As Americans founded their republic, a French, observer, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur, wrote a series of letters describing the character of the new nation and published them in Europe in the 1780s under the pen name J. Hector St. John. His main theme was the struggle to forge a single American identity from the different backgrounds and values of the American people. He saw this process in the story of early American religion: Let us suppose you and I to be travelling; we observe that in this house, to the right, lives a catholic, who prays to God as he has been taught and believes in trarisubstantiation; he works and raises wheat, he has a large family of children, all hale and robust; his belief, his prayers offend nobody. About one mile farther on the same road, his next neighbour may be a...