That so many manage to accommodate belief systems encompassing both the natural and the supernatural is a testament not to the compatibility of scien… - Susan Jacoby

The Christian right would like today’s public to forget exactly where religious conservatives stood on civil rights forty years ago. One of the more repellent ironies of modern religious correctness has been the attempt by fundamentalists to wrap themselves in the mantle of those men and women of faith who risked their lives to fight racism. In the sixties, right-wing fundamentalists were, almost without exception, hard-core segregationists. The attacked the twentieth-century civil rights movement as their spiritual and often physical ancestors had attacked the nineteenth-century abolitionist and feminist movements. What they saw was what their predecessors had seen—not a struggle for justice but a conspiracy of atheism, political radicalism, and sexual libertinism.

Although there were numerous attempts by state ratifying conventions to amend the Constitution, and subvert the intent of the preamble, by declaring that governmental power was derived from God or Jesus Christ, the proposed religious amendments were defeated. In the end, the economic necessity for a federal union trumped all other concerns.

Notions of the depravity of human reason, Allen argued, were cherished by priests because, if ordinary human beings were assumed to be perfectly capable of reasoning for themselves, the clergy would be out of work.