England has no shortage of religions, let me assure you. C of E, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, Latter Day Saints, Seventh Day Adventist, Christian Scientist, Quaker etc etc …
Any moderate sized town has a good selection of places for people not to bother going to on a Sunday.
Exactly, WotNot. Plus, is there any evidence for a significant proportion of Americans switching from one denomination to another, rather than sticking with that of their upbringing?
Given my earlier comments, readers of this thread may be interested in this thread in the Pit.
I think it would be fair to say that in much of North-West Europe religion is regarded as being just an offshoot of government, and treated with similar enthusiasm. People tick the relevant box in the same way they tick the ‘are you an honest tax-paying citizen’ box. The amount of people who actually pay even the most cursory attention to religous matters is, as far as I can see, tiny.
One of the things Britons find peculiar about Islam is that people actually believe in it. In my experience enthusiastic religious types are regarded in much the same light as people who enthuse about how much they love paying their taxes - not necessarily a reason for ostracism although you probably would try to avoid sitting next to them at a dinner party.
In southern/eastern europe the situation is a lot different, and catholicism is a much stronger part of cultural identity. The only european political parties I am aware of which explicitly state their religious orientation come from these areas. How much of it is actual belief versus social conformity, I really have no idea.
The situation in the US (lots of people REALLY believe, go to church regularly, live their lives according to scripture, talk about it all the time, etc.) is one of the many things that cause people over here to go "Americans. :rolleyes: "
I am notionally a Lutheran because I was born in Norway and was baptised in the local church and all that stuff, but am an atheist. If people ask me what church I am a member of, I say “Lutheran”. If people ask me what religion I am, I say ‘Don’t have one’. 
Christian Democrats/Christian Socialists of Germany?
Christian Social People’s Party of Luxembourg?
Christian Democrats and Christian Socialists in Belgium?
Christian Democratic Appeal and Christian Union in the Netherlands?
Christian Democrats in Denmark?
Christian Democratic Party and Christian Union Party in Norway?
Christian Democrats in Sweden?
Christian Democrats in Finland?
Christian Democratic People’s Party and Christian Social Party in Switzerland?
Perhaps I misunderstood what you meant.
There is. According to that site, about 16% of adults said they have changed their religious identification at some point in their lifetime. And that number probably doesn’t include people who identify as, say, Lutheran but go to, say, a Methodist church for one reason or another. That’s not that unusual, especially for two fairly closely-related denominations like that.
It’s also fairly common for young adults to not be involved with a religious faith- some of them change the way they identify themselves when they do this, some don’t. As an example, Mr. Neville and I are just about the only 20-something/30-something couple with no kids who regularly go to our synagogue. There are a lot of families with kids, and a lot of older adults, but not many like us, and not many 20-something/30-something unmarried people, either. Most of those people, if they grew up Jewish (many American liberal Jews are converts, like me), probably went to synagogue as a kid, if asked would still identify themselves as Jewish, and at least some of them will come back when they have kids. I think that’s a fairly typical pattern in churches, as well.
Something else to note is that there are a lot of people who identify themselves with a particular religion, and believe in (at least some of) the tenets of that religion, but might only go to a church or temple on holidays, if that.
slaphead writes:
> . . . One of the things Britons find peculiar about Islam is that people actually
> believe in it. In my experience enthusiastic religious types are regarded in much
> the same light as people who enthuse about how much they love paying their
> taxes - not necessarily a reason for ostracism although you probably would try
> to avoid sitting next to them at a dinner party. . . The situation in the US (lots of
> people REALLY believe, go to church regularly, live their lives according to
> scripture, talk about it all the time, etc.) is one of the many things that cause
> people over here to go "Americans. "
Having lived in the U.K. for three years and having been back there seven times over the past fifteen years (including four weeks in August this year) I must say that I have never found the contrast in religious belief to be as clearcut as this. If things were really this way you would expect that I would very seldom have met anyone with any religious belief in the U.K. and I would very often have met people who constantly trumpeted their religous belief in the U.S. In fact, there was actually surprisingly little difference. I’m comparing similar social situations in the U.K. and the U.S., incidentally. I spent most of my time, both on and off work, in both places with mostly urban (or suburban), middle-class, well-educated people. Only slightly more Americans than Britons tended to do anything that advertised their religious faith (like having religious items on their desks, wearing crosses or other religious items, mentioning their church work in conversation, etc.). I’ve known few Americans (or Britons, for that matter) who were obnoxious about pushing their faith. If anything, although more of the Americans were regular churchgoers, more of the ones who were seemed to make no connection between going to church and any other part of their life.
