Overview

From colonial times into the twentieth century, our laws and court cases ignored atheism, assuming that all good Americans were religious. Americans came to associate atheism with radical social philosophies that advocated violence--especially anarchism and communism. Avowed nonbelievers were derided, even the famous patriot Thomas Paine. Only in the twentieth century, with the passage of laws allowing for conscientious objection to war, did nonbelief enter debates about religious liberty. Still, today every one of the fifty states has God written into its constitution, with eight requiring a belief in God for holding public office. God is everywhere in American public life: on our currency, in the Pledge of Allegiance, and in the national motto. R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick explore both God's omnipresence and the dramatic rise in nonbelievers that has led to an atheist awakening intent on holding the country to its secular principles.

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9781665135245

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Isaac Kramnick is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government at Cornell University. His many books include Bolingbroke and His Circle, The Rage of Edmund Burke, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left, and most recently, with R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State. R. Laurence Moore is currently the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is also the chair and director of undergraduate studies for the American Studies department. His areas of research are American intellectual, cultural, and religious history, and his recent publications include the books Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture and Touchdown Jesus: The Mixing of Sacred and Secular in American History. Matthew Boston is a New York-based actor with over thirty years of professional experience working in theater, film, television, and voice-over. He received his training from the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Shakespeare & Company, and the Lee Strasberg Institute.

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