Advocating a personal relationship with Jesus and individual Bible reading, evangelicals insisted on freedom of conscience. This disposed Americans to multi-confessional communities — in other words, to pluralism. Even the most monolithic Puritan colony in Massachusetts Bay by the 1660s had to get used to non-Puritans in their midst. In turn, the relatively open religious and economic environment (for the era) attracted immigrants, who once on the continent continued to move, leading to sparse settlement and isolated frontier living. This living-on-your-own reinforced evangelical liberalism, where the individual is the primary unit and his freedom of conscience of prime importance. And so the cycle continued, not without struggle, but nonetheless, continued. Finally, to guarantee this freedom for America’s many-faithed immigrants, governmental and legal institutions would have to be secular — a guarantor of rights and freedoms blind to religion — and civil society would have to be pluralistic.

It was a marriage of principle and pragmatism, in part the principled belief in freedom of conscience and in part the pragmatic need for settlers. America had to persuade people to risk the ocean and endure the hardships of dislocation, the frontier and later industrialization. Freedom to practice one’s religion was an advertisement. To succeed in America, immigrants did not have to give up something so intimate as their God.

Interestingly, the constitutional separation of church and state, which established secular government, did not weaken but strengthened the nation’s churches. Owing to its extra-governmental status, religion was protected from the stains of political hypocrisy and corruption; it retained its good reputation as protector of the individual and his freedom. The result was high church membership and, absent a state church, the marketplace of confessions. This made the feeling for church and state in America nearly the inverse of that in Europe.

In Enlightenment Europe, established churches were suspect, as they were associated with the ancien regime and with the monarchist parties of the 19th century. As democratic forces grew, so did etatism, since secular state institutions were seen as the protector of the nation against the irrationalities of religion and aristocratic power. By contrast the US, born in revolt against London, saw government — not church — as suspect. Liberalism was emphasized over etatism. Religion remained grassroots, home to the common man and individual expression, a people’s thing. Even many Bible-belt Americans don’t worry that Muslims are committed to their religion because in the US, many people are. Forty percent of Muslim in the US say they attend religious services once a week, precisely the figure for other Americans.

One consequence of this history is America’s paradoxical-sounding “familiarity with difference”. As Americans have long been dealing with different sorts of people, they’ve gotten used to distinguishing those differences that might damage the country from those — most — which will not. At least they tend not to panic. Even after 9/11, there were but a few anti-Muslim incidents and, as seen above, 73 percent of Muslim Americans said they have never experienced discrimination. The first Muslim, Rep Keith Ellison of Minnesota, was elected to Congress after 9/11. Contrast this to Britain, where over 50 percent of survey respondents in a 2006 poll reported feeling that Islam itself, not a radical minority, posed a threat to the country. Fifty-eight percent of Germans, who have suffered no terrorist attack, in 2006 expected “a coming conflict with the Muslim population”.

More than not panicking, Americans have a “gut level” confidence in the traditional deal. If immigrants are participating in public life, whom should they attack? In a positive cycle, the relatively porous economic and political arenas boost familiarity with difference, which lowers the demand for assimilation and lowers too the barriers to economic and political participation. In Europe, by contrast, there is considerable demand for assimilation and a less porous economy and politics, yielding less participation. With less participation comes less familiarity with difference on the host country’s side. On the immigrants’ side, there is more resentment, which may lead to lassitude about the economy and politics, a rejection of the host society, violence, or insistence on maintaining symbolic differences — ironically, in a society less able to accept them precisely because of its discomfort with difference. This in short is Europe’s headscarf kafuffle. It speaks to none of the economic, educational or political barriers to participation nor does it address immigrant responses to these barriers. But it demands symbolic assimilation.

The history I’ve reviewed here is America’s and cannot be pasted onto another society, even America’s cultural parent. In conclusion, I would suggest only that religion, including Islam, changes. A human institution, religion evolves as everything human does; it has its internal, traditional mechanisms for renewal. American evangelicals were liberal, then conservative, and now some are leaving the Republican coalition for an anti-militarist, anti-consumerist theology and dedication to the needy. Islam, from the Maghreb to Indonesia, has evolved varied modes of textual interpretation and expression in its 1,500 years. The prayers services now being led by Orthodox Jewish and Muslim women in the US are also examples of religious change. They are provocative but they would not have gotten off the ground had they been demanded by feminists or civil libertarians. They are possible because they emerge from the logic, traditions and women within religious orthodoxy itself.