Read e-book online Village Atheists: How America's Unbelievers Made Their Way PDF

A much-maligned minority all through American historical past, atheists were forged as a probability to the nation's ethical cloth, barred from protecting public workplace, and branded as irreligious misfits in a country selected by way of God. but, village atheists—as those godless freethinkers got here to be recognized by means of the shut of the 19th century—were additionally hailed for his or her gutsy dissent from stultifying pieties and for posing an important secularist problem to majoritarian entanglements of church and country. Village Atheists explores the complicated cultural terrain that unbelievers have lengthy needed to navigate of their struggle to safe equivalent rights and liberties in American public life.

Leigh Eric Schmidt rebuilds the heritage of yankee secularism from the floor up, giving flesh and blood to those outspoken infidels, together with itinerant lecturer Samuel Porter Putnam; rough-edged cartoonist Watson Heston; convicted blasphemer Charles B. Reynolds; and atheist intercourse reformer Elmina D. Slenker. He describes their daily confrontations with religious acquaintances and evangelical ministers, their strained efforts at civility along their urge to ridicule and offend their Christian compatriots. Schmidt examines the multilayered international of social exclusion, felony jeopardy, but additionally civic popularity within which American atheists and secularists lived. He indicates the way it was once merely within the heart many years of the 20th century that nonbelievers attained a degree of criminal vindication, but even then they typically stumbled on themselves marginalized at the edges of a God-trusting, Bible-believing nation.

Village Atheists finds how the secularist imaginative and prescient for the USA proved to be something yet positive and age-defining for a rustic the place religion and citizenship were—and nonetheless are—routinely interwoven.