September-December 2022

T ru T h Seeker

Vol. 149

WORLD’S OLDEST MAGAZINE FOR FREETHINKERS FOUNDED BY D.M. BENNETT IN 1873

Sept.– Dec. 2022

SEPARATING CHURCH AND STATE: A HISTORY

Steven K. Green

ABSURD GIVENNESS: THE DEATH OF GOD, RICHARD RUBENSTEIN, AND ME

Thomas Larson

“THE ETERNAL YEA TO LIFE”: THE RADICAL HUMANISM OF EMMA GOLDMAN

Justin Clark

THE DOCTORS FOOTE: FREETHINKING BIRTH CONTROL PIONEERS

Roderick Bradford

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature would “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

––Thomas Jefferson, January 1, 1802

DEAR READER,

For a century and a half, The Truth Seeker has been the voice of American Freethinkers in their fight for separation of state and church. In this issue, we present Steven K. Green’s extensive excerpt from his recent book, Separating Church and State: A History. While Professor Green recognizes the resilience of the concept which is currently going through an “identity crisis,” he also acknowledges the fragility of the “wall” and uncertain future of separation of church and state.

The rise of Christian nationalism and its popularity among far-right politi cians is the subject of a piece by Samuel

Perry

.

In an article written exclusively for The Truth Seeker, twenty-year San Diego Reader staff writer Thomas Larson shares his views on the death of God and meeting holocaust writer Richard Rubenstein.

Our frequent contributor Justin Clark writes about anarchist Emma Goldman’s radical humanism and her be lief that if people lived without the oppressive structures of state, church, and the market, they’d live lives full of ”meaning and purpose.”

Truth Seeker editor George Macdonald’s father-in-law is featured In an archival 19th century “Freethinkers of the Past and Present” page. Theron C. Leland was a pioneer stenographer and secretary of the National Liberal League, an organization devoted to complete separation of church and state. T.C. Leland was also Chairman of the

Executive Committee of the National Defense Association. A forerunner of the ACLU, the NDA was founded in the offices of The Truth Seeker

Due to the recent Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, we’ve decided to introduce readers to the Doctors Foote, two of 19th century America’s most prominent birth control advocates closely associated with D.M. Bennett and The Truth Seeker. Dr. Edward Bliss Foote –– an early victim of the Comstock Law –– and his son Dr. E.B. Foote Junior, also played important roles in the free speech movement. Furthermore, the Doctors Foote (and T.C. Leland) were key figures in the formation of the Thomas Paine National Historical Association.

Jonathan Bate’s article on the assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie reminds us of our late friend Tom Flynn’s 2005 publication of the Danish Muhammad cartoons. The atrocious attack on the author occurred prior to a speaking event at the Chautauqua Institution only 80 miles south of where Flynn published the controversial cartoons in Free Inquiry magazine. Although he would undoubtedly be deeply distressed about the savage stabbing of Salman Rushdie, Tom would never be deterred from courageously continuing the fight for freedom of expression.

“These are the shoulders on which we stand,” as former Truth Seeker editor Bonnie Lange liked to say.

––R ode R ick B R adfo R d

Roderick Bradford Creative Director and Designer Francesca M. Smith

Front Cover: Jefferson Memorial, seen across the Tidal Basin at dusk in Washington, D.C.. USA. Joe Ravi CC-BYSA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Back Cover: Watson Heston editorial cartoon on the front page of The Truth Seeker, May 21, 1887.

AFTER TRUMP, CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST IDEAS ARE GOING MAINSTREAM — DESPITE A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE

By Samuel Perry

In the run-up to the U.S. midterm elections, some politicians continue to ride the wave of what’s known as “Christian nationalism” in ways that are increasingly vocal and direct.

GOP ReP. MaRjORie TaylOR GReene, a far-right Donald Trump loyalist from Georgia, told an interviewer on July 23, 2022, that the Republican Party “need[s] to be the party of nationalism. And I’m a Christian, and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”

Similarly, Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, recently said, “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church.” Boebert called the separation of church and state “junk.”

Many Christian nationalists repeat conservative activist David Barton’s argument that the Founding Fathers did not intend to keep religion out of government.

As a scholar of racism and communication who has written about white nationalism during the Trump presidency, I find the amplification of Christian nationalism unsurprising. Christian nationalism is prevalent

among Trump supporters, as religion scholars Andrew Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry argue in their book Taking America Back for God.

Perry and Whitehead describe the Christian nationalist movement as being “as ethnic and political as it is religious,” noting that it relies on the assumption of white supremacy. Christian nationalism combines belief in a particular form of Christianity with nativist and populist political platforms. American Christian nationalism is a worldview based on the belief that America is superior to other countries, and that that superiority is divinely established. In this mindset, only Christians are true Americans.

Parts of the movement fit into a broader right-wing extremist history of violence, which has been on the rise over the past few decades and was particularly on display during the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.

The vast majority of Christian nationalists never engage in violence. Nonetheless, Christian nationalist thinking suggests that unless Christians control the state, the state will suppress Christianity.

From siege to militia buildup

Violence perpetrated by Christian nationalists has manifested in two primary ways in recent decades. The first is through their involvement in militia groups; the second is seen in attacks on abortion providers.

The catalyst for the growth of militia activity among contemporary Christian nationalists stems from two events: the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff and the 1993 siege at Waco.

At Ruby Ridge, former Army Green Beret Randy Weaver engaged federal law enforcement in an 11-day standoff at his rural Idaho cabin over charges relating to the sale of sawed-off shotguns to an ATF informant investigating Aryan Nation white supremacist militia meetings.

Weaver ascribed to the Christian Identity movement, which emphasizes adherence to Old Testament laws and white supremacy. Christian Identity members believe in the application of the death penalty for adultery and LBGTQ relationships in accordance with their reading of some biblical passages.

During the standoff, Weaver’s wife and teenage son were shot and killed before he surrendered to federal authorities.

In the Waco siege a year later, cult leader David Koresh and his followers entered a standoff with federal law enforcement at the group’s Texas compound, once again concerning weapons charges. After a 51-day standoff, federal law enforcement laid siege to the compound. A fire took hold at the compound in disputed circumstances, leading to the deaths of 76 people, including Koresh.

The two events spurred a nationwide militia buildup. As sociologist Erin Kania argues: “Ruby Ridge and Waco confrontations drove some citizens to strengthen their belief that the government was overstepping the parameters of its authority. … Because this view is one of the founding ideologies of the American Militia Movement, it makes sense that interest and membership in the movement would sharply increase following these

standoffs between government and nonconformists.”

Distrust of the government blended with strains of Christian fundamentalism have brought together two groups with formerly disparate goals.

Christian nationalism and violence

Christian fundamentalists and white supremacist militia groups both figured themselves as targeted by the government in the aftermath of the standoffs at Ruby Ridge and Waco. As scholar of religion Ann Burlein argues, “Both the Christian right and right-wing white supremacist groups aspire to overcome a culture they perceive as hostile to the white middle class, families, and heterosexuality.”

Significantly, in 1995, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and accomplice Terry Nichols cited revenge for the Waco siege as a motive for the bombing of the Alfred Murrah federal building. The terrorist act killed 168 people and injured hundreds more.

Since 1993, at least 11 people have been murdered in attacks on abortion clinics in cities across the U.S., and there have been numerous other plots.

They have involved people like the Rev. Michael Bray, who attacked multiple abortion clinics. Bray was the spokesman for Paul Hill, a Christian Identity adherent who murdered physician John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett in 1994 outside of a Florida abortion clinic.

In yet another case, Eric Rudolph bombed the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. In his confession, he cited his opposition to abortion and anti-LGBTQ views as motivation to bomb Olympic Square.

These men cited their involvement with the Christian Identity movement in their trials as motivation for engaging in violence.

Mainstreaming Christian nationalist ideas

The presence of Christian nationalist ideas in recent political campaigns is concerning, given its ties to violence and white supremacy.

Trump and his advisers helped to mainstream such rhetoric with events like his photo op with a Bible in Lafayette Square in Washington following the violent dispersal of protesters, and making a show of pastors

American Christian nationalism is a worldview based on the belief that America is superior to other countries, and that that superiority is divinely established.

laying hands on him. But that legacy continues beyond his administration.

Candidates like Doug Mastriano, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Pennsylvania who attended the Jan. 6 Trump rally, are now using the same messages.

In some states, such as Texas and Montana, hefty funding for far-right Christian candidates has helped put Christian nationalist ideas in the mainstream.

Blending politics and religion is not necessarily a recipe for Christian nationalism, nor is Christian

nationalism a recipe for political violence. At times, however, Christian nationalist ideas can serve as a prelude.

Originally published at The Conversation https://theconversation.com

SAMUEL PERRY is an associate professor in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core and an affiliate faculty member in Communication.

GoldenAgeOfFreethought.com

Memorial website honoring Tom Flynn — author, Free Inquiry editor, and executive producer of our four-part American Freethought video series. The website has the entire American Freethought series, including never-before-seen segments and amusing outtakes. Whenever you need a Freethought history fix or a dose of Tom Flynn’s incomparable wisdom, wit, and humor, visit: http://www.goldenageoffreethought.com

American Freethought was funded by the James Hervey Johnson Charitable Educational Trust

Salman Rushdie Wasn’t the First Novelist to Suffer an Assassination Attempt by Someone Who Hadn’t Read Their Book

By Jonathan Bate

The Satanic Verses wasn’t the first — and won’t be the last — novel to pro voke the rage of a fanatic who has no grasp of literature’s nuances.

In 1922, an Austrian writer named Hugo Bettauer pub lished a novel set in Vienna called The City Without Jews. It sold a quarter of a million copies and became known internationally, with an English translation issued in London and New York. A silent movie adaptation, which has recently been recovered and restored, appeared in the summer of 1924. The follow ing spring, a young Nazi burst into Bettauer’s office and shot him multiple times. The author died of his wounds two weeks later.

A novel published in a polarized city

As in the U.S. today, there was a major gap between rich and poor in early 20th-century Vienna.

The impressive architecture of the inner city sheltered immense wealth, while there was desperate poverty in the working-class districts beyond. The opulence of the banks and department stores, the culture of the theaters and opera house — especially in the predominantly Jewish district of Leopoldstadt — inevitably stirred deep resentment.

In the years immediately preceding World War I, populist mayor Karl Lueger saw his opportunity: He could win votes by blaming every problem on the Jews. Many a Jewish refugee would later say that the antisemitism in Vienna was worse than Berlin’s. An impoverished painter living in a public dormitory in a poor district to the north of Leopoldstadt was inspired to build a new ideology following Lueger’s blueprint. His name was Adolf Hitler. Hugo Bettauer was born Jewish. Though he converted to Christianity, he never lost touch with his roots. He worked as a journalist and became a prolific

The City Without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden), ominously subtitled A Novel of Tomorrow, is a dystopian satire.

“A solid human wall,” it begins, “extending from the University to the Bellaria, surrounded the beautiful and imposing Parliament Building. All Vienna seemed to have assembled on this June morning to witness an historic event of incalculable importance.”

They have come to hear a politician called Dr. Schwertfeger — clearly based on Lueger — proclaim that all Jews are to be expelled from the city.

“Heil Dr. Karl Schwertfeger,” cry the mob, “Heil, heil, heil, the liberator of Austria.”

H adi M atar , t H e M an c H arged wit H t H e atte M pted M urder of t H e distinguis H ed novelist s al M an r us H die , ad M itted t H at H e H ad only “ read like two pages ” of T he S a T anic V er S e S , r us H die ’ s 1988 novel t H at angered funda M entalist M usli M s around t H e world i ran ’ s for M er s upre M e l eader , a yatallo H r u H olla H k H o M eini , w H o announced a fatwa calling on all M usli M s to M urder r us H die in 1989 , H adn ’ t read it at all

Salman Rushdie presenting his book “Shalimar the clown” at Mountain View, CA on October 2005. Ken Conley aka kwc. cc symbol [followed by this link all tiny] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

Names, facial features and ancestry are investigated; even those with mixed blood are put on the list of people to be expelled. Synagogues are desecrated and the entire Jewish population is packed into railway carriages with their suitcases. To watch this scene in the 1924 silent movie version of the novel is a chilling experience: It is as if you are witnessing the Holocaust before it happened.

Nazi wrath

The ingenious twist in the novel is that once the Jews have been expelled, the economy and culture of Vienna collapse: no bankers, no tailors or hoteliers, no theater, no newspapers. The exiles return to a regal welcome and all ends well. The book is a simple but immensely powerful satire on antisemitism, which holds the reader’s attention by focusing the story on a handful of wellsketched characters.

But the novel and movie stirred the wrath of the incipient Austrian Nazi movement. Bettauer was denounced as a communist and a corrupter of the city’s youth. Otto Rothstock, a 20-year-old dental technician who had imbibed all the antisemitic propaganda of the age, decided to take action and assassinated the author in March 1925.

In court, Rothstock said that he was saving European culture from “degeneration.” He described Bettauer’s journalism, which often celebrated erotic liberation, as pornographic, and gave no indication that he had actually read the novel. His defense lawyer, Walter Riehl, was the sometime leader of the Austrian Nazi Party. He got his man off with a plea of insanity and a mere 18 months confinement in a mental institution.

Rothstock lived until the 1970s, never repenting of his Nazism. Startlingly, H.K. Breslauer, the director of the movie adaptation, subsequently became a propagandist on behalf of Hitler’s Nazi party. By contrast, Ida Jenbach, the Jewish woman who co-wrote the screenplay, was deported to the Minsk ghetto. She was liquidated either there or at the nearby Maly Trostenets concentration camp.

Ironically, given the parallels between the Rushdie attack and the murder of Bettauer, in Vienna today it is Muslims who are demonized, as Jews were 100 years ago.

The blinders of extremism

Writers seem to be especially vulnerable in polarized times when beliefs harden into dogma and those who hold opposing views are demonized.

Rushdie’s novel is peopled by angels and devils, propelled by dream sequences and fantastical provocations. It celebrates diverse identities while mocking prophets and politicians, the British and their empire, and all manner of divisions and dogma. It is a work of “magic realism” that demands to be read playfully, not literally.

But religious and political fundamentalists have no time for play, for questioning, doubt and curiosity. In one passage, Rushdie drew on some ancient heterodox texts to depict the Prophet Muhammad being spoken to by the devil instead of God, and it was enough to stir fury across the Muslim world. By the same logic, Bettauer’s satirical “novel of tomorrow” — a thought experiment intended to make readers think twice about the Jewish contribution to Viennese life — enraged the antisemites.

HUGO BETTAUER (1872-1925)

The Satanic Verses wasn’t the first — and won’t be the last — novel to provoke the rage of a fanatic who has no grasp of literature’s nuances.

“Fundamentalism,” writes the critic Terry Eagleton, “is essentially a mistaken theory of language”: It assumes that every word of a text, whether sacred or secular, must be read as a statement of a literal truth or a proclamation of the unshakable beliefs of the author. It is deaf to irony, metaphor, satire, allegory, provocation, ambiguity, contrariness.

