The Great Agnostic spoke too soon. It is impossible to imagine such a forthright celebration of America's secularist heritage today, as the apostles of religious correctness attempt to infuse every public issue, from the quality of education to capital punishment, with their theological values. During the past two decades, cultural and religious conservatives have worked ceaselessly to delegitimize American secularism and relegate its heroes to a kooks' corner of American history. In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment secularists of the revolutionary generation were stigmatized by the guardians of religious orthodoxy as infidels and atheists. Today, the new pejorative "elitist" has replaced the old "infidel" in the litany of slurs aimed at defenders of secularist values.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, America's secularist tradition has been further denigrated by unremitting political propaganda equating patriotism with religious faith. Like most other Americans, I responded to the terrorist assaults with an immediate surge of anger and grief so powerful that it left no room for alienation. Walking around my wounded New York, as the smoke from the ruins of the World Trade Center wafted the smell of death throughout the city, I drew consolation from the knowledge that others were feeling what I was feeling - sorrow, pain, and rage, coupled with the futile but irrepressible longing to turn back the clock to the hour before bodies rained from a crystalline sky. That soothing sense of unity was severed for me just three days later, when President George W. Bush presided over an ecumenical prayer service in Washington's National Cathedral. Delivering an address indistinguishable from a sermon, replacing the language of civic virtue with the language of faith, the nation's chief executive might as well have been the Reverend Bush. Quoting a man who supposedly said at St. Patrick's Cathedral, "I pray to God to give us a sign that he's still here," the president went on to assure the public not only that God was still here but that he was personally looking out for America. "God's signs," Bush declared, "are not always the ones we look for. We learn in tragedy that his purposes are not always our own. . . . Neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth can separate us from God's love. May he bless the souls of the departed, may he comfort our own, and may he always guide our country." This adaptation of the famous passage from Paul's Epistle to the Romans left out the evangelist's identification of Jesus Christ as God - an omission presumably made in deference to the Jewish and Muslim representatives sharing the pulpit with the president.

Bush would surely have been criticized, and rightly so, had he failed to invite representatives of non-Christian faiths to the ecumenical ceremony in memory of the victims of terrorism. But he felt perfectly free to ignore Americans who adhere to no religious faith, whose outlook is predominantly secular, and who interpret history and tragedy as the work of man rather than God. There was no speaker who represented my views, no one to reject the notion of divine purpose at work in the slaughter of thousands and to proclaim the truth that grief, patriotism, and outrage at injustice run just as deep in the secular as in the religious portion of the American body politic.

Bush's very presence in the pulpit attested powerfully to the erosion of America's secularist tradition; most of his predecessors would have regarded the choice of a religious sanctuary for a major speech as a gross violation of the respect for separation of church and state constitutionally required of the nation's chief executive. Franklin D. Roosevelt did not try to assuage the shock of Pearl Harbor by using an altar as the backdrop for his declaration of war, and Abraham Lincoln, who never belonged to a church, delivered the Gettysburg Address not from a sanctuary but on the field where so many soldiers had given "the last full measure of devotion."

It is one of the greatest unresolved paradoxes of American history that religion has come to occupy such an important place in the communal psyche and public life of a nation founded on the separation of church and state. The tension between secularism and religion was present at America's creation; a secular government, independent of all religious sects, was seen by founders of diverse private beliefs as the essential guarantor of liberty of conscience. The descendants of passionate religious dissenters, who had fled the church-state establishments of the Old World in order to worship God in a multiplicity of ways, were beholden to a godless constitution. From the beginning of the republic, this irony-laden and profoundly creative relationship produced a mixture of gratitude and unease on the part of its beneficiaries.

Given the intensity of both secularist and religious passions in the founding generation, it was probably inevitable that the response of Americans to secularism and freethought - the lovely term that first appeared in the late 1600s and flowered into a genuine social and philosophical movement during the next two centuries - would be fraught with ambivalence. Beginning with the revolutionary era, freethinkers periodically achieved substantial influence in American society, only to be vilified in periods of reaction and consigned to the margins of America's official version of its history.

