This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism

by David Sehat

Overview

An award-winning scholar’s sweeping history of American secularism, from Jefferson to Trump
 
“Insights that are both illuminating and alarming.”—Linda Greenhouse, New York Review of Books
 
“An essential book for understanding today’s culture wars. Sehat’s clear-eyed and elegant narrative will change how you think about our supposedly secular age.”—Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
 
In This Earthly Frame, David Sehat narrates the making of American secularism through its most prominent proponents and most significant detractors. He shows how its foundations were laid in the U.S. Constitution and how it fully emerged only in the twentieth century. Religious and nonreligious Jews, liberal Protestants, apocalyptic sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and antireligious activists all used the courts and the constitutional language of the First Amendment to create the secular order. Then, over the past fifty years, many religious conservatives turned against that order, emphasizing their religious freedom.
 
Avoiding both polemic and lament, Sehat offers a powerful reinterpretation of American secularism and a clear framework for understanding the religiously infused conflict of the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300244212
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	03/08/2022
Pages:	344
Sales rank:	1,113,314
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

David Sehat is a professor of history at Georgia State University. He is the author of The Jefferson Rule and The Myth of American Religious Freedom, which was awarded the 2012 Frederick Jackson Turner Award. He lives in Atlanta, GA.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Part 1 Foundations

1 An Enlightenment Settlement 11

2 The Sociology of Law 29

3 Piers of American Secularism 50

Part 2 Structures

4 The Difficulties of Diversity 87

5 Stumbling toward Secularism 109

6 Religion Is Personal 145

7 The Death of God 171

Part 3 Instabilities

8 The Personal Is Political 195

9 Religious Freedom 228

Afterword 263

Acknowledgments 267

Notes 271

Index 311

Editorial Reviews

Insights that are both illuminating and alarming. . . . Sehat examines the Court’s valorization of ‘privacy’ and offers a fresh analysis.”—Linda Greenhouse, New York Review of Books

“[An] extremely useful volume. . . . Fascinating. . . . An important contribution.”—John R. Vile, Free Speech Center

“A careful historical analysis of the role that the United States government, particularly the Supreme Court, has played in the secularization of American society from its founding to the Trump presidency.”—Nova Religio

“An essential book for understanding today’s culture wars. Sehat’s clear-eyed and elegant narrative will change how you think about our supposedly secular age.”—Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“In This Earthly Frame David Sehat provides a history—at once sweeping and subtle—of political secularism as a deeply disputed inheritance in American public life. With crystal-clear prose he brightly illuminates the constitutional stakes involved in the elaboration of secularist ideals.”—Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis

“Neither born secular nor congenitally religious, the United States has been marked by an ongoing struggle over whether it rests on divine truths. In his splendid new book, David Sehat tracks the secularist idea across our history, culminating in our controversies around the importance and meaning of religious freedom. It is an invaluable guide for citizens and scholars alike.”—Samuel Moyn, Yale University

“How was a secular America built? By congregations as well as courts, and through religious collaboration as well as conflict. In Sehat’s invigorating history, we see modern secularism anew: as a fragile, shifting truce between personal beliefs and a pluralistic political order.”—Sarah E. Igo, Vanderbilt University

“Sehat sweeps across the American experience, pulling a complicated and multifaceted story into a coherent whole. He deftly weaves together elements of cultural, intellectual, and institutional history into significant statements about the formative significance of ideas. This book is a joy to read.”—Stephen Skowronek, Yale University

From the Publisher