Giving credit where it's overdue

For more than two centuries, the United States has avoided the bloody religious wars that have ravaged other nations from time immemorial. But under the umbrella of this immunity, we have suffered through our own "culture war" -- increasingly contentious and unforgiving -- about what role religious belief and religious institutions should play in our government and the shaping of public policy. In recent years, the metaphoric wall between church and state has suffered some erosion. We have a born-again Christian president who openly seeks divine inspiration, aggressively pushes for religious institutions to receive government funding for their social service programs and routinely invokes the Bible and religious settings to advance his and the nation's political agenda.

Where 45 years ago John Kennedy had to disavow the significance of his Catholicism to win election, today openly expressed religious belief is a litmus test for the highest reaches of elective office. Candidate Al Gore went so far as to announce that he approaches difficult decisions by querying: "What would Jesus do?" And although Joseph Lieberman's vice presidential run may have signaled a welcome decline in anti-Semitism, his acceptability as a candidate rested on his profound religiosity and his attendant commitment to Judeo-Christian values.

Against this backdrop, an intellectual response from embattled secularists was probably to be expected -- and has now arrived in the form of "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism," by respected social critic and historian Susan Jacoby.

Jacoby can now add "foot soldier in the culture war" to her resume. With a combination of incredulity and outrage, she assails religiously observant scholars like Stephen Carter, the author of "The Culture of Disbelief," who contend that religiously based moral convictions play too small a role in determining national policy. And Jacoby reserves special vehemence for attacking the way political conservatives have, in her view, revised U.S. history to cast every triumph from the Declaration of Independence to the flowering of a civil rights movement as the product of religious belief and motivation.