The Paradox of American Religion–Peter Berger

The role of religion in the United States is characterized by a paradox. On the one hand, this is by any measure the most religious country among Western democracies, not only in terms of individual beliefs and behavior, but also in the public sphere. On the other hand, the US has an unusually strict separation of religion and the state, dwarfing France’s laicite (where the state pays the salaries of teachers in Catholic schools) and its imitators in Kemalist Turkey (where a government agency used to write the sermons preached in mosques). This paradox makes it difficult for foreigners to understand the vagaries of American religion. During the same bout of reading that led me to the cases discussed above I came across a curious confusion in a usually very well-informed British source, the Catholic periodical The Tablet.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/berger/2012/12/12/the-first-amendment-an-icon-sometimes-erected-in-curious-places/