Leigh Eric Schmidt, “Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made Their Way in A Godly Nation” (Princeton UP, 2016)

A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation’s moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a nation chosen by God. Yet, village atheists—as these godless freethinkers came to be known by the close of the nineteenth...