So it likely wouldn’t have made any difference if Otto Rothstock had read The City Without Jews or if Hadi Matar and Ayatollah Khomeini had read The Satanic Verses. They would have heard only the message they wanted to hear.

It’s a troubling sign of the times that the number of college students getting degrees in literature is declining across the world. In our divided age, it is more important than ever for people to continue to learn the art of reading with imagination and empathy — and without the blinders of politics or religion.

SIR JONATHAN BATE is Foundation Professor of Environmental Humanities at Arizona State University and a Senior Research Fellow in English Literature at Oxford University, where he was formerly Provost of Worcester College. The author of twenty books, several of which have won major prizes, he is a world-renowned expert on Shakespeare and the history of English and European Literature, especially the Romantic movement and contemporary poetry and fiction. He was the first to introduce ecological approaches to the arts and humanities into British scholarship and has also made significant contributions to discussions in the public sphere of the value of the humanities. A Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, he is the youngest person ever to have been knighted for services to literary scholarship.

Writers seem to be especially vulnerable in polarized times when beliefs harden into dogma and those who hold opposing views are demonized.

The Truth Seeker magazine, video trailers, archives, and four-part American Freethought film series available on any digital device. thetruthseeker.net

Absurd Givenness: The Death of God, Richard Rubenstein, and Me

By Thomas Larson

W hen I Was I n college a half - century ago , I was driven by a desire to understand those who believe infallible claims about God and His putative omnipotence. One week in October, I read in the Maneater, the University of Missouri’s school newspaper, about a lecture by Dr. Richard L. Rubenstein, Jewish rabbi, theologian, and author. Its title, “After Auschwitz,” was based on his new book of the same name. The announcement noted that he would speak on the Death of God for Jews. I grokked Rubenstein’s deeper subject: How could their God still exist after the murder of six million. If so, how and, more importantly, why?

Nonreligious all my life, I was more than game to hear him. I was already a dedicated member of the Liberal Religious Youth, or LRY, an alternate education I received with friends at a Unitarian church in St. Louis. There, outside of high school, the minister insisted we be exposed to the pithiest conflicts of our time: a God who is merciless vs. a God who redeems, nuclear proliferation vs. building bomb shelters, racial segregation vs. integration in the South. Sunday nights we listened to and debated with all sorts of speakers — a Communist, a John Bircher, an inner-city civil rights leader, and a few unwashed antiwar activists from SDS who railed against the War in Vietnam. LRY also hosted progressive religious figures, one, Malcolm Boyd, the renegade priest who wrote Are You Running with Me, Jesus?

On my way to hear Rubenstein at the campus Hillel Foundation, I remember walking through the post-football revelry — the campus alit with Greek house parties, the bars on Ninth Street pulsing “Born to Be Wild,” patrons swilling 3.2 beer, and a few bandstands with folk-music sing-alongs. I was neither cocky nor detached but I did prize my outsider status. Nursing a degree (or chip) of moral superiority, I felt some sympathy for my fellow collegians who remained brainwashed by state, church, and university because they wanted to be, mind-manacles I believed I had ceded once I arrived on campus.

At Hillel, before eighty students the rabbi sat at a desk, half-annoyed, it seemed, by the director’s long in-

troduction. He did not respond to a couple titters when his July Playboy magazine article, “Judaism and the Death of God,” was mentioned. His bearing felt odd. The dangerous intellect did not stand but he sat at a card table covered by a dark purple cloth. Was he shy, infirm, book-toured out, signs that the rabbi’s great burden — the bone-weary exhaustion of theological analysis and commitment — had grown too heavy? He had the scholar’s stoop. He seemed hale but, I wondered, were Jews born old? His hair was helmet-like, a thick, wavy, combed turf. He seemed held by guy wires, like a dirigible anchored in place. I chocked it up to a long post-Holocaust woe.

Waiting, watching, I expected an acknowledgment that we were there, in attendance. He offered none. Didn’t even nod after the welcoming applause. As he spoke, he gazed at the ceiling, florescent lights bright; he twitched. Weird — an eye-blinking tic or a gesture of defiance, perhaps self-conscious anxiety. Maybe he worried his secret was written on his face: He was just as baffled by the topic as we were. Meeting our gazes might have meant we’d mirror that confusion. Another maybe: Perhaps he was ashamed to proclaim his disbelief at the Hillel, a meeting place for Jewish intellectual and artistic culture on university campuses nationwide where, surely, some God-dwelling sanctity or superstition still lodged like a splinter in the students. And maybe Rubenstein was guilt-ridden, knowing he was draining the last of their God-hope. Did he feel the latent press of a God who once caged his heart’s certainty and still, despite His banishment, dug an elbow into his chest?

Then, with his unease as testimony, I began to sense we were his co-defendants. We had elected him to address the unfathomable decimation of European Jewry for us. That was more triggering than his tic. The room grew more tense; the audience seemed to hold

Opposite Memorial at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, Israel. December 2018. Photo by Eelco Böhtlingk on Unsplash.

his sheepishness against him. Speak up, man! Be not afraid! Despite the group’s petulance, I felt a sudden truth to his witnessing. His responsibility was self-endowed. He would, if truly Jewish, be a brick in a new Wailing Wall, one among hundreds who would report on his people’s Sisyphean angst.

Finally, he began inarguable facts Holocaust scholars had uncovered. That early on Nazi soldiers surrounded the ghettoes, cattle-carred hundreds of thousands of Jews (as well as gypsies and homosexuals) to Poland, off German soil, to establish their statelessness and murder them as surplus undesirables. That he was dumbfounded at the everyday folks’ ability to ignore the flinty smells of gas vans and the outhouse stink of families, children included, on trains, stopping to refuel in German and Polish towns. That the guards promised the dispossessed that on arrival if they worked, they’d eat, but culled them immediately into lines of healthy and useless, the latter sent to the delousing showers of cyanide. And, most horrible to tell, that the Jews who then still believed in God also believed what was happening to them had some as-yet unknown purpose to it, God the deliverer waiting in the wings.

As his testament wore on, Rubenstein stared above us and his eyelids fluttered, the nervousness more pronounced. After a while, he seemed to want to offload some of the tribal weight of the Jewish survivor from his bent frame and shoulder-mount it onto us. And yet the assembled — that day, resisting the lumpsum blame for the atrocity in Auschwitz — did not want it either.

It got weirder. On one hand, Rubenstein was telling us that from 1939 to 1945, the “Lord of History,” whose authority derived from interceding in the formative lives of the Jews, was tending to “important business elsewhere” and could not be bothered about the Third Reich swine. On the other hand, the rabbi wanted the All-Mighty to squirm as the Jewish boy in Elie Wiesel’s Night had, hanging from piano wire, a scene of numbing bestiality. The contrast was ludicrous. How could this absent, hidden, dead God undergo the same punishment as the Jews had, clawing at the locked doors

when the Zyklon B steamed out of the ceiling nozzles? Many of us nonbelievers listening were in no position to manifest the impossible. Since when can atheists make a nonexistent God do anything?

Cued by a flood of ill-will, which Rubenstein seemed unwilling to curb and whose infectious despair began burying itself, I assume, in many present in the room and I know in me, he thumbed open After Auschwitz and read the following passage.

[As Jews] we cherish our hallowed, ancient traditions, not because they are better than other men’s or because they are somehow more pleasing in God’s sight: we cherish them simply because they are ours and we could not with dignity or honor exchange them for any other. By the same token, having lost the need to prove that what we are or have is better than what others are or have, we have gained a reverence for other men’s sacred traditions. This is a corollary of our belief that these traditions are not matters of original choice but are part of the absurd Givenness of every concrete, limited human perspective. As children of Earth, we are undeceived concerning our destiny. We have lost all hope, consolation, and illusion. We have also lost all ressentiment, that emblem of poverty and spirit, and we have found a renewed strength, dignity, and vitality. Jewish life must live beyond all ideology in the joy as well as the pain of the present, seeking no pathetic compensations in an imaginary future for a life unlived in the now. It is either this or a return to an ideology which must end by praising God for the death of six million Jews. This we will never do. 2/

rIchard loWell rubensteIn Was born In 1924 to nonobservant Jewish parents and died at the age of 97 in 2021. Without a bar mitzvah — his greatest regret, he later confided — the New York City youth was first attracted to Unitarianism, then the American Judaism

And, most horrible to tell, that the Jews who then still believed in God also believed what was happening to them had some as-yet unknown purpose to it, God the deliverer waiting in the wings.

Re-form movement, entering its flagship school, Hebrew Union College, in 1942. During and after the war, Rubenstein, though a fair-weather student of traditional and reformist ideologies, he became a rabbi in 1952. He was ill-suited for the job; the ministry aspect was not to his liking. He lived Orthodox with his first wife, but the crib death of their son ended that conceit; to save the marriage, the pair engaged Freudian psychoanalysis. As is often the case, they divorced, he remarried, and his interests in literature led him to mature intellectually. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard Divinity School in 1960, his thesis, “Psychoanalysis and the Image of Evil in Rabbinic Literature.”

Rubenstein was comfortable with students as well as academic writing and research. His heyday arrived during the 1960s as director of the Hillel Foundation, chaplain to Jewish students, and a literature position at the University of Pittsburgh. From 1970 to 1992, he was professor of religious studies at Florida State University. Throughout his academic foray, he taught classes in French existentialism, twentieth-century European literature, Freud, Hegel, and Holocaust studies. In the late 1990s, he served as the president of the University of Bridgeport, directed the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and was a member of several institutes, including a controversial post as advisor to Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. His teaching posts deepened his love of traditional roles for rabbis, putting his care into the rituals and rites of Jewish life. The “question of God and the death camps,” however, raked his mind unremittingly and stamped him one of the architects of a new Jewish identity after the Holocaust.

As a writer, he is best-known for After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (1966), a book he added to in later editions. That defiant volume was widely excerpted, discussed, and countered much more than his subsequent titles — Power Struggle: An Autobiographical Confession (1974), The Cunning of History (1975), and The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (1983). Power Struggle is largely an explanatory narrative of life events, less a personal confession, though it does include some pithy disclosures: “I can feel the human loss of God as a redemptive being in ways that I have trouble trying to feel theological arguments about his existence. Such is what the Holocaust convinced me of.”

When I heard Rubenstein speak, he was barnstorming Hillels, promoting After Auschwitz. Years later, I read this miscellany of essays, talks, interviews, symposia, and the personal essay, “The Making of a Rabbi.” Its core tack was to criticize Jews for believing in

God as a beneficent supremacy both after and because of the Shoah. Death-of-God ideology shook the Jews’ metanarrative, specifically, the promise to Abraham of a homeland, which God renewed after the 586 BCE destruction of Jerusalem. A fitful omnipotent, He severed the covenant and punished His people with masochistic thrashings for their disobedience to the law and the sin of idolatry. Eventually, God had had enough of Jewish intransigence and sent them into desert exile. His change of heart for the chosen then be-came categorical with the Great Dispersal, the displacement of the tribe across the globe. Jewish woe neverending, some historians and theologians argued that the tribe had continued to alienate their creator, a few naming “Hitler and the SS as instruments of God’s will,” Rubenstein writes. The Nazis and their organizational genius were easily enlisted as part of the Jews’ God-driven destiny.

The claim was unbelievable: God conspired, willfully or indifferently, with the Nazis to annihilate European Jewry in the twentieth century? Rubenstein writes, “To see any purpose in the death camps, the traditional believer is forced to regard the most demonic, anti-human explosion in all history as a meaningful expression of God’s purposes. The idea is simply too obscene for me to accept.” He concluded that God’s deal with the Jews

RICHARD L. RUBENSTEIN (1924-2021).

PHOTO BY HANNAH RUBENSTEIN, 1974.

and a homeland in Canaan had no basis in fact. It was, like most supernatural things, an excessively porous fiction. The more people attach themselves to the fantasy of a just God, the more the Death of God is deserved.

Today, with Rubenstein’s books as my guide, I’m thinking a lot about God. It feels odd that I don’t believe in God but I’m “thinking a lot about God.” What’s more, the image of the stuttering, half-bored Rubenstein at Hillel is, all these years later, snapping at my heels again. I am realizing that his existential tiredness that night expressed a writerly nature with which I was unfamiliar and dismissive. Writer types for me were Steinbeck and Mailer, Capote and Didion, Ellison and Baldwin. Street-smart thinkers, more opportunistic than intellectual, they were keen to mesh their mordant egos with those of “real people.” Their reportage and fictional (or autofictional) characters were based on men and women who, transformed by climactic events, end up deconstructing themselves.

Rubenstein was a serious scholar, obviously; but he was a writer, reflecting his turbulent time with a queasy turbulence all his own. The Death of God was a Christian idea, probed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “What is man in an age of no religion?”

That is, until Rubenstein reoriented the deicide as an inescapable fact of Jewish existence. His cause came from a duty to the unillusioned survival of his ethnic cohort. He helped Jews become religious atheists — no mean feat. About his writerly essence, I — the son of a rabidly ex-Catholic father who when I spoke of joining a church choir as a boy, he insisted I be suspicious of all religious people: forget their art and ideas; be wary of how they use you — had much to learn.

her tribe while preserving a critical status outside the group. This appears with painful eloquence in the emotive swamps and generational hand-me-downs of Black women in Toni Morrison’s characters who live in times and places of a partial African-American invisibility, “neither plantation nor ghetto,” as she once said. Reading Morrison, also a later passion, I became hyperaware that an author’s authority derives from her blooded experience amid the coal-simmering home fires. I decided that such interdependence between the chronicler’s voice and her community is a hallmark of literature’s truth, if you will, a truth untouched in religious and sacred texts, which is the primal source of their failure. The writerly ego and the soil of family or community descent mean more to me, I admit now, than the quicksand of any theological questions about God.

One attendant pleasure of a long life (of which there are just as many pains) is that if I mature enough, I may manifest my artist’s destiny, which carries a more honest self-disclosure about many of my youthful prejudices than I’ve yet realized. What do I mean?

one lesson Was that a W r I ter ’ s I nborn wound could be based in his legacy. It’s what my grad-school African-American mentor called, “racial memory.” I saw that one of an author’s subjects was to link herself and

Rubenstein hadn’t directly experienced the Shoah. But he did say that nearly every Jew in America had relatives who had. (In Power Struggle, he wrote, “[I]t is easier for reflective Christians to face the problem of God after Auschwitz than it is for Jews,” and, I’d add, for the nonreligious.) His experience was indirect, but his testimony as to how he defined his burden, real or supposed, was anchored in his empathy. How do we make central in our lives that which we must bear, even abstractly, in imagination? I escaped the psycho-logical torment of having loved a personal God who had died. Not a Jew, any ethnic consideration for Rubenstein was also indirect. But because he ordained himself a legacy survivor, I saw that the lastingness of that historical identity is central to Jewish dis-placement, renewed, seemingly, every other generation. Then, again over many years, I slowly woke up to an equivalent sensibility. As an American, I am a descendant of the slaughter my countrymen, over four centuries, have inflicted on others, a fact Americans like me too easily deny.

