turned multidirectional, working out of concert to a variety of ends and frequently producing uneven effects. At any given moment, it might have been difficult to determine any clear vector of development. But gradually and fitfully the secularist efforts converged, decoupling American political culture from the notion of Christian civilization. By the end of the 1960s an informal coalition of religious and nonreligious secularists had successfully decentered the exclusive Christian assumptions of public life.
It is in that postsixties world of American secularism that we still live. Because of the multiple efforts and unresolved disagreements, it is not an entirely coherent achievement. In spite of its successes, American secularism remains beset by internal weakness. The negative character of the secular order—its relative thinness as a political and social ideal and its requirement of a careful division between shared political commitments and more substantively personal ones—has resulted in a corresponding instability. The uncertainties have been magnified by the relatively archaic words and categories that partisans use to state their case.
To make sense of where we are, we need to consider the terms of debate, to understand how these terms came about, and to observe the suppleness, the malleability, and the resistances that these terms generate in the formation of American social and political life.
And in order to do that, we have to go back to the beginning.