Smith, C., ed. 2003. The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
The contributors to this volume make the case that secularization is a political project, undertaken by secularizing “activists” who sought to enhance their own status and authority as cultural and knowledge producers by driving religion out of public life. According to Christian Smith in his preface to the volume, “the historical secularization of American public life was not a natural, inevitable, and abstract by-product of modernization; rather it was the outcome of a struggle between contending groups with conflicting interests seeking to control social knowledge and institutions.” In addition to a long theoretical introduction by Smith, the volume contains individual case studies regarding the secularization of higher education, public education, moral reform politics, psychology, law, journalism, science, and medicine.
