ad room for more discussion of contemporary atheist leaders, I would certainly have mentioned, for example, Jamila Bay, an outspoken African-American atheist,” Stephens says.
Still, he is able to cull some of the best and most intelligent scholarship on nonbelief. For instance, here’s a portion of an 1861 speech given by Ernestine Rose, a rabbi’s daughter from Poland who became one of America’s leading atheists in the 19th century:
The Atheist says to the honest, conscientious believer: Though I cannot believe in your God whom you have failed to demonstrate, I believe in man; if I have no faith in your religion, I have faith, unbounded, unshaken faith in the principles of right, of justice and humanity. Whatever good you are willing to do for the sake of your God, I am full as willing to do for the sake of man.
One of the book’s many strengths is its explanation of secularism. That word has come to mean more than just a rejection of religion and the separation of religion from the institution of government. “Early on in my research I came upon the philosopher Charles Taylor’s notion of a third kind of secularism,” says Stephens. “He defines it as the very modern condition in which it is difficult to believe naïvely in anything. This third secularism really helped me understand a situation—our situation—where most people have not entirely surrendered their belief in God, but the strength, the explanatory power and the demands of that belief have weakened to the point where it would hardly be recognized as religion by many of our ancestors.”
As someone who was raised by parents who encouraged him to question everything, Stephens is the ideal person to write a book that tries to answer some of humanity’s most vexing questions: In a more secular time, what determines our ethical code? In America, why do we still require our political leaders to be demonstrative in their public religiosity? Will we ever shed our Puritanical past?
“I hope the book also questions some of the easier answers to the problem of how we live without God,” Stephens says.