And why did the Evangelicals want this then? Because they were a minority and they deeply feared government interference with religion. It was a coalition of religious Evangelicals and freethinkers or deists who joined together to get this ratified. Most Americans don't know that God is not mentioned in the Constitution. A secular government was developed to protect the rights of religious minorities. The secularist strain in American culture has been very strong since the beginning, but the nation's secular heritage is virtually unknown to people.

How does this history fit into American religious history? It's hard to tell when you're using a word which once had a very strong meaning and now is just sort of being revived. I know Unitarians would be happy to be called freethinkers. It's a kind of archaic word, so I don't know. Do you think a liberal Protestant today would accept being called a freethinker by you? You categorize liberal Protestants as a type of freethinker. It did not exactly get a rousing response, even from the non-believing community. More descriptive than Bright, for example? Freethinker is kind of an archaic word, but it's very descriptive. It also encompasses the belief that if God did create man, he created rationality as the supreme instrument for understanding the natural world. I prefer it to agnostic or atheist or deist or anything else you might come up with. I would say my definition of freethinker from the past is just as good a definition of freethinker today. Who would the term freethinker encompass today?

So there was a spectrum of people in the freethought community, but all were opposed to the religious orthodoxies of their day. Even though they believed in God and in some form of Christianity, they did not believe in any hierarchy of religion. Freethinkers have often been described as people who didn't believe in God, but it's more accurate to see freethought as a kind of a broad continuum, ranging from those who really didn't believe in God at all to deists who believed in a God who set the universe in motion but afterwards didn't take an active role in the affairs of men.īy the end of the 19th century, freethinkers even included liberal Protestant denominations and Unitarians. Freethinker basically meant someone who did not believe in the received word of the bible or the authority of religion. Jacoby's latest book is 'Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.' Jacoby spoke with Beliefnet about America's secular beginnings, freethought heroes, and the battles ahead between secularists and the religious right.įreethinker and freethought are terms that date from the end of the 17th century. She is the author of seven books, including 'Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge,' which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Journalist Susan Jacoby is the director of the Center for Inquiry Metro New York, a rationalist research and advocacy organization.

Wild justice susan jacoby