Conceiving an American “Secularism”: A Contested Category and the Remaking of US Law, Religion, and Civic Life, 1851-1914

Abstract

This dissertation explores the contested meanings of “secularism” that developed after the term was first coined in 1851. With particular attention paid to first-order invocations of “secularism” during the so-called “Golden Age of American Freethought” (1876-1914), it examines the wide-ranging and sometimes competing conceptions of “secularism” that entered political, legal, and religious discourse, especially in the United States. In doing so, it surveys changing understandings of “secularism” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and scrutinizes what the patterned shifts surrounding the concept’s popular meaning might reveal about the ways different historical actors were interpreting and responding to deeper social transformations taking place during the American Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Throughout this study, I argue that “secularism” served as a key rhetorical battleground on which Americans and others living during a critical moment in the installation of classical modernity were able to articulate, challenge, and further refine what it meant to be modern. In their appeals to “secularism,” these actors sought to name and describe an interlocking network of epistemological impulses, social habits, and institutional structures expressly marked as “secular” that they believed, whether supportively or disapprovingly, were becoming characteristic features of Western life. Critically examining the debates and contestations that emerged over what “secularism” connoted during these decades thus offers important insights for the historiography of this period as well as the contemporary theoretical scholarship within which “secularism” operates as a second-order object of academic analysis.