The reason for the unparalleled strength of religion in America is the separation of church and state

Christian Stoics and Skeptical Christians Michael Novak - April 10th, 2007 Again, to be “Stoic” and “Christian” are not opposites. A great many heroes of our civilization have been both at once. During many centuries before the secular Renaissance, many Christians loved their Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and other Greek and Roman heroes.

There remain two deeper points to make. As the German philosopher (and atheist) Jurgen Habermas has recently had the honesty to emphasize, many of the deepest ideals of the Enlightenment – equality, fraternity, and individual liberty of conscience – themselves have Christian roots. Such concepts were not to be found in the Greeks or Romans, but entered into history through Christianity, which drew upon even older biblical experience. It is not so easy as Ms Allen imagines to cherish the Enlightenment and its particular form of reasoned Skepticism (quite different from nihilism) without noting their Christian provenance.

Second, it is not possible to explain the argument for religious liberty given by Jefferson and Madison in the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, and in the Remonstrance, without recognizing the crucial role they assign to a God who is at once the Creator (to whom inalienable obligations are due, in which no one dares to interfere) and the God of liberty of conscience (who could have bound our minds but preferred to create us free). Their whole argument makes no sense without this highly particular concept of God. It does not work, for example, with the Islamic concept of God, who is primarily blind Will and expects of humans blind submission...

Please understand. We agree that the reason for the unparalleled strength of religion in America is “the separation of church and state,” as every Catholic priest and other clergymen he met, without exception, told Alexis de Tocqueville. Further, the American version of separation is quite different from the French version, which is poisonously anti-religious. (The French Jacobins, for example, placed a prostitute upon the altar of the cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris, as a symbol – of all things — for the goddess Reason).