At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers celebrates the
noble and essential secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the
authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason.
In impassioned, elegant prose, Susan Jacoby offers a powerful defense of more than two hundred years of secularist
activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century
abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth-century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements,
Freethinkers illuminates the neglected accomplishments of secularists who, allied with tolerant and liberal religious
believers, have stood at the forefront of the battle for social reforms opposed by reactionaries in the past and
today.
Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, and Clarence Darrow -- as well as once-famous secularists such as Robert Green Ingersoll, "the Great
Agnostic" -- Freethinkers restores to history generations of dedicated humanist champions. It is they, Jacoby
shows, who have led the struggle to uphold the unique combination of secular government and religious liberty that
is and always has been the glory of the American system.