ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores around a representative person such as Calhoun or Henry Ford. It discusses a uniquely American trait, value, or concept which, though often held unconsciously, shapes the way Americans see society, economy, government, and politics. The book considers Jonathan Edwards, the last of the great Puritan divines of Colonial America and America's greatest metaphysician, but also the father of the uniquely American concept of the relationship between State and Church. Whereas Edwards' contemporaries in eighteenth-century Enlightenment Europe worked to separate State and Church in order to protect the State from a power-hungry, bigoted Church, Edwards argued for a separation of the two in order to protect religion from government and politics. This explains why there has been no anticlericalism in America and why, alone among developed countries, America, the most laical of states is the most religious society.
