of American state education, which it remains. Horace Mann Kallen, writing in the Saturday Review (July 1951) under the title 'Democracy's True Religion’, summarized the theory: For the communicants of the democratic faith, it is the religion of and for religion. For being the religion of religions, all may freely come together in it.' The case was pushed a little further by J. Paul Williams in What Americans Believe and How they Worship (1952): Americans must come to look upon the democratic ideal. . . as the Will of God, or, if they please, of Nature. . . Americans must be brought to the conviction that democracy is the very Law of Life. . . government agencies must teach the democratic idea as religion. . . . Primary responsibility for teaching democracy might be given to the public school. . The churches deal effectively with but half the population; the government deals with all the population. . . . It is a misconception to equate separation of church and state with separation of religion and state.’ it was on the basis of such assumptions, imperfectly carried out though they might be, that the two great non-Protestant religions of America, the Catholic and the Jewish, became to some extent Protestantized, and the political ideals and practices of the United States were aligned with a broad-based form of Christianity. The process was already operating even in the seventeenth century, and it began to come to maturity after 1800. As Conrad Moehlman was to put it in 1944 (in School and Church): 'The religion of the American majority is democracy.’ Hence religion and government were tied together rather as, in the Dark Ages, the State was personalized in the pontifical king, anointed at his coronation so that he might possess regal characteristics. The American people were anointed, as children, and filled with the ethics and morality of standardized Protestant Christianity so that, as adults and voters. they might rule wisely. The institutions were different but the assumption that the spiritual and secular worlds were interdependent was exactly the same. The system could work granted two preconditions. The first was what might be termed a high level of religiosity in the nation. Religious enthusiasm must be continually replenished to make the ethical and moral ideology seem important. This was supplied by the American system of creedal plurality. Having abandoned the advantages of unity, the Americans sensibly turned to exploit the advantages of diversity. And these proved to be considerable. It was the very competitiveness of rival religions in the United States, acting by analogy to the free enterprise system, which kept the demands of the spiritual life constantly before the people. Whereas unity, it was argued, led to mechanical Christianity, apathy and, eventually , atheism, religious competition produced an atmosphere of permanent revival. And this to some extent was true, especially along the expanding frontier and in the areas of nineteenth-century settlement. The second Great Awakening, starting in the 1790s, continued until the middle decades of the new century. The Wesleyans and Baptists spawned multitudes of cults and sub-cults, and the camp-meeting became, for several decades, the characteristic form of American religious experiment. The atmosphere as one might expect, was Montanist, second-century - the reinterpretation of the central ideas of Christianity by a multitude of exalted individuals, ‘speaking with tongues’. A Maryland Presbyterian, Barton Stone, who held a great meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in August 1801, described the actions of the ‘saved’, which he strongly approved, in great detail. Thus, there was the ‘falling exercise the subject of this exercise would, generally, with a piercing scream, fall like a log on the floor, earth or mud. and appear as dead... .' Then there were the jerks: ‘When the head alone was affected, it would be jerked backward and forward, or from side to side, so quickly that the features of the face could not be distinguished. When the whole system was affected, | have seen the person stand in one place, and jerk backwards and forwards in quick succession, their head nearly touching the floor behind and before.’ The barking exercise: 'A person affected with the jerks, especially in his head, would often make a grunt or bark, if you please, from the suddenness of the jerk. The ‘dancing exercise’ was tt ‘indeed heavenly to the