An Economist special report this past week included a great discussion of religion and public life. One of the articles discussed why Americans, and people across the world, seem to be so darn religious these days. The answer? The invisible hand of market freedom, baby! In particular, the authors noted that the U.S. Constitution, by divorcing religion from state control or compulsion, enabled a great explosion of religious variety.
As a refuge for dissenters, America was always closer to [Adam] Smith’s vision, though it was not quite the religious city on a hill its boosters claim. The early Puritans were soon swamped by more venal colonists: in Salem, the zealous town in Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”, 83% of taxpayers in 1683 had no religious allegiance. Most of the Founding Fathers thought religion was useful in a squirearchial sort of way, but they were not particularly godly: George Washington never mentions Jesus Christ in his personal papers.
Thus, the First Amendment—“that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”—was a compromise between dissenters (who wanted to keep the state away from religion) and more anti-clerical sorts like Thomas Jefferson (who wanted the church out of politics). Yet it became the great engine of American religiosity, creating a new sort of country where membership of a church was a purely voluntary activity.
