A Review of David Sehat, This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism (Yale University Press, 2022)
America has, from the very beginning, been a contested project, rival visions over the very concept and purpose of the nation. One major division was whether America was a Christian or a Secular nation, with both deriving from the very origins of Independence. David Sehat, a legal historian, has documented these battles in a trilogy of works, the final being This Earthly Frame that documents the rise, displacement, success, triumph, and decline of Secularism in America. For Sehat, America’s secular tradition, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s enlightened Deism and the lack of reference to God in the Constitution, was primarily negative and derivative from liberalized forms of Christianity. Secularity did not mean, as it does in France, a removal of faith from public, but a principled plurality. Oftentimes, liberal or sectarian Christians found themselves fellow travelers with Free Thinkers, so-called, in pursuit of diminishing America’s public Christianity. But the final result, over the long course of history, has been both the defeat of both the national Evangelicalism that marked America into the twentieth century and the secular Liberalism that toppled it. This essay will review Sehat’s account and offer some reflections on a vision forward for Christians who do not believe faith should be kept in a closet.
Secularity began with the vagaries in the Constitution of 1787, one that had multiple conflicting interpretations. While some American patriots had embraced enlightened secularity, most importantly Jefferson and James Madison, many others were disturbed by the lack of theological language in the new constitution. Jefferson and Madison had successfully imposed a secular constitution on Virginia and others, particularly in New England, feared that this new federal government would embrace the secularity that would soon mark the forces of the Revolution in Europe. One Yankee critic, writing in the New York Daily Advertiser and recirculated throughout New England, lamented that a godless constitution would cause a host of problems:
1st. Quakers, who will make the blacks saucy, and at the same time deprive us of the means of defence—2ndly. Mahometans [Muslims], who ridicule the doctrine of the Trinity—3rdly. Deists, abominable wretches—4thly. Negroes, the seed of Cain—5thly. Beggars, who when set on horseback will ride to the devil—6thly. Jews etc. etc. (quoted on 22)
Despite this hostility, the states proceeded to ratify the Constitution, often with an expectation of limits on the federal government to influence each state’s religious politics, including (in some states) an established church. The First Amendment, which Madison intended as a guard for the individual conscience, was, however, a laconic ambiguity:
Take the first clause, the establishment clause. The committee used the gerundial construction “respecting an establishment of religion,” presumably to maintain parallelism with the second clause, “prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” The phrasing raised questions. How would Congress respect an establishment? Did it mean that Congress should make no law holding an establishment in esteem? Did it signify that Congress should not make a law touching upon any facet of an establishment (in the same way that we might use the phrase “in respect to”)? Did it primarily indicate that Congress should not interfere with state-level establishments that might exist then or in the future? It was unclear.
Or take the second clause, the free-exercise clause. Whose rights were being protected? Madison had wanted to protect the individual rights of conscience. Did this amendment protect individual rights? Or did it guard the right of religious groups, as the Senate seemed to desire? Or did it uphold the right of states? Again, it was unclear.
The amendment meant too much; it had a plenitude of meanings. The committee of people who designed it had wanted incompatible things. Madison’s original proposal was changed and reduced, but still they were unable to agree. So, the legislators resorted to what the historian Sidney Mead has described as the amendment’s “laconic brevity and consequent vagueness.” Far from solving the debate, the passage of the First Amendment revealed how little clarity had been achieved. (23)
In Sehat’s estimation, the Constitution may have smacked of an early godlessness, but it was not intrinsic to the text. The battle between Christian and Secular politics would spill into the nineteenth century, primarily in favor of the political Christians. The Second Great Awakening saw a boom of active Evangelicalism that marked the rise of political parties. The Third Great Awakening, occurring after the Civil War, would define both Democratic populism and the Republican Party’s Christian Lobby. Throughout the nineteenth century, American states had blasphemy laws, sabbath laws, and there was a general tendency to outlaw alcohol consumption, pornography, gambling, prostitution, and myriad other vices. America was also uniquely Evangelical, placing restrictions on Roman Catholicism and Mormonism, stripping the latter of its incorporated status as a church for its teaching on polygamy. This Evangelical Union, however, began to crack up over Higher Criticism and Darwinism, the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy that still echoes into today. Orthodox and liberal churchmen battled over the interpretation of the faith. It was into this breach that a new wave of Secularism poured, slowly changing the constitutional settlement towards principled plurality and the eventual creation of a Progressive-Liberal Establishment.
