By the same guy who sent me that email last week about Doe v. Bolton, as it happens:

Chesterton’s remark that America is “a nation with the soul of a church” is in his book What I Saw in America. I’m not sure what year it was published, but from remarks he makes it was certainly after World War I. I have excerpts from it in an old paperback titled The Man Who Was Chesterton, edited by Raymond T. Bond and originally published in hardcover in 1937.

The phrase comes after several pages in which GKC muses on being asked on a form at the U.S. consulate, prior to his coming over, whether he is an anarchist. This leads him to thoughts like these (the quotes are widely separated):

“America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.”

“Now a creed is at once the broadest and the narrowest thing in the world. In its nature it is as broad as its scheme for a brotherhood of all men. In its nature it is limited by its definition of the nature of all men. This was true of the Christian Church, which was truly said to exclude neither Jew nor Greek, but which did definitely substitute something else for Jewish religion or Greek philosophy.”

“America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial.”

And following the “soul of a church” comment:

“When we realise the democratic design of such a cosmopolitan commonwealth, and compare it with our [English] insular reliance or instincts, we see at once why such a thing has to be not only democratic but dogmatic. We see why in some points it tends to be inquisitive or intolerant.”

My response: Thanks for the information. This certainly seems to suggest that the common assumption that the quote refers to high American rates of religiosity–as in a book that I am now reading for review, which appears to have picked it up from another book–is incorrect.