From Kevin D. WilliamsonThe American proposition is a theological proposition: "that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."
Just how radical that idea is is difficult for the 21st-century Western mind to comprehend. For the entirety of the human experience, most men had been subjects — the ruled living their lives at the sufferance of rulers. The American proposition inverts that: We are citizens, not subjects, and government exists at our sufferance, not the other way around.
Americans first applied to politics the Christian belief that we are made in the likeness of Almighty God Himself, not in the likeness of livestock to be herded, milked, and slaughtered.
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.
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