American Freethought: The History of a Social Movement, 1794–1949 . By David C. Hoffman

Freethinking in the United States has not wanted for scholarly attention. Since 2000 alone, important works by Eric Schlereth, Kirsten Fisher, Susan Jacoby, Harvey Kaye, and Leigh Eric Schmidt have expanded our understanding of this vital if never quite mainstream current of thought. But David C. Hoffman contends that this current has not received treatment as an actual social movement, one that—like abolition, temperance, or the women's movement—worked to remake American culture over decades of struggle. American Freethought thus focuses on the organizational manifestations of freethinking as well as the movement's shifting repertoire of strategies and tactics.Hoffman examines this movement over four “waves,” beginning with the publication of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason in 1794, through the antebellum period and subsequent “golden era” of freethinking in the late 19th century, and concluding with a reinvigorated phase after 1920 that fastened on legal action to achieve its goals. This long view enables Hoffman to advance one of his crucial claims, which is that “secularism” (by which he means a clear separation of church and state, not the erosion of religion) has been fragile throughout American history.Free thinking was not atheism. It was often, as Hoffman demonstrates, not even irreligious. Thomas Paine, author of the foundational Age of Reason, discredited Scripture as the revealed word of God but rooted his humanistic philosophy in a theistic vision—a Creator God who endowed humans with inalienable rights. Along with deists like Paine, a set of Unitarians, spiritualists, pantheists, and other “seekers” populate Hoffman's narrative. Self-proclaimed atheists and (after the term's coinage in 1869) “agnostics” were present but not necessarily the dominant force. What united all these figures across a century and a half was a commitment to the separation of church and state and the freedom of individual conscience. This remained the central pole of the freethought big tent. It provided the rationale for campaigns against blasphemy laws, a “Christian amendment” to the U.S. Constitution, Bible teaching in schools, and religious tests for public officeholders. Other strains of freethought that were important but less unifying included anti-scripturalism and a faith in science as the key to human happiness.Hoffman weaves the stories of many individuals throughout the chapters. Most of these figures will be familiar to historians. Paine receives the most concentrated attention, beginning with a detailed chapter on the composition of his Age of Reason before recounting his fraught last decades in the United States. Paine's importance persisted, largely through the efforts of a group of immigrants in the second quarter of the 19th century, including English reformers Robert Owen (and his son), Frances Wright, William Cobbett, and the Polish-born activist Ernestine Rose. The “Great Agnostic” Robert Ingersoll, Victoria Woodhull, and Clarence Darrow feature prominently in later sections.The chapters move from the early republic to the 1940s, and though it is hard to get a handle on just how large or organized the “freethought movement” was in any given period, Hoffman discusses the various organizational forms it took. The earliest Deistical Society of New York, founded by the Dartmouth-trained minister turned deist Elihu Palmer, merged intellectual and political commitments, drawing most of its membership from the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican Club and the Tammany Society. Later organizations chose more general names, such as the Society of Moral Philanthropists, the Society of Free Enquirers, or the United States Moral and Philosophical Society for the General Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The first “national” freethought convention, held in New York in 1845, deemed itself the Infidel Society for the Promotion of Mental Liberty, and a nationally linked Society of Free Inquirers soon followed. These early efforts bore fruit in the late 19th century, the “golden age of freethought,” as Hoffman (borrowing from Susan Jacoby) calls the postbellum decades. The Free Religious Association (FRA) emerged in 1867 and drew ever more Americans to the cause, largely through its periodical The Index, whose prospectus non-controversially urged the destruction of “every species of spiritual slavery” and the encouragement of “independence of thought and action” (132). Freethought's popularity in these decades, however, seems to have come at the expense of coherence. Hoffman's sprawling (nearly 60-page) chapter detailing this “wave” moves from the FRA to spiritualism to women's rights to free love to the Comstock laws and eugenics.The four waves loosely coincide with shifts in tactics. The first wave largely consisted of alternative religious-like activities. Freethinking deists gathered to listen to lectures on Sundays. While one of the most famous blasphemy trials—against Abner Kneeland in Massachusetts—occurred during the second phase, freethinkers’ energies during these reformist decades were channeled into efforts to make their cause visible: they formed multiple societies, met in regular conventions, and published those convention proceedings as well as new, designated journals. The third “wave” (the “golden age”) saw freethinkers battle over constitutional amendments and laws restricting the circulation of “obscene” information. In a short, rather hurried last chapter, Hoffman explains how the fourth “wave” switched from a legislative to a judicial focus, culminating in a couple of key Supreme Court decisions that applied the First Amendment's “Establishment Clause” to state law (Everson v. Board of Education, 1947) and banned religious instruction in schools (McCollum v. Board of Education, 1948). These were followed by several other cases in subsequent decades, including what is probably the best-known, Engel v. Vitale (1962), which banned school prayer.The book's overall framing suggests Hoffman might consider himself to be part of a fifth wave. The conclusion tallies the number of likely freethinkers today, as well as the vast number of Americans who express no religious affiliation and would therefore, as Hoffman surmises, likely support separationism. Hoffman might have dedicated a full chapter to the recent past, especially the Supreme Court's willingness to overturn seemingly well-established principles of separationism (as in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 2022). Instead, he somewhat awkwardly includes refutations of the Constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger's anti-separationist work at the end of several chapters. In any case, the apparent resurgence of Christian nationalism in our own era affirms Hoffman's central claim about the “fragility of American secularism” (9).