Yet England feel way more secular than USA in practice, given how much Christianity seems to matter in US politics.

The highly religious nature of US settlers is directly connected to our secular freedoms. A lot of early settlers were pretty extreme practicers of their religions and faced persecution in Europe. They left to practice their religion in a place where they wouldn't be burned as a heretic. It's interesting that these opposing extremists were able to get along separately by agreeing to keep the government secular

> They left to practice their religion in a place where they wouldn't be burned as a heretic.

Not true, at least in the obvious case of the Pilgrims of Plymouth. They were perfectly free to practice their religion when they lived in the Netherlands. They moved away because they wanted to create their own strict theocratic colony. The Netherlands, in their eyes, had too much religious freedom.

There is a lot of debate over why they moved. e.g.

-running out of room -economics -impending war -wanting to venture into the unknown

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/91317/holland-first...

Even that specific example is a bit of a gray area imo. They were persecuted in England and tried to live in the Netherlands but found life hard to adjust and were also wanting to keep their English identity. So, it is more of persecution by the Church of England that pushed them away.

The Netherlands do get a point here for tolerance imo.

It's an interesting piece of American history worth drilling down on.

The Virginia Statue of Religious Freedom originated from one of the Southern colonies, which tended towards more English mainstream religion (Jefferson himself was raised in the Church of England, but considered himself a Deist). It served as a sort of "non-aggression pact" between the religions, since the various sects of the Northern colonies had quite a bit of political power by virtue of concentration of their adherents and isolation from traditional European religious power.

Yes, and that’s related to the formation of the Church of England too. The religious settlements in the reign of Elizabeth I and others aimed to bring Catholic-leaning and Protestant-leaning believers together in one broad church, but it couldn’t accommodate every sect, so some were excluded from the national church, persecuted, and eventually left. You can still see the division today in high and low Anglican churches.

It is so fascinating how fascinated all these Germanic kingdoms in Western Europe were with emulating the Romans

Until Henry VIII's divorce of Catherine of Aragon, England had the same church as Rome.

Why? Rome was vastly richer and more powerful than they were, and the only model of success they ever knew.