make it probable that this work will begin in America.’ To the Unitarian elite, the work had already, manifestly, begun. The old Calvinist theory of the Elect Nation infused nineteenth -century American patriotism. Thus Longfellow: Sail on, 0 Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all its hopes for future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate. Within the framework of this early nineteenth-century concept of the chosen people, or what was termed the ‘favoring providence’, at work by using America as the ‘melting pot' - a new nation arising from the debris of the old - American Christianity and the Republic it infused acquired their modern characteristics. America's most typical churches tended to leap back Straight from the nineteenth century to the age of the New Testament, and to seek to combine both. The Middle Ages, the age of religious wars, were dismissed as nightmares, and the association of Christianity with force (‘compel them to come in’) was broken. The assumption of the voluntary principle, the central tenet of American Christianity, was that the personal religious convictions of individuals, freely gathered in churches and acting in voluntary associations, will gradually and necessarily permeate society by persuasion and example. It is not so much the instrumentation of the good doctrine, as the agency of the good man, which will convert and reform the world. Thus the world was seen primarily in moral terms. This became a dominant factor whether America was rejecting the Old World and seeking to quarantine herself from it (a concept used as recently as 1963 during the Cuban Missile Crisis), or whether America was embracing the world, and seeking to reform it. It was characteristic of the American State, first to reject espionage on moral grounds, then to undertake it through the Central Intelligence Agency, a moralistic institution much more like the society of Jesus than its Soviet equivalent. In American religion, the reflective aspect of Christianity was subordinated, almost eclipsed. The Catholic-medieval emphasis on the perfection of God - and man's mere contemplation of Him - was replaced by the idea of God as an active and exacting sovereign, and man's energetic service in his employment. Augustinian pessimism was rejected, and Pelagianism embraced. It was not the Christian's duty to accept the world as he found it, but to seek to make it better. using all the means God had placed at his disposal. There was little mysticism, little sacramental’s or awe before the holy. There was no place for tragedy, dismissed as an avoidable accident, and its consequences as remediable. American religion, in its formative period, owed nothing to Pascal. Indeed, for essential purposes, it had no theology at all. Theological matters were points, all agreed, on which the various religions and sects happened to differ. This aspect of religion was important to individuals but not to society and the nation, since what mattered to them was the deep Christian consensus on ethics and morality. So long as Americans agreed on morals, theology could take care of itself. Morals became the heart of religion, whether for Puritans or revivalists, orthodox or liberal, fundamentalist or moralist - the eccentric hot-gospeller at the street-corner shared in this consensus as much as the Episcopalian prelate. Moreover, this was a consensus which even nonChristians, deists and rationalists, could share. Non-Christianity could thus be accommodated within the national framework of American Christendom. It could even (the argument is ironic) accommodate Roman Catholicism. Both American Catholicism and American Judaism became heavily influenced by the moral assumptions of American Protestantism, because both accepted its premise that religion (meaning morality) was essential to democratic institutions. Now here we come to an important stage in the argument around modern Christianity. The Augustinian total society had come into being in Carolingian times in great part because the Christian clergy operated a monopoly of education, which they only began to lose just before the Reformation. How could the total voluntary society of American Christianity come into being if Church and State Lis were separated, and