This Earthly Frame

Insights that are both illuminating and alarming. . . . Sehat examines the Court's valorization of 'privacy' and offers a fresh analysis. -Linda Greenhouse, New York Review of Books An essential book for understanding today's culture wars. Sehat's clear-eyed and elegant narrative will change how you think about our supposedly secular age. -Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill In This Earthly Frame David Sehat provides a history-at once sweeping and subtle-of political secularism as a deeply disputed inheritance in American public life. With crystal-clear prose he brightly illuminates the constitutional stakes involved in the elaboration of secularist ideals. -Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis Neither born secular nor congenitally religious, the United States has been marked by an ongoing struggle over whether it rests on divine truths. In his splendid new book, David Sehat tracks the secularist idea across our history, culminating in our controversies around the importance and meaning of religious freedom. It is an invaluable guide for citizens and scholars alike. -Samuel Moyn, Yale University How was a secular America built? By congregations as well as courts, and through religious collaboration as well as conflict. In Sehat's invigorating history, we see modern secularism anew: as a fragile, shifting truce between personal beliefs and a pluralistic political order. -Sarah E. Igo, Vanderbilt University Sehat sweeps across the American experience, pulling a complicated and multifaceted story into a coherent whole. He deftly weaves together elements of cultural, intellectual, and institutional history into significant statements about the formative significance of ideas. This book is a joy to read. -Stephen Skowronek, Yale University