A quote from Scott Atran at The Huffington Post, 13 September 2008

Unlike the centralized European and Canadian churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, American congregations were, and still are, concretely rooted in local communities with strong personal ties. Americans voluntarily chose and supported their community church, internalizing and shaping the community's egalitarian moral values, instead of being compelled to belong to a state-subsidized, hierarchical institution. Where American churches have emphasized the God-given individual impulsion to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England in Canada have stressed the social virtues of that country's first constitution (The British North American Act): "peace, order and good government." American churches have been more risk prone, preaching practical working values over humanistic doctrines. "American denominations had to compete like business for customers, for support for income," noted political sociologist Seymour Lipset.

Unlike in other countries, Americans often opt to go to different churches depending on changing personal social, economic or political preferences. It's as acceptable to change churches as it is to change shopping brands provided that your choice is also motivated by moral conscience rather than mere personal opportunity and benefit. For example, Obama has changed churches a few times. But the last change almost derailed his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination. This was both because of his long-term association with a church that tolerated seemingly anti-nationalist preachings, and because people felt that the political pressure for him to leave the church trumped his pronounced reasons of conscience for leaving it.

Sarah Palin grew up as a member of the Assemblies of God, the largest Christian Pentacostal movement (about 66 million members worldwide). The movement consists of a self-described "cooperative fellowship" of self-propagating, self-supporting, and self-governing churches. All profess faith in the deity of Christ, the original fall and final salvation of man through belief in Christ's blood sacrifice and his Second Coming, and the evangelical mission to spread this belief in order to save as many other souls as possible. The movement also acknowledges loyalty to the national government, but allows each church and believer to take the stance they feel most appropriate, and to support or not support national wars as their conscience tells them. [...]

In Europe, there has been a spate of academic analyses of religion in America on the heels of Sarah Palin's nomination for the vice presidency under the Republican banner. What's stunning is how well the analysts describe the trees but miss the forest. In a September 11 article in the leading French newspaper Le Monde, titled "Sarah Palin, a funny kind of parishioner" (Sarah Palin, une drôle de paroisienne) sociologist Yannick Fer gives a competent overview of the Charismatic movement to which Palin belongs, but his conclusion is widely off the mark:

"The [political] positions inspired by this religious conviction are conservative, to the point opposing the autonomy of the individual in the quest to impose 'the values of the Bible' on all of society; for, it is a mater of "saving" the nation as much as individuals. The Charismatic creed here reaches the point of contradiction: everyone is free and responsible for their choice, but there is only one path ─ A fundamental ambiguity that makes for a political object that is poorly defined, unstable and problematic."

In fact, a 2006 survey by the Pew Research Foundation in Washington found that a majority of U.S. Charismatics believe that Bible and the right path in life are open to interpretation.
 
In France, ever since 18th century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau proclaimed the secular sanctity of the "social contract," successive French leaders from the French revolution to the present have repeated the mantra that, beyond the individual, "the only community is the nation." That's why notions of multiculturalism and religious sectarianism have little place in French political philosophy. Although European Enlightenment values of individual freedom and choice also entered strongly into the American Republic's political constitution (especially via Thomas Jefferson & friends), the fundamental social constituent of economic and political culture in the United States was neither the individual nor the state, but the sectarian community. The religious community in the USA was a civic as well as moral community, a combination which infused American economic and political culture with particular dynamism.
 
Ironically, it was a French nobleman who first noted this novel historical condition. Alexis de Tocqueville stressed in Democracy in America, his masterful analysis of our young republic written in 1835, that religious conservatism in America does not mean sacrifice of individual interest for group interest, or subservience of the individual to the state or any other ruling collectivity. Rather, religion mitigates the selfishness of unbridled individualism and "private animosities," while shoring up free institutions that engage "aspiring hopes" as against "general despotism [that] gives rise to indifference."

"It must be acknowledged that equality, which brings great benefits to the world, nevertheless... tends to isolate them from each other, to concentrate every man's attention on himself; and it lay open the soul to an inordinate love of material gratification.... Religious nations are thus naturally strong on the very point on which democratic nations are weak, which shows of what importance it is for men to preserve their religion as their conditions become more equal..... Thus it is, that, by respecting all democratic tendencies not absolutely contrary to herself, and by making use of several of them for her own purposes, Religion sustains a successful struggle of that spirit of individual independence which is her most dangerous opponent.... As soon as several of the inhabitants of the United States have taken up an opinion or feeling which they wish to promote, they look out for mutual assistance; and as soon as they have found out each other they combine. From that moment they are not longer isolated men, but a power seen from afar, whose actions serve as an example, and whose language is listened to."

De Tocqueville surmised, correctly it seems, that religion in America would give its democracy greater vigor, endurance, cooperative power and competitive force than any strictly authoritarian regime or unbridled democracy.
 
In 1852, communism's co-founder Frederich Engels wrote to Karl Marx that California's sudden rise as a social and economic force "out of nothing" showed was "not provided for in the [Communist] Manifesto... We shall have to allow for this." He puzzled over the apparent exception of "Yankee blood" to the universal rule of "historical determinism." During a brief visit to North America in 1888, Engels observed that unlike the case for Canada or Europe: "Here one sees how necessary the feverish spirit of the Americans is for the rapid development of a new country."