America hasn't been a Protestant nation, or any sort of Christian nation, for a very long time. Doubtless a good deal longer than anyone on this board's been alive, myself certainly included. And in that extremely brief (by macrohistorical standards) window of time when it was, the fractious nature of Protestantism - with every different sect's religious worldview inevitably influencing their secular considerations - rendered full national unity inherently impossible in the long term. Yeah, it was fine for the first few decades when the Puritan-descended Yankees constituting the Federalist Party were just bickering about the viability of centrally-directed national development schemes with the Episcopalian, Cavalier-descended Democrat-Republicans, but obviously all that went tits up the instant the question of slavery ceased to be a merely academic discussion and one side started spawning William Garrisons & John Browns while the other pumped out John Calhouns & George Fitzhughs before the Founding Fathers were even all dead. (The decidedly non-Protestant Founding Father Charles Carroll, a slaveowner himself, lived long enough to witness Garrison's publishing of The Liberator for the first time.)

The attempt to found the nation on a marriage of multiple strands of Protestantism (Washington's Episcopalianism, Adams' Unitarian Congregationalism, etc.) with Enlightenment-era concepts of liberal individualism, minimal government & the promotion of free enterprise was worth the shot, but there's no denying that it comprehensively failed and the country they had in mind replaced with one more alien to their sensibilities than even Louis XIV's France would have been to an Egyptian farmer from Narmer's day within about 80-160 years. Depending on whether you consider the point where this Founders' vision was obliterated to be the Civil War, the ascent of the original Progressives and creation of the Federal Reserve, or the New Deal of course.

In the grand scheme of things, the Evangelical/Moral Majority attempt at a revival in the Reagan years was not some Great Awakening but a final frantic (and failed, very quickly at that) attempt at salvaging that which was already lost while the likes of Falwell and Robertson were still teenagers at their oldest. IIRC neither were even alive for the Modernist-Fundamentalist split in the 1920s, and then the poor bastards couldn't even overturn the ban on voluntary school prayer or reopen an opportunity to stave off baby-killing on a state level. When society crumbles and it's time to rebuild on the ashes, it's only natural to seek stronger materials for the foundation and structure - materials that have been proven to last millennia rather than less than two centuries - even if you intend to reuse as much of the old design as possible.

America hasn't been a Protestant nation, or any sort of Christian nation, for a very long time. Probably a good deal longer than anyone on this board's been alive, myself certainly included. And in that extremely brief (by macrohistorical standards) window of time when it was, the fractious nature of Protestantism - with every different sect's religious worldview inevitably influencing their secular considerations - rendered full national unity inherently impossible in the long term. Yeah, it was fine for the first few decades when the Puritan-descended Yankees constituting the Federalist Party were just bickering about the viability of centrally-directed national development schemes with the Episcopalian, Cavalier-descended Democrat-Republicans, but obviously all that went tits up the instant the question of slavery ceased to be a merely academic discussion and one side started spawning William Garrisons & John Browns while the other pumped out John Calhouns & George Fitzhughs before the Founding Fathers were even all dead. (The decidedly non-Protestant Founding Father Charles Carroll, a slaveowner himself, lived long enough to witness Garrison's publishing of The Liberator for the first time.)

The attempt to found the nation on a marriage of multiple strands of Protestantism (Washington's Episcopalianism, Adams' Unitarian Congregationalism, etc.) with Enlightenment-era concepts of liberal individualism, minimal government & the promotion of free enterprise was worth the shot, but there's no denying that it comprehensively failed and the country they had in mind replaced with one more alien to their sensibilities than even Louis XIV's France would have been to an Egyptian farmer from Narmer's day within about 80-160 years. Depending on whether you consider the point where this Founders' vision was obliterated to be the Civil War, the ascent of the original Progressives and creation of the Federal Reserve, or the New Deal of course.

In the grand scheme of things, the Evangelical/Moral Majority attempt at a revival in the Reagan years was not some Great Awakening but a final frantic (and failed, very quickly at that) attempt at salvaging that which was already lost while the likes of Falwell and Robertson were still teenagers at their oldest. IIRC neither were even alive for the Modernist-Fundamentalist split in the 1920s, and then the poor bastards couldn't even overturn the ban on voluntary school prayer or reopen an opportunity to stave off baby-killing on a state level. When society crumbles and it's time to rebuild on the ashes, it's only natural to seek stronger materials for the foundation and structure - materials that have been proven to last millennia rather than less than two centuries - even if you intend to reuse as much of the old design as possible.

America hasn't been a Protestant nation, or any sort of Christian nation, for a very long time. Probably a good deal longer than anyone on this board's been alive, myself certainly included. And in that extremely brief (by macrohistorical standards) window of time when it was, the fractious nature of Protestantism - with every different sect's religious worldview inevitably influencing their secular considerations - rendered full national unity inherently impossible in the long term. Yeah, it was fine for the first few decades when the Puritan-descended Yankees constituting the Federalist Party were just bickering about the viability of centrally-directed national development schemes with the Episcopalian, Cavalier-descended Democrat-Republicans, but obviously all that went tits up the instant the question of slavery ceased to be a merely academic discussion and one side started spawning William Garrisons & John Browns while the other pumped out John Calhouns & George Fitzhughs before the Founding Fathers were even all dead. (The decidedly non-Protestant Founding Father Charles Carroll, a slaveowner himself, lived long enough to witness Garrison's publishing of The Liberator for the first time.)

The attempt to found the nation on a marriage of multiple strands of Protestantism (Washington's Episcopalianism, Adams' Unitarian Congregationalism, etc.) with Enlightenment-era concepts of liberal individualism, minimal government & the promotion of free enterprise was worth the shot, but there's no denying that it comprehensively failed and the country they had in mind replaced with one more alien to their sensibilities than even Louis XIV's France would have been to an Egyptian farmer from Narmer's day within about 80-160 years. Depending on whether you consider the point where this Founders' vision was obliterated to be the Civil War, the ascent of the original Progressives and creation of the Federal Reserve, or the New Deal of course.

In the grand scheme of things, the Evangelical/Moral Majority attempt at a revival in the Reagan years was not some Great Awakening but a final frantic (and failed, very quickly at that) attempt at salvaging that which was already lost while the likes of Falwell and Robertson were still teenagers at their oldest. Poor bastards couldn't even overturn the ban on voluntary school prayer or reopen an opportunity to stave off baby-killing on a state level. When society crumbles and it's time to rebuild on the ashes, it's only natural to seek stronger materials for the foundation and structure - materials that have been proven to last millennia rather than less than two centuries - even if you intend to reuse as much of the old design as possible.