> Unlike almost anywhere else in the world, religion in America has been
since
> our founding voluntary and informal.
I think this is American exceptionalism speaking - there was a great deal of freedom and informality in Europe since the Reformation - in fact, European sects were exported to America. There is a distinct trait of informal populist Catholicism as well, especially in Spain (and Spanish colonies), free church movement in the Scandinavian countries, Unitarians in Eastern Europe - the list is long.
You portrayal of the US as a one happy freedom loving family does not seem very convincing either. This country did not grew up from a bunch of Puritan happy campers who forged an new hitherto unknown form of religiosity in the this land of the free. It was populated by the waves of European immigration to this country throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Why would these immigrants want to accept the early colonists' attitude toward religion when they brought their own variety with them?
I think a more accurate explanation is that the conditions of life in the US made religion more needed for all (or at least most) social groups than the conditions of life in Europe. Those conditions are: - alienation and social compartmentalization - a bunch of diverse and often hostile to each other groups occupying the same space and struggling to preserve their cult7ral identity - religion was a key vehicle in that struggle; - weakening of social solidarity and absence of social safety nets in the times when Europe was implementing public welfare systems - the role of religion in the formation of American ideology - to provide a notion of unity for the "American people," however, because US was a nation of immigrants of differentn nationality, the concept of ethnic identity such as Aryan descent in Nazi Germany would not work for obvious reasons, however christianity was a more believable shared root of these diverse groups.
Stated differently, religion played the same role in the US state building as the notion of nationalism played in European state building (cf. placing the US version of the German Gott Mitt Uns slogan on the US currency during the Civil War). These paths diverged after the WW2. Europe for the most part abandoned nationalism as a result of the Nazi experience. The US embraced religion even more as an ideological weapon against "godless communism."
I think that these three elements: social alienation, weak social safety nets, and ideological use of religion by the US state to legitimate its imperial wars (e.g. the Civil War and the Cold War) - can provide an adequate explanation of the pervasiveness of perverted religiosity in this country. Wojtek