>What makes America's religious experience distinctive,
>IMHO, is not the extent to which religion has opposed secularism, but the
>extent to which, instead of opposition, we've gotten mixture.
I don't disagree with you at all on the above. Religions in the USA exist in and through the free market.
>On Sun Feb 18, Yoshie Furuhashi said:
>
>> Criticism of Roger Finke and Rodney Stark has to be better than the
>> above, in that they are comparing the USA today not with early Puritan
>> settlements but with _Revolutionary_ America (their book's title is
>> _The Churching of America, 1776-1990_). In other words, we are talking
>> about Tom Paine's America (the late 18th century -- the period of
>> revolts and revolutions!), not William Bradford's America....
>
>Religion played a bigger role then too. The day after the House of
>Representatives passed the First Amendment, the one we now interpret as
>separating Church and State, it passed a resolution calling for a day of
>national prayer and thanksgiving, to thank god for letting us establish
>constitutional government. You don't see much of that nowadays. We've
>still got the holiday. But not the revolutionary religious meaning.
>
>The constitution, on the other hand, is still treated as if it were sacred
>-- but as much by secular thinkers as by religious ones, if not more so.
>And in this they may be said to be carrying on in the founding fathers'
>footsteps, but unconscious and implicit where the latter were conscious
>and explicit.
The anti-British elite ("founding fathers") perhaps thought it necessary to substitute a civic & national religion (e.g., the worship of the constitution) for sectarian religions -- as the French thought it a good idea to worship the goddess of Reason -- because the Revolution stirred up the masses more than the elite wanted, the masses fighting class struggles as well as struggles for independence. Neither the worship of the constitution nor that of Reason is the same as pre-revolutionary religious life, however. Nor are they the same as the flowering of sectarian religions in the USA today.
_Even_ in colonial America, churches & congregations were from the beginning having a hard time resisting the tendency toward dilution of religious control. Emigration to the New World, settlements in wilderness, centrifugal pressures of frontier life, etc. were brute shocks to the social cohesion of settled life -- including marriages & families, which was difficult to create & maintain since the earliest settlers were predominantly male -- that traditional religions required & reinforced. With the expansion of colonies & thus further development of classes in colonial societies, colonial clerical authorities experienced many difficulties attempting to exercise the controlling influence over the masses, especially the lower orders. By the time of the American Revolution, even the elite -- some of whom became revolutionary leaders -- were defecting from traditional religions.
Yoshie