This much ought to be clear: The origins of the contemporary disagreement about secularism lie deep in the past. They began with the construction of the First Amendment, which was not carefully drawn and which was coursed with ambiguities, if not contradictions. The amendment’s special protection of religion has been especially difficult to uphold. The framers offered no definition of religion or a limit on its protection, save that a religion must not be established, which they also failed to define. The wording was already vague in the eighteenth century. Given the vastly disparate, expanded horizons of the present, with its massive diversity and epistemic uncertainties, the amendment has become a source of social, political, and legal instability.
Other piers of secularism have likewise proven unsteady. At the beginning of the twentieth century the vocabulary of secularism took its meaning from the relative dominance of Christianity in American governance. The privatization of religion and the language of privacy itself were a response to that dominance and also its solution. But privacy has become uncertain in value and volatile in valence. Although the privatization of religion was essential to the creation of a secular settlement, now the declaration that something is private shields religious ideas and bodies from the reach of public scrutiny. The shield holds even when private groups are using public funds.
The layered social conflict of the middle of the twentieth century has also begun to shift. The earlier dispute saw multiple religious and nonreligious people turn to the state and the courts for protection. There was no obvious partisan divide, and the groups relied on somewhat surprising alliances such as that between the ACLU and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. As claimants came before the court, the contradictory and overlapping religious interests on display left it with no choice but to erect a secular political order in an attempt to preserve the peace.
In the twenty-first century the demographic decline of liberal Christianity and the union of conservative Protestants and Catholics have led to a more straightforward dispute that aligns neatly with the political parties. Republicans are the religious party, with few exceptions. There are intimations of a conservative ecumenical movement encompassing more than just Christians—the Trump photo op with orthodox Jews and a Sikh leader alongside Protestants and Catholics is one such instance. But photo ops aside, in almost every case the religion championed by Republican partisans is a somewhat strict form of Christianity. Democrats, with their much broader political coalition, often look to a form of secularism to overcome their division. They continue to use a mid-twentieth-century vocabulary in much the same way it was used then, which has put them at a disadvantage and continually off balance.
The conservative Christian mobilization has been profoundly effective. Earlier generations presumed majority status in American political life. They were accordingly indifferent or hostile to the language of civil liberties. But the loss of social, cultural, and, to some extent, political power has more recently made them reconsider what they see as the selective view that has underwritten the American secular order. They have complained that the secularism of an intolerant Left undermines such foundational liberties as the right of association, property, and free exercise.
None of these developments should come as a surprise. The political scientist Stephen Skowronek has pointed out that “a political tradition is not a coherent set of political ambitions but a common grammar through which ambitions are manipulated and redefined.” American secularists in the early twentieth century appropriated the language and the grammar of earlier generations to build the secular arrangement. Given secularism’s dominance at the middle of the twentieth century, the leaders of the Christian Right turned to the only strategy available to them, appropriating parts of the secular political vocabulary to prevent alternative uses. The result has been a destabilization, if not a rejection, of the American secular order.1
The United States is now entering a political moment in which there appears to be no agreed-upon basis of politics, no collective set of commitments to help resolve debate. It has become clear that even the negative secularism of the mid-twentieth century had meaningful substantive components, many of which have been lost. It relied on a dedication to inclusiveness and a commitment to what John Rawls called civic friendship, a seeking out of commonalities necessary to achieve political stability and peace. The resulting constitutional politics involved a set of positive virtues and habits that were, to be sure, usually honored in the breach but that in some sense formed the basis for debate. The rejection of these virtues and norms has left even the negative secularism of the mid-twentieth century in a parlous position and the nation itself not much better.
