Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-Century America - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-Century America write by Timothy Verhoeven. This book was released on 2018-12-19. Secularists, Religion and Government in Nineteenth-Century America available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book shows how, through a series of fierce battles over Sabbath laws, legislative chaplains, Bible-reading in public schools and other flashpoints, nineteenth-century secularists mounted a powerful case for a separation of religion and government. Among their diverse ranks were religious skeptics, liberal Protestants, members of minority faiths, labor reformers and defenders of slavery. Drawing on popular petitions to Congress, a neglected historical source, the book explores how this secularist mobilization gathered energy at the grassroots level. The nineteenth century is usually seen as the golden age of an informal Protestant establishment. Timothy Verhoeven demonstrates that, far from being crushed by an evangelical juggernaut, secularists harnessed a range of cultural forces—the legacy of the Revolutionary founders, hostility to Catholicism, a belief in national exceptionalism and more—to argue that the United States was not a Christian nation, branding their opponents as fanatics who threatened both democratic liberties as well as true religion.
The Church of Saint Thomas Paine
The Church of Saint Thomas Paine - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Church of Saint Thomas Paine write by Leigh Eric Schmidt. This book was released on 2021-11-02. The Church of Saint Thomas Paine available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The forgotten story of the nineteenth-century freethinkers and twentieth-century humanists who tried to build their own secular religion In The Church of Saint Thomas Paine, Leigh Eric Schmidt tells the surprising story of how freethinking liberals in nineteenth-century America promoted a secular religion of humanity centered on the deistic revolutionary Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and how their descendants eventually became embroiled in the culture wars of the late twentieth century. After Paine’s remains were stolen from his grave in New Rochelle, New York, and shipped to England in 1819, the reverence of his American disciples took a material turn in a long search for his relics. Paine’s birthday was always a red-letter day for these believers in democratic cosmopolitanism and philanthropic benevolence, but they expanded their program to include a broader array of rites and ceremonies, particularly funerals free of Christian supervision. They also worked to establish their own churches and congregations in which to practice their religion of secularism. All of these activities raised serious questions about the very definition of religion and whether it included nontheistic fellowships and humanistic associations—a dispute that erupted again in the second half of the twentieth century. As right-wing Christians came to see secular humanism as the most dangerous religion imaginable, small communities of religious humanists, the heirs of Paine’s followers, were swept up in new battles about religion’s public contours and secularism’s moral perils. An engrossing account of an important but little-known chapter in American history, The Church of Saint Thomas Paine reveals why the lines between religion and secularism are often much blurrier than we imagine.
Secularism in Antebellum America
Secularism in Antebellum America - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Secularism in Antebellum America write by John Lardas Modern. This book was released on 2011-12-15. Secularism in Antebellum America available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Ghosts, railroads, Sing Sing, sex machines - these are just a few of the phenomena that appear in this pioneering account of religion and society in 19th-century America.
The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom
The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom write by Steven D. Smith. This book was released on 2014-02-18. The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Familiar accounts of religious freedom in the United States often tell a story of visionary founders who broke from centuries-old patterns of Christendom to establish a political arrangement committed to secular and religiously neutral government. These novel commitments were supposedly embodied in the religion clauses of the First Amendment. But this story is largely a fairytale, Steven Smith says in this incisive examination of a much-mythologized subject. The American achievement was not a rejection of Christian commitments but a retrieval of classic Christian ideals of freedom of the church and of conscience. Smith maintains that the First Amendment was intended merely to preserve the political status quo in matters of religion. America's distinctive contribution was, rather, a commitment to open contestation between secularist and providentialist understandings of the nation which evolved over the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, far from vindicating constitutional principles, as conventional wisdom suggests, the Supreme Court imposed secular neutrality, which effectively repudiated this commitment to open contestation. Instead of upholding what was distinctively American and constitutional, these decisions subverted it. The negative consequences are visible today in the incoherence of religion clause jurisprudence and the intense culture wars in American politics.
Divided by God
Divided by God - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Divided by God write by Noah Feldman. This book was released on 2007-05-15. Divided by God available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A brilliant and urgent appraisal of one of the most profound conflicts of our time Even before George W. Bush gained reelection by wooing religiously devout "values voters," it was clear that church-state matters in the United States had reached a crisis. With Divided by God, Noah Feldman shows that the crisis is as old as this country--and looks to our nation's past to show how it might be resolved. Today more than ever, ours is a religiously diverse society: Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist as well as Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish. And yet more than ever, committed Christians are making themselves felt in politics and culture. What are the implications of this paradox? To answer this question, Feldman makes clear that again and again in our nation's history diversity has forced us to redraw the lines in the church-state divide. In vivid, dramatic chapters, he describes how we as a people have resolved conflicts over the Bible, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the teaching of evolution through appeals to shared values of liberty, equality, and freedom of conscience. And he proposes a brilliant solution to our current crisis, one that honors our religious diversity while respecting the long-held conviction that religion and state should not mix. Divided by God speaks to the headlines, even as it tells the story of a long-running conflict that has made the American people who we are.
