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Those outside America, and many within, would criticise the "idea of America" as being ideological. "Americanism", which we might call this ideology, is a total worldview, a lens which colours everything you look at through it. But it is more or less invisible to those who wear such spectacles. It simply describes "the way things are" - they could not be any different. Except of course they could, as is plain to anybody who is not American.
Religion and American Identity
Those who have investigated this territory, whether under the heading of Americanism or the related idea of American Exceptionalism, have sooner or later confronted the fact that a significant component of this ideology is not secular but religious.
This is the more obvious the further you go back into American origins. That the American Revolutionary War was sometimes conducted with religious fervour is not merely a metaphor for a fanaticism which we now find distastefully extreme - and which we, with our modern susceptibilities, hope was the exception rather than the rule.
For instance, before the Battle of King's Mountain in South Carolina in 1780, the local patriots, a mainly Presbyterian force ranged against the British, were rallied before battle with a sermon from the local minister which climaxed with the old Cromwellian battle cry, "The sword of the lord and of Gideon", which the congregation shouted back in a frenzy. Needless to say, they won. It marked the beginning of the end for the pro-British Americans or Loyalists.
As was usual with Protestant typology,1 once a biblical archetype had been identified, God could be assumed to want events to be acted out the same way and could be called upon to help. And no doubt those who knew God was on their side wielded their swords and bayonets with that much greater fury - just as Cromwell's Ironsides had done at Marston Moor in response to the same biblical rallying cry more than a century before.
The end of the Battle of King's Mountain was one of the most savage episodes of a savage war. One Loyalist survivor told a colleague how,
as the mountaineers passed over him he would play possum; but he could plainly observe their faces and eyes; and...