He may have fewer regiments than Gordon Brown, but it hasn't done Pope Benedict XVI any harm with the Americans. The impact made by the papal visit to the US has been rather remarkable, right from the start, what with the President meeting him off the plane and thousands singing Happy Birthday on the White House lawn.

The red-carpet reception is the more interesting, because Benedict is not John Paul II, who might have been invented to appeal to Americans. He's a war-era German; he's shy and cerebral; and this is the first papal visit since hair-raising child abuse scandals were exposed in Boston.

But the Americans, famously, do God. As Mr Bush told the Pope: “America is a place where faith and reason co-exist in harmony.” The theme of the visit, Christ Our Hope, is one they take perfectly seriously.

An obvious measure of the place of religion in the national psyche is the way the presidential hopefuls lined up to associate themselves with Benedict. Barack Obama declared: “It will not only be Catholics who are listening to the Holy Father's message of hope and peace; all Americans will be listening”; Hillary Clinton, a Methodist, opined that the US was “blessed” to be hosting the Pope. And even those parts of the papal agenda that could get up people's noses - the reservations about Iraq, the prospect of prayers for the perpetrators at Ground Zero - haven't got in the way of a blitz of media coverage.

Bobblehead Pope gives Vatican a headache

To the dismay of the Vatican, the Pope’s trip has spawned a large range of kitsch memorabilia including a bobblehead doll

BACKGROUND

• America holds a papal birthday party

• Pope's 'shame' over paedophile priests

• The Pope in quotes during his visit to the United States

• Pope to pray for redemption of terrorists

• American Catholics must stop and listen to the Pope

BACKGROUND

• A commitment to keep faith in the public space

• Multilingual Pope calls for peace

• Vatican looks to heal 950-year Orthodox rift

• Pope to discuss influx of Anglicans

• Vatican workers promised higher reward

Multimedia

• Pictures: Pope visits America

• Best of the worst Pope memorabilia

• Popemobiles past and present

This will just confirm in the mind of many Brits that Americans are not like us. Overt religiosity is suspect here. In fact, in the past decade, it's remarkable the extent to which it's regarded as a matter for consenting individuals in designated places, not for the public domain - a mindset that has informed, for instance, the debate about the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. There's a real change from, say, the unaffected Christianity of the Labour leader, John Smith, and the strangulated way that Gordon Brown talks about religion - his parents' Christianity wasn't animated, apparently, by “theology”.

Tony Blair, of course, kept his conversion to Catholicism until he left office. He recently explained: “In our culture... to admit to having faith [means] you may be considered weird.”

Americans may go overboard in the association between religion and politics but their assumption that religion is something to be upfront about and celebrated is more humane and natural than the sneery agnosticism of our political classes.

The Pope suggested that a secular state like the US, where all religions are welcomed, is a positive model from which Europeans can learn. Britain, with a state religion that most public figures are embarrassed to profess, is a case in point.

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