In Sehat’s retelling, the basis of this shift began in the odd friendship between Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis. The former a Boston Brahmin and the latter the son of Jewish immigrants fleeing the failure of the 1848 revolutions, both were committed to a pragmatic secular settlement against the wider Evangelical culture. Pragmatism became the unique American philosophy to confront the failure of confessional theology and idealist philosophy to discover the real. It did not matter if things seemed to work, and Christian bigotry that curtailed individual rights did not work. Holmes and Brandeis would eventually make their way to the Supreme Court, where they were often lone voices in defense of the individual conscience against Christian pressure. But they were joined by the growth of Progressive organizations to advance an attack on the majority in the defense of perceived freedom. Sehat noted that many of the original advocates for secularism were agnostic Jews, disconnected both from their home country and their own people, seeking a different means of assimilation. Other elites of the swirling class, later called White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, often embraced a secular politics in pursuit of a Progressive and Liberal America. Joined with them as well were some Progressive blacks, such as W.E.B. Dubois, who linked the continued racism of Jim Crow to the dominance of Evangelicalism in the South. The creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and later the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) would be created to defend the rights of minorities, racial and religious, before the Supreme Court that would, eventually, come to legislate from the bench in favor of principled pluralism.
Both Holmes and Brandeis, and later other Progressive-Liberal justices like Felix Frankfurter, would struggle over the dimensions of their pursuit of Secularity. Freedom of the individual conscience was the major point, but how could a sea of individuals consist as a nation? Holmes would write opinions to justify jailing subversive speech during World War I, while trying to preserve speech that was critical but not damaging. Brandeis would tilt between individual conscience and the needs of groups, especially as he became convinced of Zionism and the need for a Jewish homeland. This seesawing would become part of Secularism that would, through Gitlow v. New York (1925), allow the application of the First Amendment through the Fourteenth Amendment. Now it was possible for the Supreme Court to legislate Secularity against state law. This intention became explicit in a footnote from the opinion of Harlan Stone (a liberal Republican and Episcopalian) that, in the case of United States v. Carolene Products Co. (1938), conceded that the Court would cease blocking New Deal legislation on the economy, but would conduct a “more searching judicial inquiry” into laws that impacted minorities. Sehat notes this comment as a revolution in jurisprudence:
With this opinion the court entered fully into a new constitutional world. It broadcast a broad deference to the legislature in matters of political economy but a simultaneous commitment to minority rights that refused to defer to prevailing sentiment. The latter was an accession to civil liberties thinking that had been d veloped by the ACLU and other dissenters and that was articulated through Brandeis’s right to privacy thought and the free-speech cases of the 1920s and early 1930s. The court had embraced a new set of substantive ideals and liberal keywords—diversity, equality, rights—that would control its thinking in the coming years. Its public affirmation of new ideas invited people to use the court’s institutional power to achieve a renewed constitutional and political order. As a result, the court soon became the central venue for the elaboration of secularism in public life, more so than any other institution.
The Supreme Court was now committed to advancing a majority of minorities, especially in the realm of faith. This coalition included odd, seemingly hostile, sects that would tear down what remained of the watered-down Evangelical informal establishment. Jehovah’s Witnesses turned to the ACLU to protect their anti-social and abrasive efforts to evangelize. It did not matter that they expected an imminent end of the world, they would proudly proclaim that all churches and all Christian states belonged to Satan. The ACLU and the legal activism of Secular Liberals, such as Leo Pfeffer, would break down all religious instruction in public schools as well as school prayer. When the latter was decreed unconstitutional in the Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), Pfeffer was ecstatic. Secularism was now the correct interpretation of the Constitution throughout America. But it was precisely at this moment of triumph that Secularism, along with Liberalism, began its rapid implosion as the postwar order began to collapse under its own contradictions and lack of purpose.
How was secularism even possible? Thomas Jefferson’s eccentricities depended on the broader religious culture of English Protestantism. But what about sects far outside the bounds of normative belief? Room could be made for Catholics and Jews, as well as Quakers and Unitarians. But what about apocalyptic sects like Jehovah’s Witnesses that were anarchist in their relationship to the United States? What about Black Muslims? Hindus and Buddhists? New Agers who consider psychotropic drugs as a religious experience? Could anything be “religion” if someone declared their conscience violated? President Eisenhower could openly speak about the need for faith in God, but it did not matter to him what that faith actually was. It seemed, to the embarrassment of many, that Secularity could only exist off the back of a liberalized Protestantism. But what was mere faith and faith? Nothing.
