A History of American Atheism

Princeton University

The village atheist came to be seen as a necessary secularist critic of America’s dominant Protestant faith, a freethinking nonconformist in a country that demanded all too much public piety. The village atheist was scorned by many as a blaspheming subversive and admired by others as a courageous defender of intellectual independence and church-state separation.

I wanted to retell the history of secularism in the United States from the ground up with a focus squarely on the folks who proclaimed themselves atheists, infidels, unbelievers, and freethinkers. I wanted to reconsider these dissenters as an irreligious minority, not the bearers of a triumphant secularism that redefines the entire age, but a much tinier, more embattled group who had to fight long and hard for equal liberty and civic acceptance in American culture.

Leigh Eric Schmidt