Chestertonian America?

I just starting listening to Ross Douthat’s new book Bad Religion. He makes the fascinating suggestion towards the beginning that while most other western nations had official, established religions, America was founded on a certain openness to falsehood intentionally. But disestablishment was/is not necessarily in itself a capitulation to sects or secularism, though it certainly seems to have tended that way down to the present. What Douthat points out is that perhaps more than anything it reveals a certain confidence in the truth and the irresistible adventure of orthodoxy — in the grand Chestertonian sense. Perhaps it was not agnosticism or deism or some other vague pluralism that drove the founding fathers to design a nation in principle open to heresy. Perhaps it was the adventurous spirit of the orthodox faith itself and a certainty about the timid blandness of all pretenders which created a glad openness to the future simultaneously gripped by a confidence in the “faith once delivered to the saints.”