you first said “Protestants created the nation”
I pointed out that
"I think it’s more nuanced than that. you could more accurately word it as “English history + Anglican Protestants and Deists/enlightenment folks created the nation” Many of the leading Founders, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, were Deists or influenced by the Enlightenment. They argued that rights come from “Nature’s God” rather than a specific church. They sought to create a Secular Republic that protected religious freedom.Culture and 'spirit' are the matter, but Law and Philosophy are the form. Without a coherent, universalist framework (the Enlightenment and English Common Law), that Protestant energy wouldn't have created a 'Nation'—it would have created a thousand competing 'Sects.'
Early America was actually a series of mini-theocracies: the Puritans in the North, the Anglicans in the South, the Quakers in the middle. They didn’t just 'get along' naturally; they were often hostile to one another. The 'miracle' of the Founding was the creation of a Neutral Public Square.
The Founders used Enlightenment tools to build a structure that mirrored the 'Universal' (Catholic) scope of an empire, even if they were Protestants. They looked to the Natural Law—a tradition deeply rooted in St. Thomas Aquinas—to find 'self-evident' truths that didn't depend on which Protestant denomination you belonged to.
So, while the 'engine' was Protestant, the 'steering wheel' was a secularized version of Catholic Natural Law and Greco-Roman Order. Without that steering wheel, the individual 'pioneer spirit' would have just led to a fractured, bickering wilderness, not a United Republic