Why We Are Infidels

We have lately been called infidels. Yet we are perhaps the most prayerful nation in the world. Both Tocqueville and Dickens when they came over here to have a look at us were astonished at how much God there was in American society. True, the infidel is not necessarily a nonbeliever; he may also be a believer of the wrong stripe. But I think, given the variety of religious practices in our country, including that of Islam, that the term infidel as it has lately been applied to us probably does not refer to any particular religion we may as a nation subscribe to but to the fact that we subscribe, within our population of 290 million, to all of them.

Of course most of our religions, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism, landed here at different times from other parts of the world. They have been vulnerable, as religions usually are, to such denominational fracture as to offer a potential parishioner a virtual supermarket of spiritual choice. Some of our religions--Mormonism, Christian Science, Native American Anthropomorphism--were invented, or revealed, right here. And if we think even casually of the parade of creative and influential religionists on our shores--from the colonists Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather to our citizen evangelicals Aimee Semple McPherson, Billy Sunday, Father Divine and Billy Graham--we notice immediately that we have left out the Adventists, the Millerites, the Shakers, Swedenborgians and Perfectionists of the nineteenth century, to say nothing of the stadium-filling brides and grooms of the Reverend Moon's Unification Church, or the suicidal cultists of Jim Jones, or the unfortunate Branch Davidians of Waco, Texas, or the Heaven's Gate believers who castrated themselves and took their own lives in order to board the Hale-Bopp comet when it flew past in 1997.

One of the less scintillating debates among theologians is on the distinction between a religion and a cult. But all together, our religions or religious cults testify to the deeply American thirst for celestial connection. We want a spiritual release from the society we have made out of secular humanism.

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