Here is an excellent article on the role of religion in US good article
The loneliness of American democracy drives us to embrace identity politics, Mitchell argues. Uniquely among American political writers, Mitchell perceives that it is the atomization of American society that drives the search for identity. To be American is to reinvent one’s identity, something that immigrants to America (or at least their children) must do, to shed the identity of the Old Country, wherever it is, and become an American. But a country of reinvented individuals is necessarily a “lonely crowd,” in the sociologist David Reisman’s phrase. Mitchell observes, “It has been long understood—as early as the 1830s, when Tocqueville wrote about it – that as we become more disconnected and our lives get smaller in the democratic age, the temptation to make distinctions between others and ourselves grows. When we are lost in the lonely crowd, we look for ways to distinguish ourselves. Our imagination wanders, and our pride demands more than numbing anonymity. Surely, we are more than a flickering soliloquy that emerges out of nothing and returns to the dust. In democracies, where there is never much difference between one citizen and another, and where in the nature of things they are so close that there is always a chance of their all getting merged.”
After this terrible sacrifice, America turned away from Lincoln, to the Social Gospel and complacency. It was shaken out of this complacency by the World Wars of the 20th century– two hot ones and a Cold War – and emerged in 1989 as the world’s only superpower. The emergence of evangelical Protestantism as a decisive force in American politics during the administration of Ronald Reagan and the great migration of Americans away from the mainline Protestant churches to the more enthusiastic evangelical movement might be considered a fourth Great Awakening.
Now America finds itself in a quasi-religious awakening that, paradoxically, has turned the sensibilities of American Protestantism against America itself. The penchant of the Woke practitioners of identity politics for self-invention is a clownish parody of Christian self-invention, but it is practiced with equal passion. America began with a mandate for its citizens to reinvent themselves as Americans. It may end with Justice Anthony Kennedy’s declaration in the 2015 Obergefell decision, “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.”
