[2] Jacoby, who began her career as a reporter for The Washington Post, has been a contributor to a variety of national publications, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, The Nation, Glamour, and the AARP Bulletin and AARP Magazine.

In The Age of American Unreason (2008) Jacoby contends that the dumbing down of America, which she describes as "a virulent mixture of anti-rationalism and low expectations", is more a permanent state than a temporary one[7] whose basis is the top down influence of false populist politicians striving to be seen as approachable instead of intelligent.

[7] She writes that the increasing use of colloquial and casual language in official speech, such as referring to everyone as "folks", is "symptomatic of a debasement of public speech inseparable from a more general erosion of American cultural standards" and "conveys an implicit denial of the seriousness of whatever issue is being debated: talking about folks going off to war is the equivalent of describing rape victims as girls.

[9] One of the most important events in which Jacoby believes secularism played an enormous part was the writing of the United States Constitution.

She believes instead that they were strongly in favor of the separation of Church and State, and that they purposely omitted the word God from the Constitution, partly influenced by the horrors that occurred in places such as France under non-secular rule, as well as inspired by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment.

She has suggested that the religiosity of the American people, as well as the proliferation of different religious denominations in the United States, are examples of situations that have occurred precisely thanks to the existence of a secular system.

[9] According to Jacoby, secularism is also important in feminism because the latter implies dealing with "overturning ideas that very conservative religions, and many parts of the Bible, have proclaimed about women for thousands of years".

[9] Jacoby has argued that the idea of anti-Catholicism being "a significant force in American life today is a complete canard, perpetrated by theologically and politically right-wing Roman Catholics .