The Separation that Defined America: The American Experience

America's founding did not create a spiritual void. It created a platform that required completion. Those who fail to complete it live woefully incomplete lives.

The American Spirit Essays #13

(continued from From Europe to America)

Spiritual Platform

America’s founding faith did not create a spiritual void.  Far from it.  America’s founding faith represented a spiritual platform emphatically available to all who sought to build upon it.  Different denominations could complete the structure in different ways as long as they did not run afoul of some basic ethical precepts.  As for those who rejected those ethical precepts—many of which were enshrined in law?  They were expected to follow those laws notwithstanding their particular beliefs.  Perhaps most importantly, America’s founders always saw their new civic religion as incomplete.  Religious institutions, traditions, practices, rituals, holidays, theologies, and approaches to spirituality were necessary to complete the package.  For those Americans who chose to distance themselves from religious traditions, the institutions of civil society would play that role.  That founding civic religion is precisely what I mean when I speak of the American spirit.

It’s hardly a coincidence that Alexis de Tocqueville, the most important outside observer of the early American nation, recognized that these intermediating institutions played a uniquely important role in American life.  Nor is it a coincidence that both Christianity and Judaism look very different in America than they did—or do—elsewhere.  The American formulation combining a shared ethical civic foundation with widely varied denominational specifics gave rise to an entirely new formulation of religion.

This radical American system shattered the age-old formula in which faith encompassed all aspects of life.  It severed basic elements of society, economics, culture, and bedrock morality from the rituals, prayers, holidays, and ethical nuance defining man’s relationship with the unknowable or divine.  It divided control of the former set between the government and the people, while disavowing both national ownership an monopolistic control of the latter set.