American freethought derived much of its power from an inclusiveness that encompassed many forms of rationalist belief. Often defined as a total absence of faith in God, freethought can better be understood as a phenomenon running the gamut from the truly antireligious - those who regarded all religion as a form of superstition and wished to reduce its influence in every aspect of society - to those who adhered to a private, unconventional faith revering some form of God or Providence but at odds with orthodox religious authority. American freethinkers have included deists, who, like many of the founding fathers, believed in a "watchmaker God" who set the universe in motion but subsequently took no active role in the affairs of men; agnostics; and unabashed atheists. What the many types of freethinkers shared, regardless of their views on the existence or nonexistence of a divinity, was a rationalist approach to fundamental questions of earthly existence - 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 adduced from the natural world. It was this conviction, rooted in Enlightenment philosophy, that carried the day when the former revolutionaries gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 to write the Constitution.

Thomas Paine, the preeminent and much-admired literary propagandist of the Revolution, was the first American freethinker to be labeled an atheist, denigrated both before and after his death, and deprived of his proper place in American history. In 1776, Paine's clarion call for steadfast patriotism in dark times - "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman" - had inspired his countrymen in every corner of the former colonies. But memories of Paine the patriot would long be obscured by denunciations of his heretical views. In The Age of Reason (1794), he put forth the astonishing idea that Christianity, like all other religions, was an invention of man rather than God. Paine died a pauper and, nearly eight decades later, would still be subjected to slurs by such eminent personages as Theodore Roosevelt, who dismissed him as a "filthy little atheist. . . that apparently esteems a bladder of dirty water as the proper weapon with which to assail Christianity." Were it not for the unremitting efforts of Ingersoll, who, despite his nineteenth-century fame and notoriety, is ignored in standard American history texts, Paine's vital contributions to the revolutionary cause might have suffered the same fate. Unfortunately, no champion arose in the twentieth century to do for Ingersoll what Ingersoll did for Paine. In a country with less reverence toward religious institutions, Ingersoll might occupy the historical position of a Voltaire, to whom he was frequently compared by his contemporaries.

The only freethinkers who have received their due in American history are Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, in spite of the fact that they were denigrated by their Calvinist contemporaries as atheists, heretics, and infidels (then understood in its literal, original sense - unfaithful ones). It is impossible to consign former presidents or the authors of the nation's secular scriptures to a historical limbo. Thus, Jefferson, Madison, and, to a lesser extent, George Washington, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin pose a vexing problem for twentieth-century political, religious, and social conservatives intent on simultaneously enshrining the founding fathers and denying their intention to establish a secular government.

The long struggle over the role of religion in American public and cultural life has been a slow, uneven movement away from Americans' original definition of themselves as a Protestant Christian people, albeit leavened by a strong secularist bent that accommodated both non-Christians and the nonreligious at a time when compulsory state religion was taken for granted throughout the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the American self-definition has been expanded to non-Christians in ways that were unimaginable only fifty years ago. Since the Second World War and the Holocaust, public officials have increasingly substituted "Judeo-Christian" for "Christian" when talking about the nation's religious and ethical heritage. Religious Jews (as distinct from Jews as an ethnic group), who make up just 1.3 percent of Americans, are now routinely invited to participate in ecumenical ceremonies like the one held in the National Cathedral. Muslims, in spite of their recent growth as a result of immigration and proselytizing among African Americans, are an even smaller minority - one-half of 1 percent - yet they, too, are represented on most important civic occasions. In areas of the country with large first- and second-generation communities of non-Christian immigrants, Hindus and Buddhists are frequently asked to join Christians, Jews, and Muslims on public platforms. The message is clear: we may be a multicultural people, but we're all respectable as long as we worship God in some way.

