Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publication: The Washington Post
Date: April 25, 2004
URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35325-2004Apr22.html
[Note from Hindu Vivek Kendra: The
Roman Catholic Church in Europe is desperately trying to get the new European
constitution to specifically acknowledge the 'contribution' (positive in
the Church's perspective) of Christianity in the heritage of Europe.]
FREETHINKERS
A History of American Secularism
By Susan Jacoby. Metropolitan/Henry
Holt. 417 pp. $27.50
When the Supreme Court recently
listened to debate about the words "under God" as they appear in the Pledge
of Allegiance, it heard arguments from those who think that the expression
endorses religion, and thus violates the "establishment" clause of the
First Amendment, and from those who believe that acknowledgment of the
Almighty is somehow beyond religion and/or no bad thing. What is generally
overlooked is that the Pledge was initially composed without those two
words, which were inserted only during the Red scare of the 1950s. Or to
put it another way, the United States managed to survive two world wars,
a depression and the first decade of the Cold War without any such invocation.
Thus those who want the Pledge restored to its authentic version can claim
to be acting as strict constructionists with a solid defense of "original
intent."
The great virtue of Susan Jacoby's
book is that it succeeds so well in its own original intent: showing that
secularism, agnosticism and atheism are as American as cherry pie. Indeed,
this is the first and only country to adopt a Constitution that specifically
excludes all reference to a higher power. (I say "specifically" because
those meeting in Philadelphia did consider, and did decisively reject,
any such reference.) Many were the bishops and preachers of the time who
warned that God would punish such profanity, but many were the preachers
who said the same about the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which
did no more than state that no citizen could be obliged to pay for the
upkeep of a church in which he did not believe.
Two of the great books of the 18th-century
Enlightenment were Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason and Constantine Volney's
The Ruins. Thomas Jefferson wrote in praise of the first and helped translate
the second from the French. Abraham Lincoln read both, and we have his
great colleague William Herndon's word for it that his own agnosticism
was the result of Lincoln's persuasion. I think it could fairly be said,
however, that American schoolchildren are not taught that Jefferson and
Lincoln were unbelievers, or that Jefferson took a razor blade and cut
out all the passages of the New Testament that he found offensive to reason
or common sense -- leaving him with a highly condensed version. Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, co-founder of the movement for female emancipation, was to
develop this idea into the Woman's Bible, which blamed the religious mentality
for the degradation of her sex.
The refusal to establish any religion,
or state support for same, helped spare the United States the fate of Europe,
where slaughter between discrepant Christian sects had come close to extinguishing
civilization. It did not, however, prevent Americans from invoking the
blessing of heaven on whichever cause they favored. The Rev. Timothy Dwight,
celebrated president of Yale, denounced smallpox vaccinations as a blasphemous
interference with God's design. The upholders of slavery claimed (correctly)
that there was biblical warrant for the "peculiar institution." The abolitionists
also warred in the name of the divine. The pulpits were just as much divided
during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.
In lucid and witty prose, Jacoby
has uncovered the hidden history of secular America, and awarded it a large
share of credit in every movement for social and political reform. It's
nice to read again of the friendship between Walt Whitman and Robert Ingersoll,
the greatest anti-religious lecturer of his day. It's sobering to be reminded
of how many states practiced overt sectarian discrimination, against Jews,
Catholics and Quakers, even after the Founding Fathers had made plain their
abhorrence of all such practices. And, of course, it is salutary to be
reminded of how much plain villainy and stupidity has been promulgated
from the platforms of the godly, many of whom would still like to retard
the elementary teaching of science.
If the book has a fault, it is the
near-axiomatic identification of the secular cause with the liberal one.
Susan Jacoby has what might be called ACLU politics. To read her, you would
not know that two of the most prominent intellectual gurus of American
conservatism -- Ayn Rand and Leo Strauss -- were both determined nonbelievers.
H.L. Mencken, who if not exactly a conservative was certainly not a liberal,
had vast contempt for religion but is cited only briefly here for his role
in the Scopes trial in Tennessee. Still, when Billy Graham can be asked
to give the address at a service for the victims of Sept. 11, and can use
the occasion to say that all the dead are now in heaven and would not rejoin
us even if they could, it is essential to be reminded of our rationalist
tradition -- and also of the fact that our current deadliest foe is conspicuously
"faith-based." .
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist
for Vanity Fair and professor of Liberal Studies at the New School. He
is preparing a study of Thomas Jefferson for the "Eminent Lives" series.
