Is Christianity Anti-American?

This question came to me when I was thinking about the Republican conception of freedom that I loosely outlined in the post below. What this conception (which guides our government's ethos of Liberty) states is that to be free, we need a non-dominating dominator, someone who can protect us without infringing on our freedoms. How is this possible? One answer is that a ruler can simply be benevolent and let the citizen have free rein like a horse whose rider lets it go wherever it may please, but the Republican conception of freedom regards the presence of an arbitrary will, irrespective of it being invoked, as infringing upon one's liberty. This train of thought comes from classical democracy where such a relationship was only thought of in slave-master terms, and he who has a master is never free just as the horse with free rein is in constant peril of being jerked back by the rider. So long story short, government by the people is a way to have each person rule themselves, in some form or another, to prevent an arbitrary dominating will from ruling.

Given this essential American value, how can a ("devout") American regard the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious premises as just or fair beliefs? I know that is a strange way to phrase the question, but having a god with an arbitrary will who may either control your life 100% of the time or may be like the rider letting the horse wander is submitting to a tyrannical regime. If your god is all-powerful, etc., then you are at the mercy of an arbitrary will and thus unfree. While the separation of church and state in this country may provoke many to not conflate their thoughts on government with those on religion (although it doesn't seem to deter some from applying religious beliefs to government) I find this apparent contradiction worth pressing. Maybe this is why our founding fathers were deists rather than Christians, since reconciling these beliefs doesn't seem to be an easy task.

Modern Freedom

"Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains," said Rousseau quite a while ago. I think his quote can be applied in much different ways today than he had originally intended, without compromising the essential truth of the statement. While he was concerned more with how government can be a non-dominating protective force, an aspect of individual freedom in contemporary, industrial society that I have been mulling over recently is institutional freedom, or better put, freedom from the constraints of institutions.
Whether we enter them voluntarily or not, social institutions that govern our use of time and constrain our choices through their requirements are a form of arbitrary will to which we all succumb. Even when we enter these institutions voluntarily, such as going to school or taking up a job, there is a point where the duties to the institution are not like the pain undergone by Ulysses when he was bound to the mast as he passed the Sirens. (He was under his own will, despite the pain it caused him, and he came out the better for it.)
Being a slave to obligations isn't always like Ulysses' case though... this one is unfinished for now

Beauty

Is attraction to beauty shallow or deep? That's a basic way of expressing a question I've been grappling with for a while. You could ask if there's any other goal in life than to seek out and create beauty (and its related forms such as love, kindness, etc.), yet at the same time, life seems at times nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes put it. I think it was Sartre that said that the only thing left to figure out is how to live, and maybe living in search of beauty is the answer. There's a lot more to say there, but I think it goes with the flow of our times- Beauty is both objective and completely subjective, collectively experienced and different to every individual, and appreciated by all. Plus, we live in an era where the ugliest parts of life, notably the decay of the human body, are mitigated by science and control over our surroundings. In other times when people lived with physical maladies and often died of chronic conditions, no wonder the afterlife was the repository of all beauty. And I digress, but there's much more to be said here...