This Earthly Frame

The Making of American Secularism

By: David Sehat

Narrated by: George Newbern

An award-winning scholar’s sweeping history of American secularism, from Jefferson to Trump.

In This Earthly Frame, David Sehat describes the making of American secularism through its most prominent proponents and most significant detractors. He shows how its foundations were laid in the US Constitution and how it fully emerged only in the 20th century. Religious and nonreligious Jews, liberal Protestants, apocalyptic sects like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and antireligious activists all used the courts and the constitutional language of the First Amendment to create the secular order. Then, over the past 50 years, many religious conservatives turned against that order, emphasizing their religious freedom.

Avoiding both polemic and lament, Sehat offers a powerful reinterpretation of American secularism and a clear framework for understanding the religiously infused conflict of the present.

©2022 David Sehat (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Even-handed, well-reasoned, accessible

Maybe few issues have been more divisive in American history than the nexus of religion and the state. This book does a good job telling the story of not only the legal decisions, but the societal, theological, and philosophical environment in which they were made. Despite the fact that a great deal of it has to do with the legal history, I found it accessible and that it moved at a reasonable pace.

The narrator is solid.