The one minority left outside the shelter of America's ecumenical umbrella is the congregation of the unchurched. Yet the secularist minority is much larger than any non-Christian religious group. According to a nationwide opinion poll of Americans' religious identification, conducted by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the fastest-growing "religious" group in the United States is composed of those who do not subscribe to any faith. From 1990 to 2001, the number of the unchurched more than doubled, from 14.3 million to 29.4 million. Approximately 14 percent of Americans, compared with only 8 percent in 1990, have no formal ties to religion. Sixteen percent, and it is reasonable to assume that they make up essentially the same group as the unchurched, describe their outlook on the world as entirely or predominantly secular. It would be a mistake to conclude that none of the "predominantly secular" believe in God; less than 1 percent described themselves as atheists or agnostics, while the overwhelming majority simply said they had no religion. However, in view of the opprobrium attached to the words atheist and agnostic in American culture, I suspect that there are many more nonbelievers in this group than there are people willing to call themselves nonbelievers. But a secularist's specific metaphysical beliefs are politically irrelevant, because insistence on the distinction between private faith and the conduct of public affairs is precisely what distinguishes secularists from the religiously correct.

Even though more Americans may be viewing public issues through a secular lens, the influence of religion at the highest levels of government has never been stronger or more public. This contradiction has surfaced repeatedly in American history. Hard-core fundamentalist religion has always flourished during periods of increasing secularization, and its adherents tend to be much more singleminded than secularists: most secularists will vote for a religious believer who respects separation of church and state, but few fundamentalists will vote for a secularist who denounces religious influence on government. In 2004, it is impossible to imagine an avowed atheist or agnostic winning or being nominated for the American presidency. In a nationwide opinion poll released in the summer of 2003, fully half of Americans said that they would refuse to vote for an atheist for president - regardless of his or her other qualifications). Lincoln, who refused to join a church even though his political advisers - clearly not all-powerful "handlers" in the modern sense - argued that formal religious affiliation would improve his chances of election, might well be unacceptable as a major party presidential candidate today. Ronald Reagan, whose record of religious observance during his Hollywood years was spotty at best, started turning up regularly at church services as soon as he was elected governor of California and set his sights on the presidency. When Senator Joseph Lieberman, a devout Orthodox Jew, was running for the vice presidency on the Democratic ticket in 2000, political pundits indulged in interminable self-congratulation about the growing tolerance of the American people. While the positive response to Lieberman's candidacy certainly attests to the diminution of anti-Semitism, it was Lieberman's open religiosity, not his ethnic Jewishness, that enabled him to mix so effectively with evangelicals, High Church Episcopalians, and Roman Catholic bishops. An avowedly secular, nonobservant Jew - one who considered himself Jewish in a cultural rather than a religious sense - would never have been selected for a major party's national ticket. Although Democratic presidents have been much more careful to separate their private religious views from public policy making, both Jimmy Carter, the first born-again Christian in the White House, and Bill Clinton, the first president to publicly ask God's forgiveness for adultery, contributed to the blurring of the distinction between private faith and public responsibility.

In the Bush White House, the institutionalization of religion has reached an apotheosis. His cabinet meetings routinely begin with a prayer, as the public learned from a startling front-page photograph in the New York Times several years ago. The intertwining of religion and government today goes far beyond the symbolic, although symbols are important in themselves. The battle over abortion, now extended to stem cell research, is the longest-running dispute in which not only private religious beliefs but the official teachings of various churches permeate public debate and influence legislation. The Republican majority, joined by a fair number of Democrats, not only supports government funding of religious charities but insists that churches should be able to use public money to hire only members of their own faith. For the first time in American history, the judicial and the executive branches of government have endorsed tax breaks for parents who wish to send their children to religious schools. Biblical authority is cited by politicians and judges as a rationale for the death penalty. Vital public health programs - the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS, family planning aid to Third World countries, sex education for American teenagers (unless it preaches "abstinence only") - are held hostage by the religious doctrines of a determined conservative minority.

