Your challenge is to make the US less Christian (That doesn't necessarily mean less religious and this is the interesting part.).
You can use any PoD(s)*.

*But please don't come up with something irrelevant like "One Christian guy who is also American dies: the end."
 
No Chinese Exclusion.
A less assimilated former slave population that retains something Voudou/Santaria like.
A Fascist America, where religion is co opted by the government and when Fasicm is overthown, Christianity is somewhat discredited.
 
How about Islam? I'm thinking about a bigger community of muslim slaves in the South.

I have no reliable information, but I am under the impression that the idea that there were many Muslims among the slave population is revisionist history in the worst sense or that many slaves, if they were technically Muslim, came from places like Mali where they prayed to Allah and the ancestoral/nature spirits and the a latter won out once cut off from the cultural infrastructure of Islam.
 
I am under the impression that the idea that there were many Muslims among the slave population is revisionist history in the worst sense
Why in the worst sense? Sorry if the question sounds stupid, but, not being American, I'm not enough informed on this topic.
 
That's a great idea, but I don't think it fits in pre-1900.


Doh!

Others mentioned more non Christian immigration but I don't know how plausible that is. Maybe a later Civil War - thus white supremacy and slavery become more ingrained into Southern thinking and the same outcome (Union victory) thencauses Southerners to conclude that there must not be a God.
 
For a pre-1900 divergence but with the main consequences happening in the twentieth century, something like Turtledove's TL-191 would probably see this. In OTL, following WW1 and especially WW2, Europe saw a gradual turning away from Christianity, with significant percentages of people ceasing to become even nominal Christians, and many others becoming less actively practicing even if they continue to identify themselves as Christian. (Europe as a whole is about 25% non-Christian today, with actual church attendances much lower in many though not all European countries).

Given how North America is a battleground in Tl-191, then you'd probably see a similar response in that timeline.
 
Tenskwatawa's prophetic teachings continue with the survival of his brother Tecumseh in the event of the Confederacy's surrender to the US or fleeing to Canada. Even later joining the US voluntarily after Tecumseh and Tenskwatwa's death in the 1830s steadily collapses their state's integrity. Any other these situations in a TL may result in a syncretic primitivist faith for many Midwestern Native American populations, possibly together with a greater population of their peoples in the modern US.

Virtually any non-Christian immigrant group being larger today would affect their demographics, though personally it'd be interesting to see non-Christian immigration from the New World into the US in the 20th century. One possibility of this is to have Haiti reject Christianity during their Revolution or to distance themselves from the French, another would be to have the Male Revolts in Brazil succeed/perform better to reinforce a Afro-Brazilian Muslim population. They may later be persecuted in Brazil or underdeveloped in their own nation to encourage their immigration into the US like many Latin American minorities.
 
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Why in the worst sense? Sorry if the question sounds stupid, but, not being American, I'm not enough informed on this topic.

In the sense that I suspect (and like I said I do not know) just glancing at the history that otl there were few Muslims in the mostly Yorba/Gold Coast stock of most blacks and that the idea that there was a significant Muslim presence is overemphasized for ideological purposes.

Basically, the reason Yorba/Santaria came out of the slave population was because that was the strongest religious influence at the time.
 
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