This Earthly Frame

Download or read book This Earthly Frame written by David Sehat and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This Earthly Frame is a sweeping, path-breaking history of public secularism's rise and fall in the United States from Jefferson to Trump. Narrating the stories of a diverse cast of characters-from the founding fathers and Henry Ward Beecher to Fanny Wright, Robert Ingersoll, and Jehovah's Witnesses-David Sehat explores the tensions at the heart of American political and religious history. The U.S. has a national constitution that does not acknowledge God, but Christian ideas have still suffused American life, making the country one of the central sites in the wider disagreements about how religion and governance should be related. Sehat stresses that the story of American secularism is one of religious and non-religious alliance; religious advocacy was vital to secularism's success. Religious and non-religious Jews, liberal Protestants, apocalyptic sects like the Jehovah's Witness, and anti-religious activists-all used the courts and the constitutional language of the First Amendment to create the secular order. The religious and the non-religious alike supported secularism as a solution to social conflict. But in the last fifty years, many religious conservatives have turned against secularism and spoken instead of the importance of their religious freedom. Avoiding both polemic and lament, This Earthly Frame offers a powerful reinterpretation of American secularism and a clear framework for understanding the religiously infused conflict of the present"--