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Notes -
There is a big difference between
and
I suspect people are more worried are more about the latter than the former.
Thomas Jefferson would dis-agree.
In theory, sure. The argument is that in practice, the results tended toward a Protestant framework, and that other religions — particularly Catholicism and Judaism, but also to a lesser extent Buddhism, achieved the tolerance they did by "Protestantizing" their forms of practice to varying degrees. Indeed, it's not just Sullivan who has argued that the way Americans — particularly the courts — think of religion almost entirely in terms of beliefs about the supernatural (orthodoxy over orthopraxy) is very sola scriptura and sola fides in character.
I've seen something along these lines also raised as a criticism of modern reconstructionist neopaganism as contrasted to both (what we know of) the original, as well as surviving polytheistic practices (such as Shinto and Hinduism). Specifically, that neopagans tend to focus a lot more on belief — personal belief — in a list of deities, as opposed to centering upon the performance of rites, making of sacrificial offerings, reading of omens; that "traditional" polytheism is much more orthopractic and — for lack of a better word — transactional.
Back during the Iraq War, and still occasionally since, I encounter people online arguing that Islam "isn't a religion," but is instead a "political ideology" or similar. And when those folks bother to try to make case for this position, it usually boils down to an inability to fully squeeze the likes of fiqh into that Protestant-tinged frame of what is or isn't a religion.
For that matter, even that proposed reduction of freedom of religion to "freedom of conscience" is based on the implication that the most important part of "religion" is what you, in the privacy of your own head, do or don't think about god(s) and the supernatural. (I'd note that this is a rather unusual view historically speaking. The Romans would have found it pretty alien. Their contemporaries in China too. Probably the Aztecs and the Incas, too.)
And I'll note that contemporary American protestantism is, ironically, pretty orthopraxic. Modern day American protestants, some confessionals aside, are not very focused on believing in specific doctrines. Evangelicals care more about making a personal devotion to Jesus, a practice, and within broader Christianity many of them are not very orthodox at all. Liberal protestants, of course, well...
Catholicism is more orthodoxic, but Catholic doctrine returns to orthopraxy by the requirement of works for salvation.
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