Rich with such iconic figures as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Paine, and the once-famous Robert Green Ingersoll, Freethinkers restores to history the passionate humanists who struggled against those who would undermine the combination of secular government and religious liberty that is the glory of the American system. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, Freethinkers illuminates the neglected achievements of secularists who, allied with tolerant believers, have led the battle for reform in the past and today. Los Angeles Times Book Review At a time when the separation of church and. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby traces more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Jacoby accomplishes her task with clarity, thoroughness, and an engaging passion. Jacoby examines the opaque religious beliefs of the Founders, recalling that Jefferson excited opposition in the 1800 presidential campaign for his apparent indifference to religion, as well as his remark that it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God.

Los Angeles Times Book Review At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, Freethinkers offers a powerful defense of the 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. Jacoby accomplishes her task with clarity, thoroughness, and an engaging passion. Jacoby utilizes freethinkers as a catch-all term which includes deists, agnostics and atheistsas well as Jews and liberal Protestants, especially Quakers and Unitarianson the grounds that these very distinct groups are joined politically by a conviction that the affairs of human beings should be governed not by faith in the supernatural but by a reliance on reason and evidence.

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