If American political culture continues down the same path, the nation will have entered a state in which the politics of preemption becomes semipermanent. Much that used to be assumed is up for grabs. But that does not mean that all the rules are gone, that the American political tradition is suddenly no longer relevant, and that the past has no operative hold on the present. So long as Americans live in a constitutional democracy and so long as their disputes take part in the wider constitutional politics of American life, there is no escaping the requirement to articulate from within, from using American political words for contested ends.2
The discursive continuities between past and present then offer a lesson. Secularists have decried the actions and the rhetoric of the Christian Right, but they might instead learn from them. The strategy of preemption, so integral to conservative success, is still available to any and all. It could be that secularists decide that the language of pluralism, which led to the embrace of diversity during the first part of the twentieth century, has reached its limits given the centrifugal force of postsixties politics. If so, they might decide that the language of equality is now the more relevant or controlling vocabulary. Or it could be, as Rawls said, that the language of public and private needs to be reaffirmed and reimagined, that political self-discipline and the public norms of debate need to be considered anew. In that case the identity politics of the New Left might have to be modified or discarded. Or it could be that liberal secularists decide that the language of religious freedom has become antithetical to secular governance, that the only choice is a positive secularism on the French model.
In any case, political mobilization requires a searching examination of how words function in debate, how they relate to one another in a constellation of concepts, and how they are substituted for other words over time. The point is not merely academic. As the recent endeavors of the Christian Right have shown, to take account of the political tradition, to learn its language and its uses, is a first step in trying to shape the tradition or in attempting to overcome it.
Acknowledgments
This is the third of three loosely related books I have written about American history. The first, The Myth of American Religious Freedom, offers a comprehensive history of Christian coercion in the law, culture, and politics of the United States. The second, The Jefferson Rule, probes the quasi-religious mythmaking in American political debate that has often used the Founding Fathers as American apostles. The third book, this one, depicts the rise of modern American secularism and the tensions within the resulting secular order. Taken together, these books offer an extended examination, through different lenses, of religion and the American political tradition—the animating notions, the recurrent pathologies, the past and future possibilities.
Because this book is a culmination of sorts, my list of acknowledgments is long. I began thinking about secularism as a graduate student. Early versions of my prospectus promised a large history on the subject. That promise remained unfulfilled as my first book changed into something else. In 2014 I was asked to join a conference session at a meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). The purpose was to assess the work of David Hollinger. For that paper I returned to the topic of secularism. I am grateful to David Engerman for conceiving of the panel and for inviting me to take part. The paper that I wrote for the OAH session eventually became an essay entitled “Political Atheism: The Secularization and Liberalization of American Public Life” (Modern Intellectual History 17 [March 2020]: 249–77). Marni Davis, Isaac Weiner, and Charlie Capper sharpened my thinking at that point. Small parts of that essay are reproduced here in disparate paragraphs. They are reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.
The book began in earnest during the 2017–18 academic year, when I had the immense fortune of serving as the John G. Winant Visiting Professor of American Government at the Rothermere American Institute (RAI) and Balliol College, Oxford. At the RAI, Sally Bayley, Kris Collins, Huw David, Gareth Davis, Pekka Hämäläinen, Mandy Izadi, Hal Jones, Alice Kelly, Des King, Karen O’Brien, Jane Rawson, Tessa Roynon, Tara Stubbs, Stephen Tuck, and Elliott West made up a wonderful community. I also received helpful criticism from the American Politics Graduate Seminar at the RAI and the American History Seminar at the University of Edinburgh. Thanks to David Silkenat for the invitation to Edinburgh.
As anyone who has spent time at either Oxford or Cambridge will tell you, the colleges are where much of the social life is found. For me, Balliol was what I thought the university would be when I first decided to become a professor. On any given day I found myself talking to philosophers, political scientists, biologists, and physicians over lunch and dinner. I am grateful to the fellows who welcomed me and made me feel that I belonged to the fellowship, especially William Barford, Diana Berruezo-Sanchez, Martin Burton, Martin Conway, John-Paul Ghobrial, Phil Howard, Bruce Kinsey, Rachel Quarrell, Seb Shimeld, Simon Skinner, Adam Smyth, Nicky Trott, Gijsbert Werner, and Stefano Zacchetti.
