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

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

[[File:Herbert Spencer.jpg|thumbnail|right|200px|[[Herbert Spencer]] ]]

[[File:Herbert Spencer.jpg|thumbnail|right|200px|[[Herbert Spencer]] ]]

{{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.