American Unbelief From the Enlightenment to the Present

3 units

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 sacrilege, women's rights, the civil liberties of atheists and nontheists, the relationship between science and religion, the battles over religion in the public schools, nonreligious child-rearing, and the politics of unbelief on both the left and right.