My colleagues at Georgia State (GSU) have been very supportive. Jake Selwood and Jared Poley critiqued an early draft of my introduction. Nick Wilding and Julia Gaffield gave me helpful feedback on several fellowship proposals. Michelle Brattain worked to get me time off to allow me to go to Oxford, as did Associate Dean Mary Ann Romski.
I am hugely thankful to my friend and law school colleague Tim Lytton, who began inviting me to his manuscript workshops a few years ago and then proposed to do a workshop for this book. Funding came from the University Research Services Administration at Georgia State and from Wendy F. Hensel, then dean of the GSU College of Law. I was honored and astounded by the scholars who took the time to read my manuscript and who came to Atlanta to tell me what they thought: Elesha Coffman, John Corrigan, Healan Gaston, Fred Gedicks, Steve Green, Alison Greene, Leslie Griffin, Sarah Igo, Neil Kinkopf, Paul Lombardo, Monica Miller, Ed Rubin, Don Seeman, Eric Segall, Isaac Weiner, and Jack Williams. Given the number of disciplines and the divergent lines of criticism, I have not done justice to all their suggestions. But the book is far, far better for their efforts.
Many other people read the manuscript in part or whole, which also made it better. I am thankful to Andrew Hartman, Mike Lienesch, Larry Moore, Leigh Schmidt, Matt Sutton, and Molly Worthen for their criticism. Jennifer Banks, my editor at Yale, made a number of crucial interventions. Lawrence Kenney, my copy editor, helped me to curb my stylistic errors and infelicities. The insights from five external reviewers markedly improved the final book and reminded me once again of the efficaciousness of peer review.
A more personal kind of thanks goes to my wife, Connie, and my son, Thomas, who listened and offered suggestions as I talked through intellectual problems. But mostly they did other things: they came to Oxford with me, they picked me up when I was down, and they supported and loved me.
Because this book brings to conclusion several lines of thought that I have been developing since graduate school, I am grateful to the professors who let me embark on this long endeavor, even though it did not at the time have manageable proportions or obvious temporal boundaries or the normal markers of a good research project. My advisor, John Kasson, and my committee members, Peter Filene, Fitz Brundage, Grant Wacker, and Mike Lienesch, all gave me advice then that has finally been put to use. If faced with a similar proposal from a student, I would have grave doubts about giving it my approval. But I am thankful that they trusted me and that it has finally come to fruition.
This book is dedicated to two of my teachers who have helped me for some time. The late Thomas Haskell was my advisor when I entered graduate school in history at Rice University. After I received the acceptance letter into the program, he asked me over to his house for a late afternoon meeting because I was already living in Houston. I arrived to find a tall, smiling man who ushered me in, invited me to sit on a low couch facing an Eames lounge chair, and offered me a beer. I was nervous. I turned down the beer. He faltered a moment, then he came back holding a glass of juice for me and a beer for himself. Over the next two years I would occasionally think about that beer as we sat in seminar, or after I read an amazing book that he assigned, or after a conversation in his office. He showed me the power of ideas and introduced me to the practice of intellectual history. I am grateful to him for taking a chance on me. I still wish I could have that beer.
David Hollinger has been an informal mentor to me for fifteen years. I first read his essay “Jews and the De-Christianization of American Public Culture” in a graduate seminar. It was so remarkable that I soon sought out everything else he had written. After graduate school, while working toward a publishing contract, I mentioned to a friend that I wished I could get Hollinger to read my proposal. She said, “You should just send it to him.” I thought that was unlikely to work. I had spent the better part of a year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, trying with little effect to get busy academics to sit down with me. A random email from some unknown postdoc wanting time and attention did not seem to have a high probability of success.
“I think he’ll do it,” she said. “He’s just like that.”
She was right. I sent David my proposal, which he immediately read. He then read the manuscript as a whole, recommended the book for publication, and provided a blurb. He has been reading my work and writing recommendations for me ever since. I do not know of a more generous scholar or one that I respect more, and I am enormously grateful for his support.