In Book IV of The Social Contract (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau proposed a “civil religion” which, like the ancient pagan religions, would deepen and intensify republican patriotism, but without their superstitious adherence to polytheistic gods. Its dogmas would be few: “the existence of a mighty, intelligent, and beneficent Divinity”; an afterlife where the just would be rewarded and the wicked punished; and the sanctity of the constitution and laws of the republic.

America has had from its outset a civil religion of its own, but one far different from Rousseau's utilitarian concoction. America's God is not a distant “Divinity,” but a living God deeply involved in the story of a particular people. Even Thomas Jefferson, often called a deist, invoked this God in his second inaugural address in 1809. “I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life.”

Jefferson was working out of a narrative that originated more than a century and a half earlier in Puritan New England. The American colonies' main tradition in the eighteenth century was the covenantal Calvinism of the seventeenth. As historian Mark A. Noll writes, “Puritanism is the only colonial religious system that modern historians take seriously as a major religious influence on the Revolution.”