Americans’ religiosity compared with that of our European cousins perplexes and vexes those who do not understand that our civil religion is rooted in our religion-religion, that we have, for instance, a constitutional prohibition on the establishment of a national church because our founders were in the main sundry fractious irreconcilable believers rather than jaded agnostics. We have freedom of religion because our forefathers were Puritan fanatics, not in spite of the fact. Consider the mind of Thomas Paine: Even our anti-ecclesiasticals are evangelical. Paine’s character dominates that of the modern American atheist, who burns with a holy fervor unknown to the milquetoast Sunday-morning Christian…

To be an American is to know a blessing that none of us has earned or merited, to have liberty not because we deserve it but because of who we are — endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights. None of us has earned that liberty, but we do have the opportunity — and it is precious — to live up to it. The Union army once had the courage and the confidence to march singing “Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!” Those men were facing a national crisis and physical horrors worse than anything our generation has known, or is likely to know. They endured: We have now seen 239 years of liberty and prosperity unprecedented in all of human history, a longer span of time than that which separated the Year of the Six Emperors from the fall of the Roman empire.