I’m starting to get Rubenstein’s method — to promulgate the Death of God is to light, among believers and nonbelievers, a bonfire of rage and retribution, perhaps, one day cracking open a door to reparations and atonement, but not before accurate historical reporting is made commonplace.

Who died and who survived at the necropolis of Auschwitz? Of the 1.3 million sent just over the border in Southern Poland to the complex of work camps and gas chambers, 1.1 million were Jews, and 960,000 of them were murdered. This meant 140,000 lasted into a second hell, a “freed” society of the living dead who often wandered the earth soullessly.

With Rubenstein as my initiator, I equated his obsession with the six million and my racial memory/research with the American-based Holocaust of the Other: the 12 million indigenous people from 1492 and 1900 who died of disease, the 1.8 million Africans who died in the Middle Passage, the 400,000 enslaved persons who were born, bred, and perished in the southern United States before 1866, the one to two million Japanese in Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki who were killed or maimed in fire bombings and mush-room clouds, the 3.25 million Vietnamese dead from combat, napalm, Agent Orange, and carpet bombing from 1963 to 1975, and the hundreds of thousands of civilians and combatants America’s ground excursions and precision drones killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and were labeled “collateral damage.” I lack the energy to count the number of U.S. soldiers — innocent and gung-ho — who bled to death in these conflicts, defending their fellow soldiers as the U.S. Army catalyzed the imperial force majeure.

Many Americans will find my tack here degrading to the military dead. But I have read a good deal in the literature of modern mass murder — Eugene Genovese, J.D. Salinger, William Styron, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, Raul Hilberg, concentration-camp memoirs, the tales of family denial like Helen Fremont’s After Long Silence, and Richard Rubenstein. Their books — as relations, scholars, participants — punch up the mechanized cruelty of mass and individual malice no other art form can capture. I’m starting to get Rubenstein’s method — to promulgate the Death of God is to light, among believers and nonbelievers, a bonfire of rage and retribution, perhaps, one day cracking open a door to reparations and atonement, but not before accurate historical reporting is made commonplace.

In a self-censoring way, Rubenstein’s talk walled me into decades of silence. Why may be because I had no God in the fight. But that’s shortsighted. I’m remembering his lecture that night to test my own respon-

sibility for the crimes of the Holocaust and American Imperialism. I also feel that a dissimulative deity is no longer important, which once was terribly critical to my worldview. The older I get, however, the more important my country’s untold history is. Especially in America where Evangelicals tar dissenters, pacifists, and the woke mob for not supporting the troops and, as an adjunct, absolving God of His skin in the game. The God-sanctioned annihilation of Jewish and Native populations continues to inspire new methods of mass casualties. This now includes the humanitarian crisis of refugees, the yearly slaughter of 70 billion animals for human consumption, and the accelerating rate of extinction (.01% per year) of plant and animal species, the paradise we live in and must care for. Rubenstein’s larger sense of the Death of God is beginning something much grimmer in its exfoliating consequences, which I still need to understand.

context for the death of God movement is essentially twentieth century, because of the Holocaust. The true forebear was Friedrich Nietzsche who, in 1882, announced the fact in Thus Spake Zarathustra: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” This, for Nietzsche, was a good thing. God’s death offered liberation from Christianity’s astringent morality where the sins of our dominance will be forgiven in the cloudy after-life. Antisemitism, an ever-present contributary, is also baked in the cake. Prior to the Second World War, as Jews in Germany, Italy, and Poland were stockaded, the Catholic church under Pope Pius XII knew the pogroms were worsening and did nothing to intervene. Why reign in military assassins of the original Christ killers if you don’t have to? Postwar existentialists ratcheted up the claim of God’s uselessness. The theologian Paul Tillich, in his 1950s Harvard lectures, which Rubenstein attended, put it this way: “The God who sees everything is the God who has to die.” Rubenstein amplified Tillich’s take, writing of his The Courage to Be: “Tillich insists that the God of theism (that is, a personal God) is dead and deserved to die. He claims that a God who stands above all human activity and who controls the cosmos is ultimately the enemy of human self-fulfillment.” What a dig!

The claim was unbelievable: God conspired, willfully or indifferently, with the Nazis to annihilate

European Jewry in the twentieth century?

God “opposes human freedom,” not a new idea but one that felt boldly just in the 1950s and 1960s. (Recall such classics as Harvey Cox’s The Secular City and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, treatises of subtle and overt antagonism against the Christian state.) All religions are the same: Their “authoritarian conception of a deity” is a false premise. Far worse, Rubenstein heralded, God-theDaddy-O is a moral illusion.

Still another factor bred distrust of the divine. The Holocaust ushered in a nigh unimaginable question about God’s capacity for evil. In essence, just how much wickedness is the Great Benevolence capable of? How much destruction — of the soul of a culture and a people — does He condone? Apparently, far more than anyone thought. And if unthinkable evil is His plat du jour, how were the camps systematically underreported or ignored? Curious that ignorance could be born of both sadism and indifference. In the 1930s and 1940s were our ears plugged to the prayers of the starved and gassed: “Oh, dear, kind God, save us!” How many innocent children who begged His intervention learned, in their final minutes, that His dearness and kindness were vain projections?

In my post-LRY adamancy and the conceits of sophomore certainty, I like millions of others wondered why our parents refused to acknowledge that a God deaf to His “chosen people” or eyes shut to the Slaughter of the Innocents had died or, at least, had failed. But supposing He had not died, then how would we, religious and nonreligious, hold Him accountable for the gathering Armageddon — melting glaciers, monsoonal floods, suffocating heat, million-acre fires, carbon asphyxiation during just one nuclear winter.

I also nursed the skeptic’s conviction that if God is dead, weren’t all these funerary machinations beside the point? To Jews of Rubenstein’s ilk, this required some subtlety. God is ethnicity and territory, the Jews’ reason for being. How does the mix of a divine dicta-tor, the planetwide Diaspora of Jews, and a promised homeland in Israel receive such star billing? God’s most repulsive shadow is to arm with killer instincts one set of true believers against another. And then to (falsely) charge that nonreligious elites are the key purveyors of social-media hedonism and reeducation camps for the Uyghurs?

this fact did not directly implicate me, the many Jews I knew in college were mum to His passing, mostly afraid any analysis would distress their kin. “My God” had not died because my God had never lived. How do I, how do we acknowledge not an absence — if God was absent, then that presupposed he was there and, when things got intolerable, he bolted — but, rather, a Not-God, His opposite. In its Not-ness, the idea posits God, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, as the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. He is neither abandoned space nor the swoosh of His cloak, off to snap another universe into being. He is free to not be just as I am free to not believe in Him.

To be honest, after Rubenstein’s performance, I was done with God as schemer or redeemer or illusion. I had better things to do — hitchhike, work on the Mississippi River, play music, keep a journal, have kids, get married. And yet, on this issue, something was always missing. I was surprised that by digging into Rubenstein, I discovered that the rabbi was far less of a lost Jew in the wilderness, bereft of meaning, than I knew. He reasoned in several books that the worst “human” aspects of God were dead, namely, our tolerance for irrational behavior and mass self-deception. (Hello QAnon!) Rubenstein was no atheist; he dissociated himself from Nietzsche’s “good death.” Instead, he emphasized “the time of the death of God,” which steers into our time as well. Studying him, I was dazzled by the many nuances with which he explored disbelief. That just because God is Dead doesn’t mean mystery is moribund, ritual is unnecessary, or a community is permanently dismembered. That, as he writes, “God is mother night,” the cosmic black hole, “the end of all things, when all that was, is and shall be finally implodes into the source-from-whence-it-came,” which sounds both sensibly entropic and materially sensual.

long after rubensteIn’s lecture, I saW that God had died only for those who believed in God. Though

Moreover, he wrote that if one subscribes to an Absent God, then it’s not enough to disbelieve: One must, he wrote, “will the death of God.” There’s a mighty assertion. It demands a pledge of renewal for every generation to follow: Affirm His death via ritual or a confessional purge in the town square. No matter how we think about God’s death, His demise is primarily a cultural and historical event. It’s not the obliteration of a Being. Rather, it’s the recognition of an Uncaring Being who is dead to what matters. Rubenstein contended that no one knows if God died but we do know that the feeling that He died is, post-Auschwitz, a psychological reality. He argued that Christians believe removing God enthrones Jesus as God while Jews (and the rest of us unbelievers) refuse to deify the Son of Man. To have

honored God as long as Jews have is a cultural fact near impossible to dismantle. (For comparison, think about dismantling the British monarchy!) Rubenstein sought to have disbelieving Christians and Jews revive paganism with an emphasis less on history or identity or the afterlife and more on the here-and-now, a return to the survival of our children’s future minus the chains of a covenantal God.

He noted that in “the time of the death of God,” “the human condition has become darker with its coming.” Here was Rubenstein’s knifelike honesty — darkness, not liberation. We must still make obvious the godlessness of the twentieth century if we are to realize how much we in the West think our material wealth is divinely lit. In 1967, Rubenstein was offering a coherent and revolutionary rationale, a kind of spiritual secularism, where attention, meaningful ritual, and reanimated traditions live on in the cultural lastingness of racial and ethnic heritages — to cite one droll example, the comedic legacy from Sophie Tucker to Jack Benny, from Nora Ephron to Fran Liebowitz.

it. God . . . is the source of the mystery hidden in language, or, as Gerhard Ebeling obscurely puts it, ‘the basic situation of man as word-situation.’

“God” is a problem in — and because of — language; for humankind, He is a “word-situation.” The situation is, the Bible gave God a voice in writing and His followers, in all religions, have spoken His words to keep Him materialized in language. As language evolves, abstract terms flounder in cliché; they must be stipulatively defined or else they founder in the connotative. So, too, “God” must be deracinated and rerooted; the word should carry scare quotes to identify its “special usage.” I say this realizing no one uses such quotes, including me. But there must be some reckoning not only with the word but also with the thousands of genetically wild notions the word evokes, its equivalent associations with father, redeemer, creator, destroyer, almighty, choose your own appositive.

I Want to end WIth one more excursIon through Rubenstein’s “the time of the death of God.” Perhaps the most popular and polarizing force in the deicide movement came on April 8, 1966, with the Time magazine cover story, “Is God Dead?” This edgy and informative article is the most commented-upon and controversial feature in Time’s one-hundred-year-old weekly. “Toward a Hidden God,” written by John Elson, states that among the Creator’s many then-current conditions (God is dead, God is dying, God is hiding, playing possum, God is there-but-not-there), His demise is a universal sticky wicket, that is, “a problem in language.”

A word . . . is not merely a means of conveying information; it is also a symbol of man’s power over nature and of his basic impotence: one man cannot speak except to another, and language itself possesses a power that eludes his mastery of

This is a crazy-quilt way of coming at God’s death: How can He ever die if He has been made material in language? The thinking goes, once God has language, he is indestructible, which is to say, the Bible, the Jewish/Christian lexicon, gave birth to God. He didn’t give birth to the Bible. Language carries the memory of all language for its users, that is, everything that has been said or written, even if its nominal subjects, say, Tyrannosaurus Rex, have not existed for 200 million years. T-Rex still exists in the context of its skeletal reconstruction in a Natural History Museum.

Few of Rubenstein’s cohorts in the 1960s raised the impossibility of killing God in language. Such required the French literary theorists and their advancement of language as a reality of its own, a view first teased out by linguists and deconstructionists. Charting a course for religious texts is Raymond Hammer and his entry in The Oxford Companion to the Bible: “Authority of the Bible.” “To recognize the authority of the Bible,” he writes, “is to respond to the imperatives made by the God of the Bible. For ultimately what is looked for is an encounter not with language but with a person.” Language materializes a “person” in or as language. Taken “literally,” this is a testament not to God but to literature. Despite the liberation some feel by Christ’s

Prior to the Second World War, as Jews in Germany, Italy, and Poland were stockaded, the Catholic church under Pope Pius XII knew the pogroms were worsening and did nothing to intervene.

last seven words on the cross, for example, the word of God, embodied in the stories of the Bible, are representations of a voice whose humanoid male body we easily supply.

If biblical language knows a “subject” and not a “person,” we can reconstitute God as a subject, a titular authority, less an actor in history and more a character in literature. In this role, He loses some transcendence and authority. I suspect He also lose his capital H. In our time, God the Influencer is being replaced by New Age embodiments — spirit and soul — which feel close to “sacred” experience and distant from “personhood.” Thus, the Death of God assumes that religious people must give up on a creator, which is the norm for Buddhists. Even if we want to hold onto His being, His being can be — just as likely — the spiritual or the soulful sphere of feeling, of human intimacy, of the ineffable, the mystical, the pantheistic, call it what you will.

For us — and this is one of the subjects of my book, Spirituality and the Writer — is that authors today want an encounter not with God but with the mystery of being in language because the author’s encounter is with language even if the desire is for an encounter with a traditional deity. It’s the same difference. Another way to say this is: A person’s spiritual experience is seldom occasioned by language, even though such an event may be expressed in words. (It can be expressed also in art, dance, film, and, best of all in music.) The spiritual insight is ineffable; the making of it into any language gives it an alternate, medium-dependent ineffability. But a person’s experience of the spiritual in art should never be construed as the same experience in life — that latter languageless sphere, one of great hope or great terror, great absence or great belonging, exists since culture randomly selects some of us for its evolutionary momentum, not for ours, no matter how much we flatter ourselves.

I love how Robert M. Price describes the contretemps between the rhetoricity of God and the evisceration of divinity in his entry, “Death of God Theology,” in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief: “All reality is a textual field, a flat surface with much depth beneath it, a depth of unsuspected meanings, but no height, nothing above it to which it points.” More poetically put by John Len-

non: “Imagine there’s no Heaven / it’s easy if you try / no Hell below us / above us only sky.”

My experience precisely. For me, the worst problem of God’s protoplasm still hanging around is this: There seems to be no keeping God or the Death of God tame in an agreed-upon textual sphere. Its elusiveness lives with users who want language to have primacy beyond itself, which believers still call “the word of God,” as if such putative possession means anything to language. Such users may affirm God but, more important, they use His Deathlessness, if you will, for the sake of power and control. Indeed, the most direct route to power and control of the masses is by mastering multiple media (in which all of us are drowning these days) where His exclusivity continues to be claimed by His fascistic agents. For Hitler, this meant evoking a divine mandate at mass rallies and on radio; for Trump, it means evoking the same White Nationalism at mass rallies, on television, and in the daily scrum of denials and lies. Dead or alive, God, one hundred years ago or in 2022, is a useful idiot to these maniacal figures. It’s simple: Language can’t rid itself of its material legacy. The words, used for millennia, remain us. While God may be dead, and we, with good intentions one and all, may have killed Him, it’s also true that as one of our tongue’s grandest nouns, He remains at large.

