Whig Wham
Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
Metropolitan Books, 2004
(432 pages, $27.50, hardcover)
reviewed by Kenneth B. McIntyre
If, as the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott once said, the sin of the academic is always taking too long to make a point, the sin of the journalist is making a point without historical reflection or understanding. In her widely praised book Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, Susan Jacoby, a former journalist at The Washington Post and currently a freelance writer, declares that her intention is “to restore secularism, and its noble and essential contributions at every stage of the American experiment, to its proper place in our nation’s historical memory and vision of the future.”
Freethinkers has received high praise in the national press and from secular intellectuals like Peter Gay and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Christopher Hitchens lauded it for showing that “secularism, agnosticism, and atheism are as American as cherry pie,” and Arthur Miller called it “fresh air for the lungs of those who defend the separation of church and state.” Philip Roth suggested that every college freshman should be required to read the book as a primer on American secularism.
The book is, in fact, a particularly egregious example of what Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history: It reduces the significance of past events to their relevance to present concerns. The Whig historian constructs a Manichean story in which the individuals of the past are understood merely in terms of their supposed contribution or opposition to contemporary political and social attitudes.
Triumphant Whigs
Jacoby’s version of secular Whiggism can be summarized as follows. The history of liberty is the history of the triumph of secular reason over the reactionary forces of irrational religion. At some point in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and in a manner similar to Athena’s emergence fully formed from the forehead of Zeus, certain human beings escaped the cave of orthodox religion and discovered Reason.
These enlightened human beings were mostly French, but some especially bright Americans, like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, imbibed deeply from this well of knowledge and created a secular government in the United States based solely upon human reason. Since this pristine creation, however, the malign forces of reactionary religion have attempted to stifle the education of the general public.
In this story there have been heroes like Tom Paine, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Robert Ingersoll. And there have been villains like Timothy Dwight, Anthony Comstock, Billy Graham, the Catholic hierarchy, and the entire population of the Southern states.
The moral of Jacoby’s story is clear: The American past and the American present form a battleground on which the dark forces of religion attempt to tyrannize the population while besieged progressive secularists defend true liberty, and the real meaning of the Constitution and especially the First Amendment, at every turn.
Kenneth B. McIntyre is an assistant professor of political science at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky, and author of The Limits of Political Theory: Oakeshott's Philosophy of Civil Association. He is currently editing a book on the history of political science. He, his wife Maria, and their two daughters, Flannery and Juliana, are members of the Catholic Church.
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