1. Denis Lacorne, Religion in America: A Political History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Lacorne identifies two meta-narratives: a secular narrative derived from the Enlightenment and a second from a uniquely American religious-based pursuit of freedom.
2. A documentary history of the Reformation can be found in Hans J. Hillerbrand, The Protestant Reformation (New York: Harper Perennial, 1968).
3. Edwin S. Gaustad and Leigh Schmidt, The Religious History of America: The Heart of the American Story from Colonial Times to Today (New York: HarperOne, 2004), p. 292.
4. As literary scholar Sacvan Bercovitch points out, “The distinction is a crucial one. Both humanism and Protestantism shift the grounds of private identity from the institution to the individual; and……makes every man his own church.” Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 11. Alexis de Tocqueville also wrote extensively about the “individualism” of Americans—a unique and peculiar condition compared to Europeans at the time.
5. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: The Library of America, 2004), Volume II, Part II, Chapter 2.