THOMAS LARSON is a journalist, book/music critic, memoirist and the author of Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry (Swallow Press, 2019). He has also written The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease (Hudson Whitman), The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ (Pegasus Press), and The Memoir and the Memorist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative (Swallow Press). He is a twenty-year staff writer for the San Diego Reader, a six-year book review editor for River Teeth, and a former music critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican. As a lecturer, Larson has spoken about his book on heart disease, held workshops on “Writing the Memoir” and “The Spiritual Memoir,” and given talks on jazz, American composers, and nonfiction narrative. He continues to work privately with authors on their nonfiction manuscripts. https://www.thomaslarson.com

Perhaps the most popular and polarizing force in the deicide movement came on April 8, 1966, with the Time magazine cover story, “Is God Dead?”

INTRODUCTION

Church-state controversies have played a prominent role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s docket since the 1940s. Every term, it seems, the Court decides one or more cases that implicate the Constitution’s religion clauses contained in the First Amendment. And in most terms, those church-state cases involve controversial and contentious issues, such as whether a professional photographer or bakery shop owner can refuse to serve LGBTQ customers based on the proprietors’ religious beliefs. This has long been true. Even the more conventional church-state disputes involving public funding of religious institutions or religious exercises in public schools have elicited strong feelings on opposing sides, with the Court’s decisions in the early 1960s striking school prayer and Bible reading provoking attempts to amend the Constitution.

Not only have the Court’s specific church-state holdings proved to be controversial; so too has the Court’s chosen standard for adjudicating many church-state conflicts: does the government’s involvement with reli-

EXCERPT FROM Separating Church and State: A History

By Steven K. Green

gion or religious entities violate the separation of church and state? Commonly, the notion of church-state separation means that government cannot promote religion, financially or otherwise, or employ its coercive and persuasive powers to make people be more religious. Applied with rigor, it would mean that religious institutions and actors would be excluded from receiving grants and other benefits that flow to comparable secular entities (e.g., fund public schools but not religious schools) and that the government would be prohibited from making religious proclamations or employing religious imagery, such as maintaining Ten Commandment monuments on courthouse grounds. As will be seen, the apparent rigidity in the phrase “separation of church and state” has rarely been applied with exacting rigor. Still, critics of church-state separation have often charged that the principle is hostile toward religion and that it privileges a regime of secularism.

Church-state separation has an affirmative quality aside from its restrictive quality. The Court has identified a strain of separationism that protects religious institutions from intrusive governmental regulations, particularly when those regulations interfere with the autonomy and decision making of religious institutions about matters of doctrine and internal organization. When considering these “church autonomy” cases, the justices have rarely used the phrase church-state separation, though they have acknowledged that this rule of independence is grounded not only in free exercise principles but in non-establishment principles as well. Here, the idea of separate zones of authority — a concept that goes back centuries — insulates religious institutions from too much government oversight. For some people, this internal tension within the principle of church-state separation — sometimes restricting while other times protecting the role of religion — illustrates a larger tension between the two religion clauses themselves, one affirming the value of free exercise of

religion (religious pluralism) with the other embracing the value of non-establishment (secularism). One can interpret the two clauses as working in tandem to advance the principle of religious freedom writ large, but others see an inherent conflict between the two clauses.

This uncertainty over the meaning and application of the principle of church-state separation can be seen in three Supreme Court decisions in 2020. Two of the cases implicated the religious autonomy strain of separationism. In one decision, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, the Court held that lay teachers at Catholic schools fit within a judicially created “ministerial exception” to employment nondiscrimination laws. Eight years earlier a unanimous Court had ruled that religious entities had an absolute say in selecting their religious leaders, even if it appeared the entity had otherwise discriminated on the basis of a protected status — race, gender, age, disability — in its employment decision. In that case, Chief Justice John Roberts had written that any restriction on that privilege “interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs,” interests that are protected by both the Free Exercise and Establishment clauses. Whereas the plaintiff in the earlier case was also a teacher, she held the title of “commissioned minister” and preformed significant religious duties; in contrast, the plaintiff-teachers in Our Lady of Guadalupe School met neither of those criteria. Nonetheless, the Court majority extended the ministerial exemption to block the teachers from bringing age and disability discrimination claims against the Catholic schools, reemphasizing the autonomy of religious entities in deciding matters of faith and the importance of insulating those decisions from oversight from civil authorities, including courts. Although neither the majority nor concurring opinion employed the language of “separating” church functions from those of the state, that principle underlay the holding.

In contrast to affirming the concept of separationism in Our Lady of Guadalupe School, the Court took a different track in Bostock v. Clayton County. There, a majority interpreted the prohibition on sex discrimination under the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include banning employment discrimination on the basis of gender

identity, thus expanding protections to members of the LBGTQ community. Even though none of the parties in Bostock was a religious entity, numerous religious groups filed amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs arguing that expanding the definition of “sex” to include gender identity would interfere with their autonomy to make and maintain employment decisions consistent with their religious doctrines. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion acknowledged that that possibility existed, but held that such a claim was not before the Court at that time. Again, neither the justices nor the parties used that language of church-state separation, but the concept was implicated in the holding.

In the third case of the 2019 term, the principle of church-state separation was not simply implicated; it was front and center in the holding. Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue involved a state tax credit for donations that paid for tuition at private schools, including religious ones. The Montana Supreme Court had voided the credit on the basis of a “no religious funding” clause in the state constitution, citing the state’s interest in “separating church and State ‘more fiercely’ than the Federal Constitution.” A narrow majority of the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that interest as justifying excluding religious schools from receiving the financial benefit. The majority brushed aside the longstanding precedent of prohibiting government funding of religious education, one reaching back to the early nineteenth century, holding that to deny funding to a religious entity constituted discrimination against religion. The majority and concurring opinions bristled with hostility to Montana’s reliance on church-state separation and its argument that by not funding religious education it advanced religious freedom writ large. Chief Justice Roberts called that claim an “ill-defined interest,” and then added that “we do not see how the no-aid [to religion principle] promotes religious freedom.” And in his concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas asserted that church-state separation represents a “distorted view of the Establishment Clause” and declared that “this Court’s adoption of a separationist interpretation has itself sometimes bordered on religious hostility.”

In their dissenting opinions, Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor defended the bona fides of the no-funding rule and separation of church and state. As

The concept of church-state separation seems to be experiencing an identity crisis as one strain of separationism is ascending while the other is declining.

Justice Sotomayor wrote, the Court’s decision “‘slights both our precedents and our history’ and ‘weakens this country’s longstanding commitment to a separation of church and state beneficial to both.’” When viewed in conjunction with a decision three years earlier where the Court held that a state could not deny a renovation grant to a church based the no-funding rule, Espinoza was remarkable: a majority of justices rejected the principle of church-state separation that the Court itself was so instrumental in crafting some seventy-five years earlier. This reversal led constitutional scholar Erwin Chemerinsky to write that the trend was “unprecedented in American history: Never before had the Supreme Court held that the government is required to provide assistance to religious institutions. . . . The noble and essential idea of a wall separating church and state is left in disarray, if not shambles.”

The concept of church-state separation seems to be experiencing an identity crisis as one strain of separationism is ascending while the other is declining. It is with this latter, more conventional notion of separationism where there has been the greatest movement in recent decades. Not only has the Court backed away from its own jurisprudence of church-state separation with issues concerning aid to religion — upholding grants to religious nonprofits to conduct family planning counseling, instructional materials that can be diverted for religious uses, tuition vouchers for religious schools, and grants to houses of worship for facility renovations — a Court majority has turned a kind eye to invocations at city council meetings and the government’s use of religious symbols such as the Ten Commandments and Latin crosses. Only with respect to officially sponsored devotional activity in public schools has the Court not retreated, though it has allowed student-led “Bible clubs” and other religious activities conducted by outside groups immediately following the school day. The future of church-state separation appears to be in doubt.

What has led to the decline of church-state separation as a legal construct? As noted, the Court’s embrace of separation of church and state has been controversial from the beginning. In 1947, the justices adopted church-state separation as the operative legal standard for judging Establishment Clause violations. Everson v. Board of Education involved a challenge to a state re-

imbursement for transportation costs associated with sending children to parochial schools. Even though the Court voted five-to-four to uphold the reimbursements based on public safety grounds, the justices unanimously agreed that separationism was the controlling legal rule. Writing for the majority, Justice Hugo Black set out what famously became known as the “no aid” rule: The ‘establishment of religion’ clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. . . In the words of [Thomas] Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect ‘a wall of separation between Church and State.’

A year later, in a case striking religious instruction in the public schools (McCollum v. Board of Education), the Court reaffirmed its commitment to church-state separation. Writing again for the majority, Justice Black reasserted that the Establishment Clause “erected a wall between Church and State which must be kept high and impregnable.” In their concurring opinions, other justices added their own modifiers to describe the rigor of the separationist principle: “complete and uncompromising separation;” “a spacious conception;” “eternal separation;” and “strictly apart.” The object of the Establishment Clause “was broader than separating church and state in [a] narrow [institutional] sense,” wrote Justice Wiley Rutledge. “It was to create a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority.” This rhetoric left little doubt that the justices considered separationism to be the controlling principle behind church-state relations and to represent a constitutional rule.

Public reaction to the Court’s adoption of churchstate separation was generally favorable, with the New York Times praising the justices’ pronouncements, though not the specific holding in Everson. Legal journals such as the Harvard Law Review also endorsed the Court’s embrace of separationism, calling it “a towering issue of our time — the relation of the state to religious minorities in a democratic society.” Not all reaction to the Court’s embrace of separationism was positive, however, particularly following the McCollum decision, with Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr

By the mid-1950s, the status of church-state separation seemed so secure that one commentator declared that the “separation principle has become axiomatic in American thought.”

charging the principle would “greatly accelerate the trend toward the secularization of our culture.” Catholic Archbishop Richard J. Cushing went further in his criticism, labeling church-state separation a “phony plea” and a “smoke screen for secularism or bigotry.” And a handful of conservative scholars challenged the justices’ historicism, with one particularly harsh critic calling church-state separation a “fictitious principle.” But overall, Americans appeared to accept the idea of church-state separation, at least in principle.

By the mid-1950s, the status of church-state separation seemed so secure that one commentator declared that the “separation principle has become axiomatic in American thought.” Another observer remarked that church-state separation, “with its comforting connotations of certainty and security, now seems to occupy a central — for some even a dominant — position in the dialogue on church and state.” Jefferson’s iconic wall of separation also came to epitomize the principle: “If a single metaphor dominates American thinking about church and state it is the metaphor of a wall of separation,” opined a commentator. More than being a compelling visual representation, the “metaphor of a ‘Wall of Separation’ between church and state has become an enduring element of First Amendment analysis.” Even conservative Protestants endorsed separationism. Contained in the Doctrinal Statement of the National Association of Evangelicals, along with affirmations of the Bible’s infallibility and of Jesus’ divinity, was the goal of the “preservation of separation between church and state.” As a result, John F. Kennedy’s iconic 1960 statement that “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute” was not that remarkable, even coming from a Catholic, as it reflected a near consensus among Americans, Protestants, Jews, and rank-in-file Catholics.

For three decades following the Everson and McCollum decisions, the Court largely took a separationist approach to church-state controversies, albeit with a few exceptions. In the early 1960s the Court struck down the common practice of prayer and Bible reading in public schools, and then in the 1970s it issued approximately a dozen rulings on public aid for religious education, striking the bulk of the programs. At times, the justices reaffirmed church-state separation as the constitutional touchstone, while at other times they simply let the separationist result speak for itself. The Court’s separationist approach seemed to align with, and reinforce, the growing secularization of the culture, represented by an increasing consumerism and the social revolution of the 1960s. While some people

criticized specific separationist holdings — such as the prayer and Bible reading decisions — few condemned the concept. This apparent consensus led church-state lawyer and scholar Leo Pfeffer to write in 1975 that “[t] he principle of separation . . . is as alive and well as it was in 1791, when the First Amendment was added to the Constitution. Indeed, there are many who claim that it is now more vigorous than [ever].”

Pfeffer’s confidence was shortly proven wrong. By the late-1970s, lingering opposition to the Court’s school prayer and abortion decisions, and to a perceived cultural secularism and relativism, led to the rise of the Christian Right which accompanied, if not facilitated, a conservative political backlash that resulted in the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Among other items, Reagan proposed a constitutional amendment to guarantee prayer and Bible reading in the nation’s schools, criticizing church-state separation in the process; as Reagan declared at one event, the drafters of the First Amendment “sought to protect churches from government interference” but “never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself.” At the same time a new round of scholarly criticism arose about the Court’s promotion of church-state separation. Political scientist Robert L. Cord wrote an influential book in 1982, Separation of Church and State: Historical Fact and Current Fiction, which excoriated the Court’s historicism and its separationist holdings. Cord’s book was followed by a series critiques, popular among political and religious conservatives, that attacked the principle as much as its applications, with Richard John Neuhaus of First Things charging that church-state separation had created a “naked public square.” Yale law professor Stephen Carter offered a similar critique, declaring that “[o]ur jurisprudence of church and state has become almost silly, a satire on itself, struggling to enforce an ahistorical fantasy.” The result, wrote Carter, was that “separation of church and state, in its contemporary rendition, represents little more than an effort to subdue the power of religion, to twist it to the ends preferred by the state.”

Before long, criticism of church-state separation appeared in the opinions of conservative Supreme Court justices, those appointed to the bench by Presidents Nixon and Reagan. On one level, the criticism was not new; the sole dissenter in the McCollum decision, Justice Stanley Reed, had warned that a “rule of law should not be drawn from a figure of speech.” Still previously, accommodationist justices including Byron White and Warren Burger had declined to attack separationism directly, preferring instead to qualify its understanding.

As Burger had written in the 1971 decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman: “Our prior holdings do not call for total separation between church and state; total separation is not possible in an absolute sense. Some relationship between government and religious organizations is inevitable.”

By the mid-1980s, however, the tone in judicial opinions began to shift from hesitancy to hostility. Justice William Rehnquist had consistently taken a non-separationist approach in church-state cases since being appointed to the Court by Nixon in 1972. Chiefly in the minority for a decade, Rehnquist allowed his disdain for church-state separation to boil over in a dissenting opinion from a 1985 decision striking a state statute providing for silent prayer and meditation in public schools (Wallace v. Jaffree). Rehnquist attacked the concept of church-state separation at length, calling the wall metaphor “misleading” and “mischievous,” and “all but useless as a guide to sound constitutional adjudication,” concluding that it “should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.” Shortly, other justices joined in Rehnquist’s broadside, with Justice Antonin Scalia likening separationism (as represented in the Lemon v. Kurtzman test) to a ghoul from a late-night horror film that refuses to die. Justice Thomas also condemned what he termed “extreme notions of separation of church and state.” This judicial criticism of church-state separation accompanied a rising number of non-separationist holdings after the 1980s, approving greater forms of financial aid to religion and the official use of religious symbolism and rhetoric. This evolution led church-state scholar Ira Lupu to write an article in 1994, “The Lingering Death of Separationism,” that argued the legal regime of separation of church and state was not only in decline but was effectively existing in a terminal medical condition, being kept alive by its resiliency as a “stock phrase.”

