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Experiment in Environment: Foreign Perceptions of Religious America

Students of American religious history have long debated whether they should speak of "American religion" or only of "religion in America." Has the nation's environment left some sort of stamp on its varied religious forces or do they merely pursue their inherited ways in America, sharing little more than locale? What has American religion or religion in America been "about"? It would be futile to look for unique features, elements that are shared by all spiritual agencies and religious organizations in the United States but unshared by all others elsewhere in the world. But it is at least legitimate and possible to look for distinctive characteristics that serve to color America's religious expressions. Experiment and experimentalism as forces in national life have on occasion been proposed as the unifying theme, and I believe them to be fundamental for understanding the whole of American spirituality. One might mistrust the introduction of a novel category, one that could somehow have been wholly overlooked by the thousands of observers and analysts of the American past. At decisive turns in this history, notable articulators have converged on the terms. In early colonial times, Baptist Dr. John Clarke pleaded for the idea that "a flourishing civill State may stand, yea, and best be maintain'd ... with a full liberty in religious concernmts," and called such a situation "a lively experiment." At the moment of the epochal turn toward "separation of church and state," Thomas Jefferson pleaded for religion "without any establishment at all," an experiment that had been "new and doubtful." Now: "Let us ... give this experiment fair play. .. ." In the middle of the nineteenth century, when it could be shown that religious groups had made a creative adjustment to the new circumstance, the nation's foremost church historian, Philip Schaff, could say that "in America the most interesting experiments in church-history are now made." And while Benjamin Franklin back in what he called "the age of experiments," the Enlightenment period, spoke up for "the Necessity of a Publick Religion," in the twentieth century an unhappy critic of its development, England's Roman Catholic visitor to America