Millennial Muslims, Unmosqued

Unique among Western and industrialized nations, the US boasts a high rate of people who say they believe in God. Not all of these people regularly go to church, synagogue , mosque or temple, but over 90% of adult Americans say they believe in a Divine Being. The US is the most religiously diverse country in the world and the most religiously devout country in the West. I believe that this is because religion has remained in the realm of the marketplace of ideas since the time the first Puritans – who after all left Britain to preserve what they believed was their right to separate church from state – arrived on American shores. Their whole purpose in leaving the UK was so that they can protect their freedom to practice their religion the way they saw fit – not the way their government or any other legislative body saw fit.

Indeed, the Protestant Reformation, of which the Puritans were inheritors and champions, could rather simplistically be explained as a religious revolution that occurred when an increasingly educated class of citizens decided that they would no longer accept what they saw as interference by the institution of the Catholic Church into the religious life of believers. Top down institutions, be they absolute monarchies, or the papal system, inherently had a corrupting influence on the moral beliefs of regular citizens. The early European colonizers of the US had as their main moral objective the protection of church and state. This resulted in a peculiarly American form of creating religious communities for the people, by the people and of the people.