Affirmations of separation by liberal justices also declined in the mid-1980s, possibly reflecting a reluctance to highlight a controversial — and for some, divisive — issue. In fact, the last majority opinion to acknowledge church-state separation as a controlling rule was Lynch v. Donnelley (1984), where Chief Justice Burger offered a tepid endorsement: “The court has sometimes described the Religion Clauses as erecting a “wall” between church and state. . . . The metaphor has served as a reminder that the Establishment Clause forbids an established church or anything approaching it. But the metaphor itself is not a wholly accurate description of the practical aspects of the relationship that in fact exists between church and state.” Thus, by the 1990s,

few church-state opinions openly embraced the principle of church-state separation. A principle that had been at the heart of an important area of constitutional law was now openly reviled by opponents and all but abandoned by supporters.

Paralleling separationism’s decline among members of the judiciary and academy were voices of popular discontent, the harshest critiques coming from commentators and authors associated with the Christian Right. Televangelist Pat Robertson, a one-time Republican Presidential candidate, charged on more than one occasion that the Constitution “says nothing about the separation of church and state” while noting that the phrase appeared in the Soviet Union’s constitution. (Although true, the term “separation of powers,” acknowledged in numerous Court decisions, also does not appear in the Constitution.) In 1992, the legal arm of Robertson’s ministry, the American Center for Law and Justice, circulated a newsletter titled “Tear Down This Wall,” which compared the wall of separation between church and state to the Berlin Wall, demanding that the former also be demolished. More recently, Focus on the Family, a religious advocacy group founded by James Dobson, published an analysis, “Cause for Concern: Church and State,” which asserted that the “so-called ‘wall of separation between church and state’ has done more damage to America’s religious and moral tradition than any other utterance of the Supreme Court.” Raising a familiar complaint, the analysis charged that the Court’s “misuse of the ‘separation of church and state’ phrase has fostered hostility toward, rather than protection of, religious freedom.” Asserting that America was founded as a “Christian nation,” the analysis concluded that church-state separation is “an unconstitutional doctrine.” Fueling these attacks has been a “veritable cottage industry” of popular works criticizing church-state separation — best represented by David Barton, author of several pseudo-histories including The Myth of Separation — that have charged that the concept is anti-religious and lacks a historical basis.

Criticism of separation of church and state, both scholarly and popular, has centered on three charges. The first is that the Court’s choice of separationism to represent the meaning of the religion clauses is ahistorical or, in the words of Justice Rehnquist, amounts to “bad history.” This critique, which has existed since Everson was decided in 1947, has two interrelated parts: that the justices selectively emphasized the contributions and writings of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to the exclusion of other members of the founding generation (with critics frequently noting that Jef-

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jDOCTORS FOOTE:

Freethinking

Birth Control Pioneers

By Roderick Bradford

In 1842, the United States Congress passed the first federal law prohibiting the importation of “obscene or immoral” pictures and prints. Two decades later, at the height of the Civil War, northern Christian ministers grew concerned that the North was losing because God was angry about America’s “godless” constitution.

Ever since the founding of the nation, Christian clergymen had grumbled about the Founding Fathers’ decision not to mention God in the constitution. In 1863, Protestant leaders resolved to do something about it and founded the National Reform Association. They proposed a constitutional amendment to inscribe God and Jesus into the Constitution as the supreme authority. William Strong, a prominent judge, was chosen as president of their association and tasked to introduce the amendment. Like the ministers, Judge William Strong — who would later become an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court — believed Abraham Lincoln would support their amendment since he had already ordered military commanders to observe Sunday as a day of rest. And because his powerful speeches often sounded so much like sermons. Despite his gift for biblical oratory, Abraham Lincoln did not champion the Christian-nation amendment. “Amending the Constitution should never be done hastily,” Lincoln warned; the amendment failed.

After the disappointment, they turned to more secular approaches to the same ends, such as temperance and the crusade against obscenity. During the Civil War, Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, set the precedent for using the postal laws to regulate free speech. Blair personally confiscated mailed material that he determined was disloyal to the Union and/or might aid the Confederacy.

Near the end of a four-year war that pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, and was tearing the country asunder — with more than a half million Americans dead and countless casualties — the members of Congress found time to address what they considered the most pressing issue of the day: obscenity.

On February 8, 1865, the Senate and House passed a bill which stated that no obscene book, pamphlet, picture, print, or other publication of a vulgar and indecent character, shall be admitted into the mails of the United States; any person or persons who shall deposit or cause to be deposited, in any post-office or branch post-office of the United States, for mailing or for delivery, an obscene book, pamphlet, picture-print, or other publication, knowing the same to be of vulgar and indecent character, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, being duly convicted thereof, shall for every such offense be fined not more than five hundred dollars, or imprisoned not more than one year, or both, according to the circumstances and aggravations of the offense.

Since Congress never defined “vulgar,” “indecent,” or “obscene,” the determination was left up to judges, who, like most nineteenth-century Americans, believed obscenity could be easily recognized. Victorian Americans thought obscenity was linked to drinking, gambling,

masturbation, and all other social ills. And despite the fact that citizens had constitutionally protected First Amendment rights, prudish Victorians were in favor of moral censorship and suppression of “whatever outrages decency and is injurious to public morals.”

There was an effort to try to ameliorate this situation by a return to purity as Christian fundamentalists saw it. The issues that concerned religionists was not the inequality of wealth and power, nor the exploitation of labor, rampant government corruption in the Grant administration; not the return to serfdom in effect by African Americans who had been freed from slavery but were in Jim Crow. They believed the solution to all the problems in America could be solved if obscenity including birth control information could be criminalized. After the war, this method would be used against social radicals — especially, against freethinkers — with devastating effect. It was the dawn of the culture war in America.

At the beginning of the Gilded Age, Christian moralists and politicians began an aggressive campaign against sexual immorality. In 1873 –– the year D.M. Bennett founded The Truth Seeker –– the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was incorporated by the New York State Legislature. Samuel Colgate, the wealthy soap manufacturer, was president; Anthony Comstock served as secretary and chief vice hunter. In this capacity, and subsequently as the United States Post Office Department’s “special agent,” Comstock, a struggling dry-goods salesman and zealous religious member of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), waged war on publishers of “obscene” literature which he believed were poisoning the minds of America’s children.

With blessings from New York’s Christian leaders

Left JUDGE WILLIAM STRONG (1808-1895). ASSOCIATE JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES (1870-1880). WIKIPEDIA COMMONS.

Right MONTGOMERY BLAIR (1813-1883). UNITED STATES POSTMASTER GENERAL (1861-1864). WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

and financial support from Samuel Colgate –– owner of the world’s largest collection of Baptist books –– and the YMCA, Comstock went to Washington where he lobbied members of Congress to induce them into believing that America’s youth were at great moral risk. With his dogged determination and satchel full of lewd pictures and devices, which he spread out for the congressmen for close exam ination, Comstock convinced his fel low Republicans that the children of America were receiving obscene material in their mailboxes. Sub sequently, on March 3, 1873, in the closing hours of the 42nd Congress, the Republican Majority recklessly passed a series of acts while the House was in a state of confusion and some members were reportedly inebriated. Two hundred and sixty acts were passed without inquiry or consideration of merit and summarily signed into law by President Grant, whose administration was mired in corrup tion scandals.

The Comstock Act –– named af ter the self-appointed arbiter of mor als –– banned magazines, books, and pamphlets being sent through the U.S. Mail which advertised abortion or any forms of contraception which purity crusaders condemned as obscenity.”

One of the first high-profile targets of the ill-defined Comstock Act was also the most effective birth control advocate in 19th century America –– Dr. E.B. Foote. As early as 1858, Dr. Edward Bliss Foote (1829-1906) began publishing birth control information in his Medical Common Sense which sold more than a quarter million copies. The entrepreneurial Manhattan author’s Plain Home Talk published in 1872 sold 500,000!

Dr. Foote was a registered physician in the state of New York and a respected member in medical societies. Nevertheless, he was “eclectic” in his own medical practice and fought for the rights of Christian Scientists, magnetic healers, and other unorthodox practitioners. Dr. Foote promoted proto-eugenics and relied on bo-

tanical medicines and opposed the use of mineral medicines and mercury compounds. He believed medical knowledge should be available to the masses and not monopolized by elite professionals and medical societies. Dr. Foote declared: “The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few—when it must be woven into the common life of the world.”

Dr. Foote attended to patients in his medical office located in the basement of his fashionable three-story Manhattan brownstone across the street from the luxurious Italianate residence of a future president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur.

Patients, a writer reported, streamed through the door of Dr. Foote’s elegant medical office daily “of all conditions –– the rich and the poor; the dyspeptic and the consumptive; the palefaced woman and the ruddy-faced but rheumatic-limed man; the brain-worn student and the weakly maiden –– all of whom have, in most cases, tried the popular resident physician of ward or county before seeing the aid of the ‘Common Sense Doctor.’ ”

During the Victorian era, discussions about abortion, sexual intercourse, masturbation, and condoms was

considered taboo. Dr. Foote, however, never shied away from providing patients with frank advice and reading material which contained scientific illustrations of sexual organs. Dr. Foote invented the first cervical cap (a rubber cup inserted into the vagina before sexual intercourse to prevent pregnancy).

In the late 1800s, a common belief was that magnetism played a key role in sexuality. Dr. Foote theorized that men and women had magnetic auras, and sexual attraction was essentially an electric force similar to the attraction of magnetic poles. He postulated that sexual intercourse was an electrical procedure and varied between people according to their similarity or charge. Linking magnetism and electricity to sexual-

SAMUEL COLGATE (1822-1897). MANUFACTURER, PHILANTHROPIST, AND PRESIDENT OF THE NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

In 1873 — the year D.M. Bennett founded The Truth Seeker — the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was incorporated by the New York State Legislature.

ity did not seem to be an outlandish theory in 1876, the same year that Alexander Graham Bell seemingly miraculously transmitted spoken words by using his “electric telephone.” The theory of “Electrical Therapeutics” was designed into clothing and advertised as the “Magnetism is Life.” The ubiquitous cure-all was even widely advertised in The Truth Seeker.

As busy as Dr. Foote was with his writing, publishing, and thriving medical practice at his Lexington Avenue office, he found time and money to promote free speech and freethought. He was a principal member of several liberal and political organizations and a women’s rights advocate. He sent a check for $25 to Susan B. Anthony when she was fined $100 for voting. Dr. Foote began his fight for free speech in 1872 when he lobbied against an obscenity bill introduced to the New York legislature by Anthony Comstock.

When D.M. Bennett moved The Truth Seeker from Paris, Illinois, to lower Manhattan in late 1873, the novice publisher received monetary support from Dr. Foote.

In Dr. Foote, D.M. Bennett found a kindred spirit with more than just freethought in common. Both men had worked in printing shops and were former journalists. At nineteen, Edward Foote was an editor of a Connecticut weekly newspaper. D.M. Bennett, at twenty-three, was a Shaker ministry-appointed scribe during the celibate sect’s spiritualistic Era of Manifestations. Coincidentally, Bennett was still known by friends as Doctor Bennett due to his position as the Shaker community physician during his thirteen years as a member of the society. Their close friendship continued until D.M. Bennett’s death a decade later in 1882.

The country’s traditional and powerful medical profession felt threatened by Dr. Foote and his fellow unconventional eclectic and homeopathic physicians. In an effort to obtain control over the renegade and flourishing “medical freedom” movement, the “regular” physicians affiliated themselves with the government and Anthony Comstock’s pious Vice Society. Dr. Foote declared: “It is a hard thing to say, but nevertheless true, that the professional abortionists are only to be found in the ranks of the old school, while the new schools in medicine are to a man preventionists.”

Throughout history, abortion was the dominant form of birth control and a common practice in the nineteenth century. However, because of the availability of contraceptive devices, abortion became the absolute last desperate remedy.

In his “fight for the young” as Comstock called his mission, the prudish vice hunter targeted the “three great crime-breeders in America” . . . intemperance, gambling, and evil reading, and the greatest of these is evil reading.”

Anthony Comstock found any open discussion

ANTHONY COMSTOCK (1844-1915). SECRETARY OF THE NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE AND UNITED STATES POSTAL INSPECTOR. WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

D.M. BENNETT’S VIEWS ON ABORTION AND BIRTH CONTROL.

Like the Doctors Foote, D.M. Bennett opposed abortion but believed in a woman’s right to control reproduction. During his trip abroad, Bennett commented on birth control in Ireland: He found the overpopulation especially troubling and blamed the Catholic Church and its “evil” policies. Bennett denounced abortions which he believed ruined health and were in his opinion absolutely criminal. But he declared prevention legitimate and right. In a country so poor, he felt that every mother should be intelligent enough to safely control the number of children that she was able to raise properly. No one should add to the growing “number of wretched human beings to starve, suffer, and die, or at best eke out a miserable existence.” D.M. Bennett believed that mothers had the right to determine the size of their families, but it should be done by prevention and not by infanticide or child murder, before or after birth.

about the human body or sexuality deeply offensive. In the mid-1870s, Comstock focused his attention to literature containing information about sexuality and the prevention of conception which he declared “obscene.” (The phrase birth control did not yet exist.) Comstock conflated and condemned birth control and free-love advocates as “abortionists.”

With his hackneyed “fight for the young” battle cry, Comstock fiercely opposed anyone who shared sex education with young people. Dr. Foote, however, was happy to provide information to help readers to avoid “blundering along through the dangerous period of youth and enter into the greater responsibilities of marriage [and parenthood] without opportunity to learn about the origins of life.”

The orthodox medical establishment and the mainstream press, however, denounced Dr. Foote’s provocative theories regarding eugenics, birth control, and human sexuality. Moreover, the frank descriptive language he

used in his medical books was highly offensive to Christian conservatives like Anthony Comstock. Furthermore, the fact that Dr. Foote was an early and vocal opponent of Comstock obscenity legislation in 1872, increased the vice-hunter’s dislike for the “common sense doctor.”

Anthony Comstock abhorred any nudity in art. In an interview, however, Comstock confessed that that nobody “revered the female figure” more than he did. “In my opinion there is nothing else in the world so beautiful as the form of a beautiful maiden woman—nothing. But the place for a woman’s body to be — denuded — is in the privacy of her own apartment with the blinds down.” It is unknown, however, if the corpulent crusader was referring to his wife, the daughter of a Presbyterian elder, as the “maiden” whose female “form” he so adamantly adored. (The only thing friends of the couple could recall about the dimwitted homebody was that she always wore black, never spoke, and weighed only eighty-two pounds.)

Regardless of his reverence for the female form, Comstock railed against the public exposure of statues and paintings of nudes that were exhibited in the prestigious Paris Salon or the “Saloons of Paris,” as he reportedly referred to them. “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States,” George Bernard Shaw said in 1905. “It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the old world that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country town civilization after all.” When Comstock was asked to respond to the celebrated Irish dramatist’s remarks, he asked: “Who is he?” He later condemned the world-renowned writer as an “Irish smut-dealer.”

