December 18, 1995
Web posted at: 9:50 a.m. EST
From Correspondent David George
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- The United States has been called "a nation of immigrants," a land where myriad cultures co-exist. That didn't happen by accident. The country's founders purposely created a nation in which freedom and diversity -- both cultural and religious -- are part of the political framework.
But theory and practice often diverge. God is in the U.S. pledge to the flag, and even on the country's money. This is a religious nation, despite the Constitution's efforts to separate church and state.
"America today is a paradox," said Emory University Professor Brooks Holifield. "It is at one and the same time one of the most secular countries in the world, and one of the most religious countries in the world." (111K AIFF sound or 111K WAV sound)
Ninety-six percent of Americans questioned in a 1994 Gallup poll said they believe in God. But they envision God with many faces. The United States has about 145 million Christians, between 4 million and 5 million Muslims according to some estimates, 6 million Jews, over a million Hindus, 100,000 Buddhists, and many Native Americans who still observe the ancient religious rituals of their culture.
"What is remarkable about America (is that) people did learn to live and let live and to develop an attitude of tolerance," said historian Nathan Hatch, vice president of the University of Notre Dame and one of the nation's acknowledged experts on religious diversity.
Religious tolerance figures heavily in popular accounts of the colonization of the United States. The stories tell of refugees from the Old World fleeing religious persecution, looking for freedom in the New World. But historians say those early settlers were looking for freedom only for themselves, not necessarily everybody else.
"They were seeking their freedom to worship," Holifield said. "There were not seeking freedom as a general or abstract value or ideal."
Hatch adds, "I think it's fair to say that religious freedom came about not because people had the idea they should have it, (but) just because there were so many different groups that to form a nation you had to allow religious freedom." (238K AIFF sound or 238K WAV sound)
Historians say a certain kind of preacher helped shape American Christianity. Hatch calls them the "uneducated clergy" -- unschooled in ways of formal religion, but steeped in the "Word of God." They were driven by a faith of their own construction and a compulsion to preach. They are still a powerful force today, embodied by people such as Pastor Helen Turner, a former drug addict who once served time for attempted murder.
"We have a long history of being surprised by common people of deep religious commitment who take religion into their own hands and say it's not going to be an educated elite that tell them what to believe, and who operate, really, at the periphery," Hatch said.
He said that over the years, the periphery became the center. Movements once on the fringe of religious thought are in the cultural mainstream in the United States. And in a land where church and state are constitutionally separate, politics nonetheless are driven, at least in part, by religion.
"Religion has been such a part of American life that you couldn't divorce it from politics," Hatch said.
Some of today's hottest political issues -- abortion and gay rights, for instance, -- have religious overtones. And just three decades ago, a movement with religious underpinnings -- the push for civil rights for the country's African-Americans -- changed the course of U.S. history.
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