Narratives of American religious history commonly relate a story about how religious disestablishment led to an unimagined proliferation of religious groups that eventually learned to live in peace. In 2008, close to seventy-five Christian denominations in the United States reported a membership exceeding sixty thousand. There are countless numbers of smaller denominations. This bewildering variety of Christian identities plus the growth of non-Christian faiths, which are also split by different traditions, suggests that the legal and cultural landscape of the United States has not only accommodated but also encouraged diversity.

To be sure, histories that record the multiplication of religious groups also acknowledge that the path to civility was not easy. The ugly clashes between Catholics and Protestants in the nineteenth century, the efforts made by the federal government to eradicate the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and Native American religions, the suppression of African religious practices during the period of slavery, and the poison of anti-Semitism that did not weaken until the last half of the twentieth century spoil any story line suggesting that immigrants to the United States somehow jettisoned every bit of the baggage of religious prejudice in their voyage across an ocean. But the fact that Americans very early in their history spun a myth about their tolerance is not necessarily a bad thing. Myths are representations of ideals. The one about immigrants fleeing Europe in search of religious freedom worked to strengthen the Constitution’s protections giving equal legal standing to all religions.