In January of 1876, Dr. Edward Bliss Foote became one of the first and most prominent victims of the puritanical Comstock Law. Dr. Foote was charged with mailing his pamphlet advocating and describing contraception “Words of Pearl” which Comstock requested using a fictitious name. (The decoy letter would be the same modus operandi the mutton-chopped crusader would use to entrap D.M. Bennett a couple of years later.) After Dr. Footes’s arrest, D.M. Bennett forcefully defended his friend in The Truth Seeker:

This notorious individual [Comstock] has placed himself beneath the contempt of honest and good men; but unfortunately he is vested with power from government to annoy men much his superior. We understand he has caused the arrest of Dr. E. B. Foote, author of Plain Home Talk and Medical Common Sense, than whom there is not a finer man in this city. The charge is Comstock’s favorite one, obscenity, and is based on the language used in that most valuable medical work in treating physi-

Left OFFICIAL SEAL OF THE NEW YORK SOCIETY FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF VICE. D.M. BENNETT DESCRIBED THE ILLUSTRATION ON THE NYSSV SEAL AS “AN UNFORTUNATE HANDCUFFED VICTIM IS, BY A MINION OF THE LAW, BEING THRUST INTO A DUNGEON, WHILE SAINT ANTHONY IS MAKING A BONFIRE OF BOOKS AND PAMPHLETS, SUPPOSED TO BE TRUTH SEEKERS, OPEN LETTERS , SCIENTIFIC TRACTS ON MARSUPIALS , ETC. ONE CAN EASILY IMAGINE THAT AROUND THE BENIGN BUT BADLY SCARRED FACE OF THE GOOD ANTHONY, LIKE HIS ILLUSTRIOUS PREDECESSOR, TORQUEMADA OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY, HOVERS A WISH THAT HE COULD THRUST THE VICTIM IN THE FLAMES, AS WELL AS HIS BOOKS.”

Opposite DR. FOOTE’S HEALTH MONTHLY . FOUNDED BY DR. E.B. FOOTE IN 1876, THE 16-PAGE PERIODICAL REMAINED IN PRINT FOR TWO DECADES UNTIL 1896.

ology and the diseases the human frame is liable to. This man Comstock will keep fooling around until by and by he “wakes up the wrong passenger.”

Dr. Foote was subsequently convicted of violation of the Comstock Act and was fined $3,500. Comstock was even more offended by printed matter critical of Christianity. And although Comstock initially targeted Dr. Foote, he especially detested D.M. Bennett and his “most horrible & obscene blasphemies” published in The Truth Seeker. In an effort to stop publication of the weekly, Bennett reported that Comstock visited The Truth Seeker’s distributor with “a copy of the paper in his hand, and by his arrogant, intimidating manner, bulldozed the manager.”

Less than two years after Dr. Foote’s conviction, D.M. Bennett became the “wrong passenger.” Comstock sent a decoy letter to Bennett ordering a scientific tract written by a former clergyman titled “How Do Marsupials Propagate Their Kind,” along with a copy of and Bennett’s own highly irreverent “An Open Letter to Jesus Christ.” After Bennett’s arrest –– the first of three –– Dr. Foote returned the favor and payed The Truth Seeker editor’s fifteen hundred dollar bond.

In his arrest blotter, Comstock commented: “He [Bennett] is everything vile in Blasphemy & Infidelism. His idea of liberty is to do and say as he pleases without regard to the rights, morals or liberties of others.”

After D.M. Bennett was again entrapped by a hand-written Comstock decoy letter –– the elderly editor was convicted for mailing Ezra Heywood’s free-love pamphlet “Cupid’s Yokes” –– fined $300 –– and also sentenced to thirteen months at hard labor in the Albany Penitentiary.

Soon after Dr. foote’S conviction, he founded Dr. Foote’s Health Monthly. The periodical was inspired by his printer John P. Jewett who also happened to be Harriet Beecher Stowe’s publisher. As D.M. Bennett had done three years earlier, Dr. Foote decided to print –– as an alternative to relying on the mainstream press –— his own periodical to express his political beliefs and views on health matters. Dr. Foote’s co-editor was his son Dr. Edward Bond “Ned” Foote Jr. (1854-1912).

Dr. Foote Junior graduated from the Columbia University medical department in 1876 and authored several books. Dr. Ned, as he was affectionately known, was also a birth control advocate and promoted sex education in public schools. Dr. Ned coined the term “contraceptics” which evolved into “contraceptives.”

The 16-page Health Monthly featured the Foote’s fight for free speech editorials along with health-related articles and focused on a wide range of subjects including eugenics, economics, free love, prison reform, divorce, marriage, freethought, and diet. The Monthly often included articles expressing opposition to “Comstockery” and “the Agent” as they dubbed their arch enemy Anthony Comstock. The Monthly’s mission statement declared: “The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few –– when it must be woven into the common life of the world.”

The Health Monthly also served as the official organ of the National Defense Association founded on June 12, 1878. Its first meetings were held in Science Hall, 141 8th Street, near Broadway –– the same address as The Truth Seeker.

A week after the NDA was organized, an article appeared in The Truth Seeker entitled: “The National Defense Association –– a Society for the Promotion of Virtue,” readers learned of the new organization’s members and its mission.

The piece listed the nine officers of the society which included several of D.M. Bennett’s closest friends. President Albert L. Rawson was a renowned artist, biblical scholar, pioneer Theosophist, leading Liberal, and D.M. Bennett’s travel partner during his first trip abroad. The editor had been friends with Dr. Charles Winterburn since the 1860s when they both lived in Cincinnati and attended the Thomas Paine lectures by abolitionist Moncure Conway. Pioneer phonographic reporter Theron C. Leland was part of The Truth Seeker family and third editor George E. Macdonald’s father in law. Wilson MacDonald’s art was installed in Central Park and the sculptor would go on to create the bronze medallion on the D.M. Bennett monument in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery and the Thomas Paine bust in New Rochelle. Dr. E.B. Foote Junior served as secretary and John P. Jewett, vice president.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty. Who would be free themselves must strike the blow,” was the NDA’s motto. The NDA elaborated on their goal and clearly identified the enemy. “Our Christian opponents have their ‘Society for the Suppression of Vice,’ but it has proved itself to be a suppressor of innocence and good intentions, and it has become an engine for persecution and tyranny. We mean that our society shall be emphatically for the promotion of virtue, and that it shall be the antagonist of the first-named society

so long as the same remains in the interest of sectarianism, bigotry, superstition, and intolerance. So long as we know we have a deadly enemy, our only prudent course is to have our weapons burnished and in readiness.” The association’s task was to investigate questionable obscenity cases, sympathize with the unjustly prosecuted, provide legal aid, and “to employ all peaceful and honorable means to roll back the wave of intolerance, bigotry, and ignorance which threatens to submerge our cherished liberties.”

In their Health Monthly, the Footes routinely expressed their dismay with Christian moralists able to control through laws the dissemination of information about the human body and reproduction. “This attempt to establish an [unenlightened] morality and by U.S. postal laws to enforce it on everyone else is what we call Comstockism, and we never tire of protesting, though we do tire of seeing how successfully it prevails under a mask of hypocrisy and superior values.”

D.M. Bennett advertised the Health Monthly in The Truth Seeker and echoed Dr. Foote’s sentiments with his own cogent quote: “Worse than all other mean acts are those performed by hypocrites under the cloak of purity and virtue.”

Dr. Foote’s Health Monthly was popular with a respectable 5,000 subscribers and the 16-page periodical remained in publication until 1896.

Dr. Ned Foote was actively involved in radical causes considerably more than his father. He was a public speaker before graduating from medical college and an ardent Malthusian. Dr. Ned believed in the doctrine that population increases more than the means of increasing the food supply which unless controlled would cause mass starvation.

Dr. Ned was active in all of the Liberal societies in New York. He was a founding member –– and served as president –– of the Manhattan Liberal Club which was home for New York’s most radical thinkers. (Horace Greeley, the New York Tribune editor and politician was second president when it was organized three decades earlier.) Both doctors Foote –– and Truth Seeker editor Eugene M. Macdonald –– were among the sixteen freethinkers appointed to organize the Thomas Paine National Historical Association founded two years after D.M. Bennett’s death on Paine’s birthday, January 29, 1884. All of the founding members of the TPNHA had close ties to the late editor. Subsequently, since The Truth Seeker was founded a century and a half ago in 1873, all six of D.M. Bennett’s successors –– up until today –– have promoted the TPNHA.

In 1902, the National Defense Association (funded by Dr. Ned) evolved (at least in spirit) into the Free Speech League and remained active until 1919. The Free Speech League was primarily concerned with defending free-speech advocates, sexual reformers, and anarchists. The NDA was a forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Dr. Ned also took a leadership role in many organizations promoting women’s rights to contraception. Dr. Ned was the first treasurer of the Francisco Ferrer Association. At time of death, he was treasurer of the American Secular Union, the Free Speech League, and the Thomas Paine National Historical Association. He contributed generously in both time and money to the TPNHA and was responsible for converting Thomas Paine’s New Rochelle, New York cottage into a Paine museum.

NATIONAL DEFENSE ASSOCIATION STATIONERY LISTING NINE FOUNDING MEMBERS AND FRIENDS OF D.M. BENNETT INCLUDING SECRETARY DR. E.B. FOOTE JR. FOUNDED A YEAR EARLIER, THE NDA’S FIRST MEETINGS WERE HELD AT 141 8TH STREET –– THE SAME ADDRESS OF THE TRUTH SEEKER .

“ST. ANTHONY COMSTOCK, THE VILLAGE NUISANCE” EXTRACTED DRAWING FROM PUCK MAGAZINE CENTERFOLD PUBLISHED AUGUST 22, 1906. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

DR. EDWARD BLISS FOOTE SR. (1829-1906). DR. FOOTE WAS AT D.M. BENNETT’S BEDSIDE WHEN THE TRUTH SEEKE R EDITOR PASSED AWAY ON DECEMBER 6, 1882.

D.M. BENNETT PHOTOGRAPHED WEARING HIS PRISON GARB WHILE SERVING HIS 13-MONTH HARD LABOR PRISON SENTENCE IN THE ALBANY PENITENTIARY, NEW YORK, 1879-80.

Dr. Foote Senior retired from his medical practice in the late 1890s but continued writing. Published in 1901, his Home Encyclopedia of Social and Sexual Science was his last book. On October 5, 1906, at the age of 77, Dr. Edward Bliss Foote died two miles north of the Paine monument at his summer home in Larchmont. Dr. Foote left his medical practice and a sizable endowment to his sons Dr. Ned and his younger lesser-known brother Dr. Hubert Townsend Foote. Dr. Ned continued

his father’s support of women’s rights organizations and funded the defense of another birth-control pioneer charged with violating the Comstock obscenity laws ––Margaret Sanger. He also provided financial support to Emma Goldman and her publication Mother Earth

In his early thirties, Dr. Ned predicted that he only had a few months to live due to his poor health. And staying true to his belief in the Malthusian population theory and eugenics, he married late and never had children. In the last years of his life, his mind remained sharp, but he suffered from a progressively debilitating paralysis and was physically helpless. Dr. Ned (who survived his younger brother who died six months earlier) died at the age of 57 on October 12, 1912. The three doctors Foote died within only six years of each other.

After his death, Emma Goldman praised Dr. Ned in Mother Earth: “He differed from the average liberal in that he was a firm and active believer in Free Speech even for those with whom he did not agree.” Dr. Ned defined himself as an agnostic. He was, however, according to attorney and free-speech advocate Theodore Schroeder: “preeminently a humanitarian in the very best and broadest sense.”

Dr. Edward Bliss Foote and his son Dr. Edward Bond “Ned” Foote, were in the vanguard of advocating for birth control and promoting freethought from the dawn of the Gilded Age into the Progressive era. The doctors Foote were largely responsible for laying the foundation for the birth control movement which subsequently organized in 1921

Bennett advertised the Health Monthly in The Truth Seeker and echoed Dr. Foote’s sentiments with his own cogent quote: “Worse than all other mean acts are those performed by hypocrites under the cloak of purity and virtue.”

HOME ENCYCLOPEDIA, POPULAR MEDICAL SOCIAL & SEXUAL SCIENCE BY E.B. FOOTE, MD. MURRAY HILL PUBLISHING CO., 1901.

as the American Birth Control League and renamed Planned Parenthood in 1942. In their open-minded educational approach toward medicine, sexuality, and birth control, the doctors Foote were a century ahead of their time.

Furthermore, their courageous fight for free speech formulated in the National Defense Association and the Free Speech League paved the way for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). And their deep appreciation for Thomas Paine’s legacy –– and the TPNHA which they helped found in 1884 –– still thrives today as the oldest historical association devoted to a Founding Father in the United States.

Above DR EDWARD BOND “NED” FOOTE JR. (1854-1912).

Right DR. EDWARD BOND “NED” FOOTE JR. AND DR. EDWARD BLISS FOOTE SR. AT THE THOMAS PAINE STATUE IN NEW ROCHELLE, NEW YORK, 1894.

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“Where knowledge is a duty, ignorance is a crime.”

–Thomas Paine

The charge is ostensibly ‘obscenity’ but the real offense is that I presume to utter sentiments in opposition to the views entertained by the Christian Church.

D.M. BENNETT

1818-1882

“The Eternal Yea to Life”: The Radical Humanism of Emma Goldman

By Justin Clark

American humanism has always benefited from its trailblazers, the radicals whose revolutionary ideas moved the progress of freedom, equality, and justice forward. One almost without peer was Emma Goldman, the anarchist philosopher and public intellectual; her unique perspective on atheism constantly challenged the status World War I, the government convicted her of violating the Alien and Sedition Acts and deported her from the United States. She lived in multiple countries during her exile before her death in 1940.

quo. Goldman, a Lithuanian immigrant to the United States, toiled in the sweatshops of upstate New York before coming to political consciousness after the Haymarket Riot, a massacre that left countless dead and implicated labor activists as scapegoats for the violence. This event pushed her out of her first marriage and into New York City, where she met fellow-anarchist Alexander Berkman and fell in love. She used her new-found freedom to study the ideas of anarchism, socialism, and atheism, which influenced all of her later activism and writing.

Authorities followed Goldman her entire life. They attempted to charge her with involvement in the near-murder of Carnegie Steel manager Henry Frick, which had been carried out by Berkman as a response to the bloodshed at Homestead. While she was involved in the plot, she was never charged due to lack of evidence. In 1901, she was wrongly arrested for alleged involvement in the assassination of President William McKinley; but, like the case involving Frick, she was later released. In 1919, after speaking out against

During her many years of activism, Goldman wrote for a variety of publications, including Mother Earth, a magazine she founded in 1906. Her writing championed free speech and expression, free love and open relationships, anarchism, the rights of labor, education, birth control, and criticisms of religion. This essay will explore Goldman’s ideas about atheism and how they fit into her larger ideological framework. As her writings will show, three core themes permeate Goldman’s work: strong advocacy for individual freedom, rejection of Christianity, and the defense of atheism. In all, Emma Goldman’s radical atheism was rooted in her love of humanity, and while the term didn’t exist then, that made her a deeply committed humanist.

