For Tocqueville, to see such a variety of accepted religions was both shocking and thrilling. At the time that he was traipsing through the American frontier, a number of new faiths were being born in this officially secular land. Mormonism and Seventh-day Adventism emerged during the Second Great Awakening. Methodism and Presbyterianism thrived. New religions would continue to be founded, from Christian Science and Spiritualism to Pentecostalism and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. American soil would bear the fruits of new religions, more than almost any corner of the earth. Over the centuries, the U.S. has been the origin of the Longhouse Religion and the Ghost Dance, the African Methodist Episcopal Church and American Unitarianism, New Thought and Moorish Temple Science, Theosophy and Discordianism.
By comparison, in European nations with established churches, there were the extremes of either the frequently ignored ritual of England, the authoritarianism of the Russian Orthodox Church, or the occasional anti-clericalism of France. In America, however, secularism was the mother of faith. Not just a prerequisite for religion, secularism is itself a theology: the religion which ensures the independence of all others.
That there is a religious component to disestablishment appears to be a paradoxical claim. Yet, the tradition of American secularism arrived not sui generis, but rather out of the theologies of the radical Reformation. To maintain that church and state can be separated is itself a theological formulation, one that theocrats would notably object to. But the one free exercise of faith that can’t be countenanced is that of the theocrat. David Sehat explains in This Earthly Frame: The Making of American Secularism that, “In a society with a high degree of religious adherence, a secular democracy requires religious support to have success and legitimacy. In the United States, secularism had that support… Religious Jews, ecumenical Protestants, apocalyptic sects, and even Protestant missionaries joined heterodox and nonbelieving intellectual to promote public secularism.” To this list we can add American Catholics who established independent parochial schools so that their children couldn’t be mandated into Protestant prayer as part of public education.
What these groups understood at one point in time is that secularism is distinguished from both theocracy and from the anti-clerical state. Both of those are merely mirror images of each other, upside down. Secularism rather carefully balances all theological positions in a divine agnosticism, circumscribed from the mundane reality of the government. It lets all manner of belief – and disbelief – on those issues of fundamental meaning thrive. Understood in this way, to filch tax money to fund Christian education, to demand that students pray with an authority figure, all of this has nothing to do with the open thriving of religion and everything to do with the impositions of power.