The twenties also marked the end of the freethought movement as a distinct intellectual force in American life….Freethought ideals did survive the di… - Susan Jacoby

The Constitution is a secularist document because of what it says and what it does not say. The first of the explicit secularist provisions is article 6, section 3, which states that federal elective and appointed officials “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” No religious test. This provision, much less familiar to the public today than the First Amendment, was especially meaningful and especially sweeping in view of the fact that the necessity of religious tests and religious oaths for officeholders had been taken for granted by nearly all the governments of the American states (not to mention those of the rest of the world) at the time the Constitution was written.

For the past four decades, the militant religious right has mounted a tireless assault on separation of church and state.

Political radicals regarded religion as merely one pillar of an unjust society, and they fully expected the pillar to collapse with the overturning of an economic order that favored the rich and oppressed the poor. Committed freethinkers, by contrast, regarded orthodox religion as the foundation of most other social evils. Because religion imprisoned the mind with visions of eternal rewards and punishments in the afterlife, it prevented men and women from devising rational solutions to finite earthly problems.