This course examines American secularism, humanism, freethought, and atheism from the Enlightenment forward to the present. Topics to be explored include: the tensions between secular and Christian conceptions of the nation’s founding, blasphemy and irreligious cartoons, the civil liberties of atheists and nontheists, the battles over religion in the public schools, the Satanic Temple, secularism and gender politics, atheism and race, humanistic Judaism, and the contemporary growth of the religiously disaffiliated or “nones.” The course considers not only the intellectual dimensions of skeptical critiques of religion, but also the underlying politics of secularism (and anti-secularism) in a nation routinely imagined as “under God.”
Course history:
Fall 2017: taught by Prof. Leigh Schmidt
Share
really enjoyed learning about early American atheists, and how Enlightenment ideology influenced American thinkers.
— Fall 2017
Though the focus is on atheism, the course gives a sense of America's general religious history, as we learned about the many religious ideologies that atheists have had to combat throughout American history.