This crude nihilism and commercial materialism would come under siege from both the Right and the Left. The former attacked Liberals for being dupes of the godless Commies, the latter rejected the Liberal obsession with process and moderation as a deception to protect the Capitalist system. Even more, both rejected the drift towards Secularity as it had been previously understood. After the shock of Vatican II and continued liberalization of the Mainline churches, Evangelicals and traditional Catholics began to join forces against their freeze from mainstream politics, for the Left had begun to understand Secularity as part of a wider movement to rectify systemic oppression throughout American society. Roe v. Wade (1973) was a watershed for both partisans, with the Right galvanized to go on a counter-offensive while the Left saw great potential to advance the cause of individual liberty. The Left did not reject the Liberals’ concern for conscience, but this private domain of individual choice required recognition and protection of various identities. A woman’s right to choose required a more active government to prevent regression to patriarchal norms. The Right, however, had to defend not only the right of the unborn as an individual, but also the many private schools that had cropped up to escape Secularity (as well as the fallout from the Civil Rights movement). The bizarre occurred: the Left demanded greater interventions from the state to secure liberty while the Right appealed to individual conscience to defend Christians from the regulations of the state. In the flash of an eye, Jefferson and Madison were now heroes of the Right.
While the Reagan Revolution represented the success of an unambiguously rightwing president since, maybe, Herbert Hoover, many on the Right have been dissatisfied with the results. Similarly, many on the Left shake their heads at the compromises and “Liberalism” of their candidates. The clear explanation is that the center has mostly eroded, with the Democrats and Republicans increasingly representing the Left and Right, respectively, courting the unthinking undecided voters with short-term economic incentives and cultural releases. It is no longer clear what the norm is in American politics, as Liberal Secularity gutted Evangelical Christianity, so too has it imploded from its own technocratic vacuity.
What will the future look like for Secularists? The liberal Protestantism upon which Secularity depended has imploded, and there is no capacity to judge “religious freedom” from destructive anti-social behavior. For Sehat, there are two possible options: reduce the influence of identity politics or impose positive Secularity on the French model. In both of these, the goal is to recover a robust civic nationalism that finds unity in commitment to the idea of freedom and the intolerance of intolerance against that idea. If people do not voluntarily put aside the divisiveness of intersectionality, then stronger medicine may be needed to prevent something more radical from besieging his beloved godless republic. The wall of separation must be further fortified on different grounds than ecumenical Protestantism and its infidel dependents.
However, Sehat’s research is useful from the other side. As he concluded his own work: the purpose is “to take account of the political tradition, to learn its language and its uses, is a first step in trying to shape the tradition or in attempting to overcome it” (266). What would a step towards public Christianity look like in twenty-first-century America? It is true that, with the victory of the Trump administration, public Christianity seems to be on the rise. Administration figures, like Secretary of War Pet Hegseth, are open about their faith as the source of their politics. But how strong is this shift? It is important to recall that the RNC convention in 2024 not only dropped the total abortion ban from the party platform but permitted a Sikh woman to pray to her god. Unabashed Hindus have become solid Republicans, with one likely positioned to become the next governor of Ohio. Trump and his managers did not make these shifts arbitrarily or capriciously, but because there are millions of undecided moderates, the Joe Rogan Experience or FanDuel voters, who are always on the verge of being alienated by either the Right or the Left. These are people who make a moral equivalence between pronoun policing tranitors and church-ladies against pornography. I would argue, against some optimistic voices, that public Christianity is still on the rocks, a demographic minority (though sizable, vocal, and still politically engaged) that cannot expect to become the norm in any near future.
This fact, however, does not necessitate despair. For as much as some contemporary critics like to sandbag Reagan and the Moral Majority, they were sound in their strategic move. To make Christianity more public, it is still necessary to defend the individual right to private institutions, be they businesses or schools. Some Christian Nationalists, in a romp through the past, are too sanguine about taking what was and making it into what ought to be. The importance of the Trump years has been, to whatever limited degree, clearing out bureaucracies that are committed to aggressive positive Secularity, using the government to forcibly correct failures in diversity or equality. Tactical pluralism is, as many Leftists have rightly seen it, a means to further expansion. Being openly Christian in politics should not require compromise or retreat, even as it does not legally claim to be the only standard. Constantine began his public support for Christians as Augustus through blanket toleration. Christians became more and more important at his court subsequently. Plurality was never a means to an end. Nevertheless, within the continued existence of a constitutional federal democratic system, tactics remain paramount. Some have recently savaged the legacy of Abraham Kuyper, his supposed abandonment of a national settlement for free churches, but Kuyper, presciently, understood the crashing wave and rode it (achieving the office of Prime Minister with his Anti-Revolutionary Party). Kuyper understood that in an increasingly mass democratic polity, new tactics are necessary to win, whatever the merits or demerits of said mass democracy. Clinging onto a dead past, which includes America’s old establishments and informal Evangelical Union, will not carve a way into the future, and yet the horizon for a Christian nation remains the same. There is a bright future, God willing, to achieve the unachievable in spite of the numerous forces against.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