Yet the religiously correct continue to speak of a "naked public square," a space in which secular humanists supposedly have succeeded in muzzling the voices of faith. In The Culture of Disbelief, Stephen L. Carter asserts that "the truth - an awkward one for the guardians of the public square - is that tens of millions of Americans rely on their religious traditions for the moral knowledge that tells them how to conduct their lives, including their political lives. They do not like being told to shut Up." But no one is telling them to shut up - not that anyone could. And no one denies that all public policy issues, whether they involve scientific research or the conduct of foreign affairs, have both a moral and a pragmatic component. For individuals, morality is never a matter of consensus: your countrymen may go to war, but you may not follow if your conscience forbids you to do so. For a democratic society, however, there must be a moral consensus, extending beyond and in some instances contradicting particular religious beliefs, to maintain the social contract. Both the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement a century later exemplify the kind of consensus that transcends all religions and runs counter to some. It is often noted that religion played a major role in both the nineteenth-century abolitionist and the twentieth-century civil rights movements, but, as Lincoln pointedly observed, the Bible was used just as frequently to justify slavery as to support emancipation. In the 1960s, America's steps toward racial justice were ratified by a moral majority - with a small m - that included both the men and women of faith and the nonreligious humanists who had played a vital role in the civil rights movement. When President Lyndon Johnson proposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and declared, in his memorable Texas twang, "We shall overcome," he was articulating a moral position that could and did command the respect of citizens of any or no religion.

Not surprisingly, generations of social reformers, concerned about alienating religious Americans who might otherwise support their causes, have attempted to minimize the importance of the secularist influence in their ranks and protect themselves from guilt by association with the ungodly. That strategy has consigned many nonreligious and social progressives to a historical memory hole and is responsible for widespread ignorance of secularist contributions to the abolitionist, feminist, labor, and civil rights movements. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the eminent leader of the nineteenth-century woman suffrage movement, was censured by her fellow suffragists and all but written out of the movement's official record after the 1895 publication of her Woman's Bible, which excoriated organized Christianity for its role in justifying the subjugation of women. Only in the 1980s, when a new generation of feminist scholars rediscovered Stanton, was her reputation revived. Today, a similar impulse to downplay secularist leanings is at work among prochoice groups. Abortion rights activists love to point to liberal ministers and rabbis, as well as to the dissident lay group Catholics for a Free Choice, as evidence that being prochoice need not mean being antireligious. And of course that is true, but it is a measure of the defensiveness of secularists today that they are reluctant to forthrightly acknowledge the abortion rights movement as the product of a secularist rather than a religious concept of personal liberty and social good.

This timidity - in sharp contrast to the boldness of proselytizing freethinkers of the nineteenth century - has unquestionably played an important role in the demonization of American secularism. Those who cherish secularist values have too often allowed conservatives to frame public policy debates as conflicts between "value-free" secularists and religious representatives of supposedly unchanging moral principles. But secularists are not value-free; their values are simply grounded in earthly concerns rather than in anticipation of heavenly rewards or fear of infernal punishments. No one in public life today upholds secularism and humanism in the uncompromising terms used by Ingersoll more than 125 years ago. "Secularism teaches us to be good here and now," Ingersoll declared. "I know nothing better than goodness. Secularism teaches us to be just here and now. It is impossible to be juster than just. . . . Secularism has no 'castles in Spain.' It has no glorified fog. It depends upon realities, upon demonstrations; and its end and aim is to make this world better every day - to do away with poverty and crime, and to cover the world with happy and contented homes."

These values belong at the center, not in the margins, of the public square. It is past time to restore secularism, and its noble and essential contributions at every stage of the American experiment, to its proper place in our nation's historical memory and vision of the future.

The above was the Introduction to Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism by Susan Jacoby.