Accommodation vs. Separatism

Susan Jacoby's Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism has been a recurring preoccupation of this blogger in the last few weeks. I have finally finished reading it, and I must say that at the end of the day I seem to have stumbled over a fundamental disagreement I have with Jacoby.

The book is about "freethought" in American history: atheism, agnosticism, secularism, humanism, rationalism, naturalism, and other words of that ilk. The opposed mindset is that of conservative, orthodox, fundamentalist, evangelical religion — not at all the same, mind you, to "liberal" or "mainstream" religion.

Freethinkers is both a history and a polemic. The closer the historical record gets to the present day, the more the book turns into pure polemic. The entire last chapter, "Reason Embattled," is little more than opinionated editorializing. I must say I found that disappointing.

As a polemical argument, the book's contention is more or less this: the Framers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights were super-wise to have left all mention of God out of their secular creation, insisting on no religious tests for public office and no "establishment" of religion whatever. Then, despite some noteworthy exceptions, American freethinkers pretty much had the best of things for the first 100 or 150 years of our country's existence. Yet beginning at about the time of the Scopes "monkey" trial in 1925 — if not a couple of decades earlier — fundamentalists began staging a huge comeback. The 1973 leagalization of abortion by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade energized religious conservatives even more. Today, freethinkers (though they are no longer called that) are afraid to open their mouths, and it looks as if the secular intent of the Framers has all but bitten the dust.

Notice the close parallel of Jacoby's contention to arguments often heard from religious conservatives. They make an almost mirror-image claim: our country's Founding Fathers were generally pious Christians who wanted America to be a Christian nation. Over the past century or so, however, secular humanists and atheists have stolen the country away from God's rule. Nowadays religion has been all but excluded from the "public square," and the country and the world are headed for hell in a handbasket.

Can it be a coincidence that each argument is identical to the other, except that all the terms have been reversed?

Meanwhile, despite whichever of the two putative declines you care to harp on, America has continued to grow in terms of prosperity, strength, liberty, and democracy. We now have more people of more categories — race, gender, religion, age, sexual preference, ideology, etc. — living the good life than ever before.

What's wrong with this picture?

The better off we get, the more certain many of us become that some deep-seated negative trend is going to end it all.

Why can't we just relax and enjoy the ride?

Jacoby notes throughout the book that there are, among freethinkers, two schools of thought about that vital secularist desideratum, the separation of church and state. On is full-blown separatism, which insists on a maximally high "wall" separating the two. The other is accommodationism, which is content to let the wall be breached under certain circumstances.

Jacoby agitates for high-wall church-state separatism. For example, when in the aftermath of Sept. 11 President Bush denied "the existence of any connection between [those events] and 'real' Islam" (p. 355), she interpreted it as a reflex of the "religious correctness" which she claims has permeated our politics. I interpreted it, on the other hand, as a gesture of tolerance for all religions that do not turn into excuses for terror and tyranny — a profoundly American idea which I'm sure Jacoby would agree the Founders wished to instill.

In other words, I think Jacoby is paranoid in her unwillingness to accommodate fundamentalists, an attitude which so clearly mirrors fundamentalists' own unwillingness to accommodate freethought. This freethinker says, "A plague o' both their houses!" America needs its accommodationists and reconcilers! That, Rodney King (remember him?), is how we all get along.