Changes

== Susan Jacoby on the Golden Age of Freethought ==

== Susan Jacoby on the Golden Age of Freethought ==

 

Susan Jacoby wrote in her book ''Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism'' about the Golden Age of Freethought:

Susan Jacoby wrote in her book ''Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism'' about the Golden Age of Freethought:

{{Cquote|To describe the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries as a golden age of freethought is to suggest not that a majority of Americans were persuaded by rationalist or antireligious arguments but that those arguments reached a much broader public than they ever had in the past. Unlike eighteenth-century [[Deism|deists]], nearly all of whom identified with [[Thomas Jefferson|Jeffersonian]] [[democracy]], American freethinkers of the late nineteenth century were anything but unified in their political views, which ran the gamut from anarchism to [[Herbert Spencer|Spencerian]] [[conservatism]]. Freethinkers might be Democrats, rock-ribbed Republicans, or, on occasion, socialists with either a capital or a small s.

{{Cquote|To describe the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries as a golden age of freethought is to suggest not that a majority of Americans were persuaded by rationalist or antireligious arguments but that those arguments reached a much broader public than they ever had in the past. Unlike eighteenth-century [[Deism|deists]], nearly all of whom identified with [[Thomas Jefferson|Jeffersonian]] [[democracy]], American freethinkers of the late nineteenth century were anything but unified in their political views, which ran the gamut from anarchism to [[Herbert Spencer|Spencerian]] [[conservatism]]. Freethinkers might be Democrats, rock-ribbed Republicans, or, on occasion, socialists with either a capital or a small s.