Since the 18th-century Enlightenment, the United States and Western Europe's paths to modernity have diverged sharply with respect to religion. In short, Americans have maintained much friendlier ties with traditional forms of religion than their European counterparts. What explains this transatlantic religious divide? While the divide has received considerable commentary from journalists and sociologists in recent decades, this is the first major work of cultural and intellectual history devoted to the subject. Accessing the topic though 19th- and early 20th-century European commentary on the ... More

Since the 18th-century Enlightenment, the United States and Western Europe's paths to modernity have diverged sharply with respect to religion. In short, Americans have maintained much friendlier ties with traditional forms of religion than their European counterparts. What explains this transatlantic religious divide? While the divide has received considerable commentary from journalists and sociologists in recent decades, this is the first major work of cultural and intellectual history devoted to the subject. Accessing the topic though 19th- and early 20th-century European commentary on the United States, the book argues that an ‘Atlantic gap’ in religious matters has deep and complex historical roots, and enduringly informs some strands of European disapprobation of the United States. While exploring in the first chapters ‘Old World’ disquiet toward and criticism of the young republic's religious freedoms and dynamics, the book pivots in the final chapters and focuses on more constructive assessments of the United States. Acknowledging the importance of Alexis de Tocqueville for the topic, the book argues that voluminous references to him have had a tendency to overshadow other noteworthy European voices. Two underappreciated figures are, then, profiled: the Protestant Swiss–German church historian Philip Schaff, and the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Scholars, journalists, policy makers, and educated citizens on both sides of the Atlantic, the book concludes, ignore religious factors at their peril when considering American-European relations and the history of European attitudes toward the United States.