WOMEN AS “VICTIMS OF MORALITY”

In 1913, Goldman published a lecture entitled, “Victims of Morality,” where she argued that religious puritanism had, like a disease, infected the moral compass of

Above EMMA GOLDMAN, 1906

America, with significant consequences for the lives of women. “Through the medium of religion they have paralyzed the mind of the people, just as morality has enslaved the spirit. In other words, religion and morality are a much better whip to keep people in submission than even the club and the gun,” Goldman wrote. She was speaking in reference to Anthony Comstock, the overzealous social reformer who used his position as a special agent of the U.S. Post Office Department to enforce strict laws against the purported transfer of “obscene” literature via the mail. In fact, the “Comstock Act,” which prohibited the passage of obscene literature in the mail, is named after him.

Goldman believed that Comstock’s style of Victorian puritanism violated the rights of women. “It is Morality,” said Goldman, “which condemns woman to the position of a celibate, a prostitute, or a reckless, incessant breeder of hapless children.” Now, why would she capitalize “morality?” Was she speaking in reference to a specific kind of morality? In the context of this article, her capital-M morality referred to “Property Morality,” her view that the capitalistic United States was beholden to property. “Woe to anyone that dares to question the sanctity of property, or sins against it,” she declared. In this passage, we see Goldman’s critique of morality as part of a greater critique of capitalism itself. To her, capitalism and its slavish devotion to property created the conditions under which those who were oppressed by its machinations barely understood their own servitude. In this milieu, religion (specifically Christianity) and Victorian moralism served as a major contributor to false consciousness. In turn, Goldman estimated that “until the workers lose respect for the instrument of their material enslavement, they need hope for no relief.”

As indicated above, this condition wreaked havoc on the rights of women. For Goldman, the celibate was created by the morality of marriage, the prostitute was created by the morality of property and money, and the mother was created by the morality of socially-sanctioned reproduction. All these moralities amounted to the same consequence: the lives of women were pre-

ordained by social roles, at the expense of their liberty and freedom. Goldman’s solution to this problem was for women to throw off the social bonds of “Morality” and embrace a moral individualism that is consummate with a person’s own desires and needs. “Woman is awakening, she is throwing off the nightmare of Morality; she will no longer be bound,” Goldman wrote, “Her love is sanction enough for her.” She believed if people lived their lives without any regard for gratifying oppressive structures of the church, the state, and the market, they would live full lives of meaning and purpose.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE DENIAL OF LIFE

To further her critique of society’s “Morality,” she produced another pamphlet lambasting its fundamental support structure: Christianity. In “The Failure of Christianity,” also published in 1913, Goldman saw herself as the rightful heir of such notable German iconoclasts as Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner. Goldman declared that they “hurled blow upon blow against the portals of Christianity, because they saw in it a pernicious slave morality, the denial of life, and the destroyer of all the elements that make for strength and character.” The concept of “slave morality,” as articulated by Nietzsche, understood Christianity as an oppressive system buttressed by the values of humility, obedience, and deference; by contrast, the concept of “master morality” prized power, confidence, and self-expression. Goldman agreed with Nietzsche’s framing in this pamphlet, writing, “I believe, with them, that Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us today.” Christianity, in Goldman’s eyes, ripped away our human potential by stripping us of our strength, courage, and agency.

She’s also not forgiving to Christ as a teacher; she saw his religion as “the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name.” Now, she differentiated the concept of “Jesus Christ” into three distinct categories:

IT IS MORALITY,” SAID GOLDMAN, “WHICH CONDEMNS WOMAN TO THE POSITION OF A CELIBATE, A PROSTITUTE, OR A RECKLESS, INCESSANT BREEDER OF HAPLESS CHILDREN.”

the theological, the ethical, and the poetic. The theological Christ is the one presented by the Bible, a divine-human figure, with all the miracles and supernaturalism. The ethical Christ, like the one depicted in the Jefferson Bible, is stripped of supernaturalism and miracles to focus on his ethical teachings. Finally, the poetical Christ focuses on the story of Christ as a metaphor for life, a story that helps a person understand their place in the world. In her view, the theological Christ was refuted long ago, by such luminaries as Thomas Paine, Ernest Renan, Richard Strauss, and Ferdinand Christian Baur (she spells as Bauer). Her main contention, which she saw as more important to the culture of her time, was the influence of the ethical and poetic Christs: “the ethical and poetic Christ-myth” Goldman argued, “has so thoroughly saturated our lives, that even some of the most advanced minds make it difficult to emancipate themselves from its yoke.”

Goldman’s frustration was less with the fundamentalists of Christianity (who would be refuted over time by scientific and theological inquiry) and more with the liberals, whose dedication to the myth led to widespread ethical contradictions. They couldn’t see how the metaphor of life represented by the poetical Christ turned them into slaves for social and political ideologies requiring subservience and intellectual sacrifice. For instance, Christians who decried slavery lacked self-awareness of their own religion, for while it taught them ethical responsibility, it also taught them “slavish acquiescence in the will of others” and encouraged “the complete disregard of character and self-reliance, and [was] therefore destructive of liberty and well-being.” Thus, well-meaning Christians actually propelled and sustained the slave trade for centuries, despite the ethical call to “love thy neighbor.” In order for a society to truly achieve progress, it must reject Christianity, in any form. It is a religion which prizes the allure of heaven over the concerns of the here and now. It teaches that to be “poor in spirit” is to be virtuous, that those who toil on this earth need not bother with their cur -

rent status or the political state of the world in which they find themselves. The rich will suffer in hell while the poor live in heaven. And most of all, it reinforces subjugation as a virtue.

This is Goldman’s central problem with Christianity; like “Morality’s” assault on women’s rights, Christianity’s insistence on meekness becomes “the whip, which capitalism and governments have used to force man into dependency, into his slave position.” Furthermore, Goldman observed, “Righteousness grows out of liberty, of social and economic opportunity, and equality. But how can the meek, the poor in spirit, ever establish such a state of affairs?” In order for society to truly promote and preserve individual rights, freedom, and equality, the institutions of social cohesion (the state, market capitalism, organized Christianity) must crumble before the working classes.

GOLDMAN’S AUDACIOUS ATHEISM

Alongside her critiques of religion, Emma Goldman articulated her alternative worldview in the February, 1916, issue of her magazine, Mother Earth. Called “The Philosophy of Atheism,” this short essay has become her best-known writing on the subject (and included in Christopher Hitchens’s edited omnibus, The Portable Atheist). It’s fairly surprising how prescient she was in this essay, laying out ideas that have become common themes in our modern discourse on atheism. For example, she writes early in the piece that “the God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.” Decades later, the physicist Richard Feynman laid out this problem in ways that echoed Goldman’s view:

God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore.

SHE BELIEVED IF PEOPLE LIVED THEIR LIVES WITHOUT ANY REGARD FOR GRATIFYING OPPRESSIVE STRUCTURES OF THE CHURCH, THE STATE, AND THE MARKET, THEY WOULD LIVE FULL LIVES OF MEANING AND PURPOSE.

Like Goldman, Feynman understood that the advancements of science limited religion’s attempts to explain the natural world and our place in it. This critique is still used today to refute “God of the Gaps” arguments for theism, which posits that current gaps in knowledge shows support for the existence of God.

Another clear influence on her own atheism was the anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin, whose own work God and the State she quotes at length in “The Philosophy of Atheism.” Bakunin argued that gods were the product of “the prejudiced fancy of men who had not attained the full development and full possession of their faculties,” which led to the “abdication of human reason and justice” and “necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and in practice.” If this sounds familiar to you, it should, because Goldman also viewed religion as slavery and wrote about it at length in the aforementioned “Failure of Christianity.” In accepting Bakunin’s thesis, Goldman declared that “In proportion as man learns to realize himself and mold his own destiny theism becomes superfluous. How far man will be able to find his relation to his fellows will depend entirely upon how much he can outgrow his dependence upon God.”

One instance in which she presaged a modern intellectual was with her critique of what she called “theistic tolerance.” Goldman noted that as religious belief wanes in the public square, denominations of all stripes will

“combine variegated religious philosophies and conflicting theistic theories into one denominational trust” in a “frantic effort to establish a common ground to rescue the modern mass from the ‘pernicious’ influence of atheistic ideas.” Therefore, “It is characteristic of theistic ‘tolerance’ that no one really cares what the people believe in, just so they believe or pretend to believe.” With this analysis, she anticipated the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s concept of “Belief in Belief,” from his 2006 work, Breaking the Spell. In the chapter of the same name, Dennett argues that many view the belief in a god or gods as essentially valuable to society, regardless of whether or not the god(s) exist or religious doctrines are empirically true. Like Goldman, Dennett is firmly convinced that as societies forge evermore robust secular systems of justice and social harmony there will no longer be any need for this “belief in belief.” Now, Dennett wouldn’t go along with Goldman’s anarchism, but would definitely sign on to her diagnosis. This makes her a pretty prescient prognosticator of some of mainstream atheism’s most prevalent ideas.

After clearing away religions under the lash of her pen, Goldman spends the rest of this essay articulating her view of atheism. She begins with an excellent definition:

The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possi-

EMMA GOLDMAN’S AMERICAN ANARCHIST MOTHER EARTH JOURNAL PUBLISHED FROM 1906 UNTIL 1917 AND DESCRIBED AS “A MAGAZINE DEVOTED TO SOCIAL SCIENCE AND LITERATURE.”

bilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.

Her definition reaffirms her commitment to the real world, not the promise of heaven or the fear of hell. In fact, she even says as much in a further passage:

The philosophy of Atheism has its roots in the earth in this life . . . . Man must break his fetters which have chained him to the gates of heaven and hell, so that he can begin to fashion out of his reawakened and illumined consciousness a new world upon earth.

Atheism allows a person to fully embrace their humanity for the betterment of themselves, others, and the world they live in. When one is dedicated to self actualization, social betterment, and scientific discovery, religious notions are easily pushed aside.

ATHEISM AND THE AFFIRMATION OF HUMANITY

Finally, Goldman turns to moral questions. One of the oldest and most-common questions unbelievers get is, “How can you be good without God?” First, she dismisses the idea of Christian morality outright, as it “has always been a vile product, imbued partly with self righteousness, partly with hypocrisy.” Goldman never thought much of the traditionally Christian notions of fixed moral states set by a god; they don’t reflect what morality is really all about, which is creating a framework of human interaction based on social norms of freedom, solidarity, and discerning a shared reality. In all times, she declared, the freethinkers were the ones who fought for these principles:

They knew that justice, truth, and fidelity are not conditioned in heaven, but that they are related to and interwoven with the tremendous changes going on in the social and material life of the human race; not fixed and eternal, but fluctuating, even as life itself.

This could be interpreted as moral relativism, but that wasn’t Goldman’s intent. She actually believed in

some moral universals such as freedom, choice, and empathy. She just couldn’t stomach a morality disconnected from real-world human needs that predicated its universals on unknowable gods and their indecipherable whims.

For Goldman, Atheism gives humanity agency in a way that theism doesn’t; it compels us to show up for the tasks of life, to make the hard choices, to benefit from our successes, and to learn from our failures. In a sense, it allows us to be fully human. As she writes at the end of her essay, “Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.”

In our own time, atheism is still a radical position, despite being an eternal “Yes” to humankind. Paradoxically, we try to make our view more palatable by obscuring it, as when we tell an acquaintance that we’re “not religious” instead of explicitly atheist or humanist. While this position is rightly applied to those who don’t fully grasp our intentions, it is far better to foist our ideas in the public discourse in the hope that someone might agree with us. This is exactly what Emma Goldman did with her writings on atheism. Raw, rancorous, and always controversial, Goldman’s iconoclasm reads nearly as modern as anything from someone like the late journalist Christopher Hitchens or author Michael Parenti. It’s this boldness — a desire to own one’s radicalism — that electrifies her writing. This disregard for pleasant spectacle in the service of radical truth reaffirms Goldman’s rightful place in the pantheon of American humanism.

JUSTIN CLARK is a public historian and serves as the Digital Initiatives Director at IHB, a division of the Indiana State Library. He holds a B.S. in History/Political Science from Indiana University Kokomo and an M.A. in Public History from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. His graduate research focused on orator Robert Ingersoll and his contributions to Midwestern freethought.

GOLDMAN’S FRUSTRATION WAS LESS WITH THE FUNDAMENTALISTS OF CHRISTIANITY. . . AND MORE WITH THE LIBERALS, WHOSE DEDICATION TO THE MYTH LED TO WIDESPREAD ETHICAL CONTRADICTIONS.

ferson was Minister to France during the drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, such that his input was minimal); and that the majority of people during the founding period never expressed fealty to separationism but articulated alternative ideas about church-state ordering. As Philip Hamburger writes, contemporaries “adopted many different conceptions of the relationship between church and state, but they did not ordinarily, if ever, propose a separation, let alone a wall of separation.” Accordingly, “the constitutional authority for separation is without historical foundation.” While agreeing with Hamburger’s critique, Daniel Dreisbach has argued that even Jefferson did not believe in the phrase he helped coin, that his statement was motivated out of political considerations rather than sincere conviction, and that Jefferson’s record as Virginia governor and President does not demonstrate a commitment to church-state separation. Robert Cord also highlighted several inconsistencies between the writings of Jefferson and Madison and their public actions which were more accommodating of church-state intermixing.

The second complaint about separationism is that it conflicts with the nation’s religious traditions and the beliefs of its people and, when applied with any rigor, is hostile to religion. This critique relies on a similar analysis about the historical record, one that emphasizes the ubiquity of religious discourse during the founding period, including official acknowledgements of religion, such as Thanksgiving proclamations and the appointment of chaplains in Congress and the military. It maintains that the Founding lacked a strain of anticlericalism, absent the inclinations of figures like Jefferson and Tom Paine, and that most people considered religion essential for fostering public virtue. It then argues that the Court’s pronouncement of separationism has led to a “brooding secularism” that hamstrings religious practice and expression today. As one critic charged following the McCollum decision, the Court had “taken sides with the secularists in their campaign to drive religion out of public life under the specious pretext of separation of church and state.” Philip Hamburger concurs that the phrase “penalizes religion and discriminates against religious groups,” thus “undermining the Constitution’s religious liberty.” As discussed, religious conservatives have embraced this argument.

A third criticism of separationism, popularized by Hamburger and Thomas Berg, is an extension of the first two critiques. It asks, how did church-state separation become an established constitutional principle if it was generally alien to members of the founding generation? The answer, according to Hamburger and Berg,

is that it arose in the mid-nineteenth century as a Protestant response to Catholic immigration and was used to impose a Protestant cultural hegemony on Catholics. “[Separation became a popular vision of religious liberty in response to deeply felt fears of ecclesiastical and especially Catholic authority,” Hamburger maintains. Nativists “popularized separation in America in the nineteenth century, and, during the first half of the twentieth, they continued to distinguish themselves as the leading proponents of this ideal.” Then, as Berg continues, “the late 1940s and the early 1950s saw a resurgence in fear and distrust of Catholicism, and these contributed to the rise of church-state separationism in constitutional decisions, especially in decisions limiting aid to religious, overwhelmingly Catholic, schools.” Agreeing with this critique, Stephen Carter asserts that “nobody seriously argued that aid to religious schools was unconstitutional until the argument became a useful tool in the nativist campaign against Catholicism.”

