How to Be Secular
A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Why secularism isn't the same thing as atheism—and why it's crucial for preserving liberty and democracy for all Americans, regardless of their beliefs.
Founding father Thomas Jefferson believed that "religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God," but these days many people seem to have forgotten this ideal. Conservatives claim America is a "Christian nation" and urge that laws be structured around religious convictions. Hardcore atheists, meanwhile, seek to undermine and attack religion at all levels. Surely there must be a middle ground.
In How to Be Secular, Jacques Berlinerblau issues a call to the moderates—those who are tired of the belligerence on the fringes—that we return to America's long tradition of secularism, which seeks to protect both freedom from and for religion. He looks at the roots of secularism and examines how it should be bolstered and strengthened so that Americans of all stripes can live together peacefully.
"Jacques Berlinerblau mounts a careful, judicious, and compelling argument that America needs more secularists. . . . The author's argument merits a wide hearing and will change the way we think and talk about religious freedom." —Randall Balmer, author of Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts FaithandThreatens America
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Berlinerblau, director of Georgetown's Program for Jewish Civilization, comes avidly to the defense of secularism, which he defines as a philosophy that attempts to "balance the individual citizen's need for freedom of, or freedom from, religion" with "a state's need to maintain order." In his view, secularism, despite its status as a fundamental tenet of American thought, is losing in the current war of political ideas. At stake is not the need to keep government completely separate from religion, a goal Berlinerblau believes is unachievable, but rather the ability to reduce the influence religion (by which he means Christian revivalism) exerts on government policies. To achieve this goal in a landscape in which some politicians believe they are in office to serve Christ, not their constituents, Berlinerblau places his hopes on political coalitions among religious moderates and offers a 12-point plan, highlights including a campaign to clarify the goals of secularism, abandoning the insistence on radical separatism of church and state, and letting religious extremists hang themselves with their own radical petard. Berlinerblau succeeds in making concrete the current threats to secularism and offers a reasoned blueprint for an organized secular movement to regain its political power.
