A Country is a group of people set up to support themselves as a State with the intention of Survival, sharing some form of nationality and common purpose.
The Vatican City is composed of an administrative structure to support an organisation that happens to have some territory. It has people of many nationalities living their, all of whom have some function in the Catholic Church. It is more akin to the United Nations Plaza in New York than Belgium.
It may happen to be listed as a country, but it is an anomaly being the mere rump of the papal states and now is the administrative center of a religion.
To quote it as a normal country when the question is "Which country is most religious is silly beyond measure.
The United States has Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Taoists, and Shintoists.
I’m not aware of any population of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Taoists, or Shintoists in Vatican City.
Well, there, you see? The U.S. is more Christian and more Muslim, more Sikh, more Buddhist, more Taoist, etc. than Vatican City. We’re also way more atheist.
They do have that really good library of pornography, now…
(Just in case you haven’t caught on, I am only quipping here.)
No. You quoted a politician politicking. The Britishreally don’t actually care about religion. More recent immigrants do but for the rest of us religion is not part of our national or personal identity beyond the reflexive and content-free ticking of the C of E box on the census form. We live in a culture informed by it but it is not an active force any more even if we still get married in churches or pretend to be religious for 6 months to get into the local C of E school.
We are a post-Christian society, which is what the former arch-bishop of Canterbury was saying and to which Cameron was responding.
Cameron was doing some defensive politicking. When the tories talk about religion they are really indulging in dog-whistle anti-immigration politics aimed at UKIP supporters. He’s trying to shore up his white, elderly middle class vote in the south and get a slice of the angry white working class anti-immigrant vote in urban areas.
Certainly…you could perhaps take a look at this list here.
Feel free to look up countries in that whole Central and South America regions (and let’s not forget my own home country of Mexico, ehe?) for countries that are more Christian…or do they not count as ‘real’ countries either? You seem focused almost exclusively on Europe as the only viable countries to look at…so, you could look up several in Eastern Europe (assuming THEY count). You will find that, actually, the US is not even in the top 10 of the ‘most Christian’ nations…maybe not even in the top 20, though that’s just me skimming the list.
For someone who talks about the US a lot you don’t actually seem to know that much about it. You do realize that a lot of the sensational stuff on TV and in the news is there because, well, it is sensational…right?
Maybe if you discount most of Africa and Latin America, and even a few European countries.
There are about 50 mostly Christian countries with higher self-professed religiosity than the United States, as well as a few others divided between Muslims and Christians (like Lebanon and Nigeria).
Israeli writer Yochanan Gordon:“When Genocide Is Permissible.” Posted on the Times of Israel website, which shortly took it down, but you can still read the article at the latter link. It’s not clear whether he’s advocating genocide on all Palestinians or all Gazans or just members of Hamas – in fact, he seems to blur the distinction.
For the record, some people are idiots. And Yochanan Gordon isn’t an Israeli and he’s not a writer. He’s a New Yorker who’s a sales manager for his father’s newspaper.
Certainly, the U.S. displays more overtly religious feuds than most other countries.
However, Pjen used the fact that he did not know the religion of his associates as an example of how distant Britain is from being “religious.” I simply countered that his experience exactly mimics my own. So where is his point? Similarly, you are now trying to make an issue of your ignorance of the religions of your PMs. So what? I know JFK was Catholic and I think Nixon was raised Quaker, (a point I know only because of the irony of a Quaker presiding over the Vietnam War). I would have known Romney was Mormon because of the irony of far Right religious leaders attacking him for that, but I have no idea of the denominations any other presidents. Rather than my vision being filtered by the religion surrounding me, I suspect that you are confusing the activities of a relatively small number of people who attempt to impose their religious beliefs on the rest of society, (leading to the discussions on this board), with the actual day-to-day religious awareness of the vast majority of Americans.
It is, indeed, possible for religious groups to rally their membership to promote or (more typically) attack specific issues. I would never claim that the U.S. has achieved some sort of secular steady state. However, the perception of religion permeating daily life, like the other foreign perception that there are people having open gunfights on every street in the country and where no one is safe in his or her home, is a distorted reality based on selective news reports that does not actually reflect the daily life of the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Biden’s a Catholic, and I’m pretty sure that Hillary is a Methodist. But there does seem to be a sort of generic Episcopresbyluthamethobaptist religion out there, sort of a generic American Protestantism that tends to just prevail, where so long as a candidate or somebody doesn’t make a big deal out it, it’s just generally not thought about,
Also, I missed this. How is John Boehner from “the south”? He was born just outside Cincinnati, and lived his entire life in the Cincinnati metro area. Admittedly, it’s Southern Ohio, but he’s a Yankee. And he’s Catholic. McConnell is the Baptist.
Hillary is a Methodist- I was strapped for reading material on a bus one time and had to peruse her horrendously awful autobiography, in which she talks a lot about her church.
You seem focused almost exclusively on Europe as the only viable countries to look at…so, you could look up several in Eastern Europe (assuming THEY count). You will find that, actually, the US is not even in the top 10 of the ‘most Christian’ nations…maybe not even in the top 20, though that’s just me skimming the list.
