ABSTRACT
Denis Diderot, a prominent exponent of European secularism, expressed his conviction that “man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Among enlightened Europeans the incompatibility of liberty and religion had become an article of faith. With some surprise therefore the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1830 that in the USA religion and liberty were not in opposition (de Tocqueville 1945 [1835]: I, 310 ff.). Unlike in Europe there was a marked compatibility, if not symbiosis, between religious and democratic passions (I, 319). After all, had not the American clergy supported the revolutionary struggle of the republic, thus giving Protestantism a progressive political spin (I, 310–18)? James Bryce, British ambassador to the US from 1907 to 1913, commented that in America Christianity had entered the body politic and become the “common law of the United States” (Bryce 1888: 560–61). And the English novelist Gilbert Keith Chesterton concluded in 1920 that the US was “a nation with the soul of a church” (Mead 1967). Clearly, all three would have agreed that Denis Diderot was dead wrong as far as the US was concerned. Since the beginning of the American republic, religion and liberty have remained not only compatible but deeply dependent on each other to the point of fusion in an all-pervasive civil religion.
