The United States is the first and greatest post-Christendom Christian nation.

Founded after the collapse of the medieval order, the earliest Americans didn't renounce Christianity, as many modern Europeans did, exhausted by seemingly endless war.

On the contrary. Our earliest colonists were among the most intense Christians ever to grace planet Earth.

But the new-world setting detached American Puritans, Pilgrims, and others from the institutions and symbols of European Christendom.

You can't go far in Europe without happening across a monastery, a village church, a cross planted on some remote hill commemorating some forgotten miracle. Every cranny boasts a centuries-old Christian history.

The Puritans encountered a virgin landscape, as far as Christianity was concerned. Their errand was to put their stamp on an unstamped wilderness.

From the first, American Christianity has had an eccentric flavoring, a boisterous spirit of religious innovation.

And American Christianity just kept getting eccentricker and eccentricker, spawning sects and cults but also heroic missionary expeditions to Christianize the continent and later the world. 

Irish monks camped out on whales and hopped into boats to commit "white martyrdom." 

Our rugged, bristly Methodist circuit riders hopped onto horses, strapped on a gun belt, and tamed the frontier.

American Christianity is easy to criticize, especially for people (like me) with fondness for old Christendom.

But the energy, ingenuity, tenacity, zest, the sheer Americanness of American Christianity awes and terrifies the world. As it should.

As we celebrate the 250th this week, give thanks for all the things that turned the world upside down - the Founding Fathers, Lexington and Concord and Yorktown, the Constitution, our supersized opulence.

And spare a word of thanks for the reckless adventurers who made America what it is, the first and greatest post-Christendom Christian nation.