De Tocqueville On the US

The "Special Character" of the United States

New Zealand is now a thoroughly secular society.  The United States less so.  There are historical reasons for this disparity.  One fundamental difference is that New Zealand was progressively populated by immigrants from England coming to a country that was ostensibly governed by Britain.  In the case of the United States, once the Revolutionary Wars had ended, was self-governed to a degree and extent well beyond what New Zealand experienced in its days of colonial settlement. 

One of the consequences was that from the eighteenth century onwards the Christian faith had a far greater influence in the United States than it did in New Zealand.

Here is Alexis de Tocqueville's summary of the strong correlation in the United States between Christianity and American law and political institutions:

But there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a great influence over the souls of men than in America; and there can be no greater proof of its utility, and of its conformity to human nature, than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation on the earth. . . . Religion in America . . . must be regarded as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of it . . . .  I don't know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion--for who can search the human heart?  But I am certain that they hold it indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions.  This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens, or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.  [Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York, NY: Barnes and Noble, 2003), p. 258.]

Such claims could never be justified in the case of New Zealand.  Once the influence of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect waned they were replaced by rationalists, deists, and Darwinian evolutionists.  It was not long before successive boatloads of settlers coming to New Zealand were carrying nominal Christians, whose real ideological loyalties lay elsewhere than to the Christian zeitgeist, or world-and-life view. 

The United States, however, maintained its Christian zeitgeist far more extensively and for much longer than New Zealand and Australia, and indeed, the British Empire as a whole.