According to this third critique, church-state separation is not only ahistorical, it is a perverse and illiberal concept that should be rejected as a constitutional standard. In the words of Justice Thomas, it is a principle “born in bigotry [that] should be buried now.”

One can acknowledge that church-state separation developed in the United States chiefly as a Protestant concept without necessarily considering it to be anti-Catholic. While today church-state separation has a secular orientation — meaning that government policies and programs must have secular purposes and effects beyond being merely neutral among religions — it is clear that the early idea of separationism reflected

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

PHILIP HAMBURGER SPEAKING IN TEMPE, ARIZONA ON FEBRUARY 19, 2016. PHOTO BY GAGE SKIDMORE. WIKIMEDIA.

Protestant presuppositions. Church-state separation presumed and valued several distinctly Protestant values: freedom of religious conscience; voluntaryism or “soul liberty” on matters of faith; and a suspicion of clerical au thority and ecclesiastical power. As will be seen, these assump tions underlying church-state separation ensured that its early application would be consistent with Protestant world views and less assessable to Catholics who sensed, even absent Protestant-oriented practices such as Bible reading in the public schools, that church-state separation favored Protestant perspectives to the detriment of Catholic ones. This presumptive Protestant understanding of separationism continued into the mid-twentieth century, reflected in part on the creation of Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU) in 1947 to resist perceived Catholic incursions on church-state separation (POAU’s founders initially proposed naming the organization “Prot estants United for Separation of Church and State” but added “Other Americans” so as not to appear too sectarian). It is no coincidence that as church-state separation began to reinforce more secular-oriented values, matching a growing secularization of the overall culture, that support for church-state separation began to decline among religious conservatives. To an extent, the current controversy over whether separationism is the appropriate referent for adjudicating church-state controversies reflects a broader cultural division over the role of religion in American public life and whether government policies should promote a regime of secularism or reflect an ethic of Judeo-Christianity.

Although much of the debate over church-state sep-

aration has been ideologically driven, other criticism has centered on semantics. Because “separation of church and state” represents a legal principle, the question arises how closely the words, “separation,” “church,” and “state” should define the concept. Few commentators have interpreted the phrase literally but as interdicting various degrees of intermixing of religion and government authority. Few people argue that the word “church” should not include synagogues, temples, or mosques. But some have maintained that Thomas Jefferson, as the main promoter of the concept, was chiefly concerned about the tyranny of ecclesiastical institutions and of government control of the same — that he purposefully used the narrower word “church” rather than “religion” so as not to prevent the government from patronizing religion generally. Jefferson, according to Steven Smith, was addressing “the problem of the church.” If the principle of separation of church and state is chiefly to prevent government control of institutional religion and to guard against the latter’s incursions into democratic governance, then the words may make a difference. Justice Stanley Reed advocated this position early-on, writing in his McCollum dissent that the prohibitions on a religious establishment “may have been intended by Congress to be aimed only at a state church.” Under Reed’s view, church-state separation “do[es] not bar every friendly gesture between church and state.” That position did not persuade the other justices, however, with Justice Rutledge responding that “the object [of disestablishment] was broader than separating church and state in this narrow sense. It was to create a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority by comprehensively forbidding every form of public aid or support for religion.”

Relatedly, commentators have argued that separa-

Above THOMAS PAINE AND THOMAS JEFFERSON IN “SHEOL” ILLUSTRATION BY JOSEPH FERDINAND KEPPLER (1838-1894). PUBLISHED IN THE MAY 27, 1885 ISSUE OF PUCK MAGAZINE. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.

tion of church and state is a term of art that speaks of a relationship of separation of the two spheres, which is impossible in a religiously pluralistic culture. Several decades ago, religious historian Sidney Mead wrote that if one considers “Jefferson’s concepts of ‘church,’ ‘state,’ and a ‘wall,’ the image that is conjured up is two distinct and settled institutions in the society once and for all times separated by a clearly defined and impregnable barrier which has solid foundations in the Constitution.” Mead asserted that the more apt metaphor was a “line,” a term used by James Madison, so as to indicate a boundary rather than a barrier. (In the same letter, however, Madison called for the “entire abstinence” of interference of either entity with the other “in any way whatever.”) Relatedly, Philip Hamburger claims that while members of the founding generation spoke about preventing a “union” of church and state, few if any demanded “separation” between the two spheres. On that point, Hamburger is essentially correct; the historical record indicates that people more commonly wrote about preventing a “union of church and state” than ensuring a “separation” between the two entities. That phrasing should not be surprising considering that a “union” had existed under the established Church of England and the immediate concern was to prevent another such union. The strength of this argument also turns in no small degree on an assumption that contemporaries distinguished between the two phrases and purposefully used the word “union” to represent a more limited concept rather than the word “separation.” As will be seen, members of the founding generation used a variety of terms to describe the goals of disestablishment, and there is little to suggest they viewed the phrases “union” and “separation” as mutually exclusive terms of art.

tion of church and state is a term of art that speaks of a relationship of separation of the two spheres, which is impossible in a religiously pluralistic culture. Several decades ago, religious historian Sidney Mead wrote that if one considers “Jefferson’s concepts of ‘church,’ ‘state,’ and a ‘wall,’ the image that is conjured up is two distinct and settled institutions in the society once and for all times separated by a clearly defined and impregnable barrier which has solid foundations in the Constitution.” Mead asserted that the more apt metaphor was a “line,” a term used by James Madison, so as to indicate a boundary rather than a barrier. (In the same letter, however, Madison called for the “entire abstinence” of interference of either entity with the other “in any way whatever.”) Relatedly, Philip Hamburger claims that while members of the founding generation spoke about preventing a “union” of church and state, few if any demanded “separation” between the two spheres. On that point, Hamburger is essentially correct; the historical record indicates that people more commonly wrote about preventing a “union of church and state” than ensuring a “separation” between the two entities. That phrasing should not be surprising considering that a “union” had existed under the established Church of England and the immediate concern was to prevent another such union. The strength of this argument also turns in no small degree on an assumption that contemporaries distinguished between the two phrases and purposefully used the word “union” to represent a more limited concept rather than the word “separation.” As will be seen, members of the founding generation used a variety of terms to describe the goals of disestablishment, and there is little to suggest they viewed the phrases “union” and “separation” as mutually exclusive terms of art.

Semantics aside, separation of church and state — a principle that has long been a cornerstone of constitutional law and societal ordering — appears to be on the ropes. It is attacked from various sides, and a majority of Supreme Court justices seem ready to jettison it outright or at least ignore it into irrelevance or obscurity. Yet, separationism’s demise has been predicted before; only four years after McCollum, the justices retreated from that holding in Zorach v. Clauson by upholding released-time religious instruction, provided it occurred

Semantics aside, separation of church and state — a principle that has long been a cornerstone of constitutional law and societal ordering — appears to be on the ropes. It is attacked from various sides, and a majority of Supreme Court justices seem ready to jettison it outright or at least ignore it into irrelevance or obscurity. Yet, separationism’s demise has been predicted before; only four years after McCollum, the justices retreated from that holding in Zorach v. Clauson by upholding released-time religious instruction, provided it occurred

off-school premises. There, Justice William O. Douglas famously declared that “[w]e are a religious people whose institutions suppose a Supreme Being,” while he asserted that the government could accommodate the “spiritual needs” by “cooperat[ing] with religious authorities.” Pundits quickly announced the demise of separationism, and even Justice Robert Jackson wrote fellow Justice Felix Frankfurter that “[a]s a legal doctrine, separation is gone.” Then, a decade later, the Court reaffirmed separationism in the prayer and Bible reading decisions, with Justice Tom Clark repeating the earlier line that the Constitution required “a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority.”

off-school premises. There, Justice William O. Douglas famously declared that “[w]e are a religious people whose institutions suppose a Supreme Being,” while he asserted that the government could accommodate the “spiritual needs” by “cooperat[ing] with religious authorities.” Pundits quickly announced the demise of separationism, and even Justice Robert Jackson wrote fellow Justice Felix Frankfurter that “[a]s a legal doctrine, separation is gone.” Then, a decade later, the Court reaffirmed separationism in the prayer and Bible reading decisions, with Justice Tom Clark repeating the earlier line that the Constitution required “a complete and permanent separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority.”

Despite the repudiation of separation by members of the judiciary and academy, church-state separation remains popular in the cultural mainstream. A 2011 opinion survey indicated that sixty-seven percent of Americans either “strongly or mildly agree that the Constitution requires ‘a clear separation of church and state.’” Those figures far outstrip the percentage of Americans who are progressive Christians or Jews or self-identify as atheists or agnostics. Even some conservatives remain wedded to the concept, though they disagree with the way courts and public officials may have applied the principle. In a 2018 contribution to Time magazine, Republican Senator James Lankford and Rev. Russell Moore, president of the conservative Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote that “Separation of church and state is too important a concept to be misused.” The principle, they asserted, “ensures both that the government does not show preference to a certain religion and that the government does not take away an individual’s ability to exercise religion. In other words, the church should not rule over the state, and the state cannot rule over the church.” According to Lankford and Moore, “The concept of a ‘separation of church and state’ reinforces the legal right of a free people to freely live their faith, even in public, without fear of government coercion.”

Despite the repudiation of separation by members of the judiciary and academy, church-state separation remains popular in the cultural mainstream. A 2011 opinion survey indicated that sixty-seven percent of Americans either “strongly or mildly agree that the Constitution requires ‘a clear separation of church and state.’” Those figures far outstrip the percentage of Americans who are progressive Christians or Jews or self-identify as atheists or agnostics. Even some conservatives remain wedded to the concept, though they disagree with the way courts and public officials may have applied the principle. In a 2018 contribution to Time magazine, Republican Senator James Lankford and Rev. Russell Moore, president of the conservative Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, wrote that “Separation of church and state is too important a concept to be misused.” The principle, they asserted, “ensures both that the government does not show preference to a certain religion and that the government does not take away an individual’s ability to exercise religion. In other words, the church should not rule over the state, and the state cannot rule over the church.” According to Lankford and Moore, “The concept of a ‘separation of church and state’ reinforces the legal right of a free people to freely live their faith, even in public, without fear of government coercion.”

Popular support for the concept may say less about agreement with the Court’s pronouncements than about the public’s familiarity with the phrase and the protean quality of the concept that allows people to read various meanings into the idea. As Philip Hamburger has

Popular support for the concept may say less about agreement with the Court’s pronouncements than about the public’s familiarity with the phrase and the protean quality of the concept that allows people to read various meanings into the idea. As Philip Hamburger has

It maintains that the Founding lacked a strain of anticlericalism, absent the inclinations of figures like Jefferson and Tom Paine, and that most people considered religion essential for fostering public virtue.

It maintains that the Founding lacked a strain of anticlericalism, absent the inclinations of figures like Jefferson and Tom Paine, and that most people considered religion essential for fostering public virtue.

quipped, separation of church and state “is a pleasingly rotund phrase that seems innocuous to many Americans.” Researchers have documented a disjuncture between abstract views about church-state separation and its concrete applications. The 1988 Williamsburg Charter Survey found that the “American public is generally ambivalent about the relationship between church and state, tending to favor a strict separation in theory, while accepting a strong blending of the two in practice.” Another study concurred that there is “strong support for a high wall of separation between church and state, but the public is almost equally divided on whether government should help all religions equally or not help religion” at all. As that study concluded, “[i]t may be that much of the rhetoric of church-state separation is primarily symbolic.”

CONCLUSION

Despite its evolution and reported decline, the idea of separation of church and state retains a powerful resiliency. This is likely due to several factors. First, the phrase has long been associated with the Constitution and represents a particular cultural ordering that is quintessentially American. The public’s familiarity with the phrase may explain its longevity; as one commentator has observed: “[i]f a single metaphor dominates American thinking about church and state it is the metaphor of a wall of separation.” And as religious historian Edwin Gaustad once noted, Americans are more familiar with the phrase separation of church and state than with the constitutional language itself. Separation of church and state, it seems, is embedded into America’s cultural fabric.

A second factor that may explain the resiliency of separation of church and state is the inherent indeterminacy of the concept, if not of the very phrase itself. Does it mean simply a separation of the official functions of the state from an institutional church or does it imply a greater separation between religious forces and government policies? Does it mean a formal separation, where each entity operates in its own sphere of authority but allows relationships that do not implicate that institutional autonomy? Or does separationism require no interaction between the two spheres? Can the church and state work in tandem to accomplish the common good or must they relate as strangers? Does separationism require a secular state and public square, or does it allow for religious pluralism? Does separationism prohibit government from acknowledging religious habits and traditions by preventing its use of religion rhetoric and symbolism, or are such acknowledgments

not implicated by the concept? And is separationism a free-standing value or only relevant for how it promotes religious freedom writ-large? People can embrace any of these positions and still espouse fealty to church-state separation.

Despite its resiliency as an idea, however, churchstate separation has declined as a legal rule and cultural construct. As this book demonstrates, this is due to at least three factors. The first was the modern Court’s initial identification of separationism with secularism rather than as promoting religious pluralism. Despite the justices’ later efforts to backtrack on that perception, the association of separationism with secularism stuck, reinforced by controversial decisions such as the school prayer cases. Thus, a principle that had achieved a degree of consensus became a source of division. Separationism became an easy target for political and religious conservatives to demonstrate a hostility toward religion among those people with secularist leanings. The second factor is that a rigorous idea of separation failed to keep up with cultural developments that valued religious ecumenism and accepted expanding access to government benefits programs regardless of one’s religious identity. Accordingly, the Court’s gradual abandonment of separationism had less to do with the appointment of conservative justices after 1980 — although they certainly accelerated its decline — and more to do with the justices of the late 1960s and 1970s seeking to reconcile separationism with the times. And finally, the Supreme Court’s various — and some would say inconsistent — holdings in this area only invited criticism over the idea of church-state separation. The inability of the Court to decide on a definition of churchstate separation has also added to this sense of indeterminacy. In a sense, the indeterminacy of church-state separation has been both its strength — ensuring the longevity of the idea — and its weakness — by making it more of a rhetorical device rather than a discernable legal rule.

Reprinted with permission from Steven K. Green.

STEVEN K. GREEN is the Fred H. Paulus Professor of Law and Affiliated Professor of History and Religious Studies at Willamette University. He is the author of five books and more than forty scholarly articles on the intersection of history, law, and religion.

Separating Church and State: A History (Cornell University Press. ISBN13: 9781501762062. ISBN10: 1501762060. Published 03/15/2022. Pages: 246. Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 0. Hardcover $42.95.

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