5/22/2023 0 Comments Freethinkers by Susan Jacoby![]() Freethinkers might be Democrats, rock-ribbed Republicans, or, on occasion, socialists with either a capital or a small s. Unlike eighteenth-century deists, nearly all of whom identified with Jeffersonian democracy, American freethinkers of the late nineteenth century were anything but unified in their political views, which ran the gamut from anarchism to Spencerian conservatism. To describe the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries as a golden age of freethought is to suggest not that a majority of Americans were persuaded by rationalist or antireligious arguments but that those arguments reached a much broader public than they ever had in the past. Excerpted from "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" by Susan Jacoby with permission of Henry Holt. ![]()
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