I suppose that someone could claim that the well-educated set that I hung around with in both places was untypical. Well, the rural, working-class, mostly not very well-educated people that I grew up with weren’t that much different either. Yes, more of them went to church and perhaps more of them spoke more about their faith. It was still untypical to be obnoxious about pushing one’s faith. Again, although more went to church, a large percentage made no connection between going to church and any other part of their life.
xtisme writes:
> While my own statement that the US was founded by folks seeking religious
> freedom may have been a bit overblow, by the same token so was Wendell
> Wagner’s categoric denial of it. . . Really this wasn’t central to the point I was
> trying to make in any case…which is that Europe has historically had a lot of
> bad experience with religion so its no great shock that religion is at a low point
> there (taken as a whole, noting that there are exceptions)…while America
> hasn’t really had anything similar.
Look, the whole notion that the U.S.'s relatively larger proportion of people with (declared) religious faith, as compared to Europe, has something to do with events that happened in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries (when most of the immigration that you’re talking about happened and when the religious wars in Europe happened) falls apart upon examination. First, the people who came to America for religious religions were a pretty small proportion of all the people who came. The prime example that people give for this was the Pilgrims, but the Pilgrims were in fact really nothing more than a footnote in American history. They were only a small part of the immigration even to the Massachusetts Bay colony during the seventeenth century and were swamped by ordinary Anglicans by 1700. Nor have their descendents been particularly religious. The descendents of the Pilgrims are now nearly all either Congregationalists (i.e., liberal Protestants), Unitarians (vaguely spiritual people who mostly don’t believe in Christian doctrines), and atheists. Yes, some of the other immigrants came for religious reasons, but that doesn’t mean that the people who came were any more religious than the ones that stayed in the U.S. The people who stayed in Europe were generally just as religious, but they happened to be part of the established church where they lived.
Indeed, the whole notion that religious persecution and immigration made Americans more religious and religious wars made Europeans less religious is a post hoc, propter hoc argument. If the proportions of religious faith had turned out the other way, you could make an equally convincing argument that that’s how it had to turn out. You would say, “Well, being persecuted made Americans more wary of religious faith and enduring religious wars made Europeans more strong in their faith.” There’s just no proof of the implications Religious Persecutions and Immigrations -> Religious Faith and Religious Wars -> Lack of Religious Faith.
Second, the argument falls apart on ethnic grounds. Do you know which ethnic group in the U.S. has the highest proportion of belief in God and attendance at church? It’s African-Americans. None of their ancestors came to the U.S. for religious reasons. Or what about Hispanics? Again, their proportion of belief in god and attendance at church is noticeably higher than other Americans, and yet none of their ancestors came to the U.S. for religious reasons.
Third, the argument doesn’t work on regional grounds either. If we look at the parts of the U.S. that were most religious in about 1800, they don’t match up to the areas that are most religious now. In 1800, the northern U.S. (what we could call the northeastern U.S. now) was the strongest in religious faith. In contrast, the southern U.S. (what we would call the southeastern U.S. now) was weakest in religious faith. Those proportions have now completely turned around.
Indeed, whatever difference there is in the amount of (declared) religious faith between the U.S. and Europe must be the result of events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1800, there wasn’t much difference in religious faith between the U.S. and Europe. The differences, such as there are, must have happened later. What ever caused the differences in the amount of religious faith in the U.S. must be the results of things that happened purely within the U.S. after 1800, not of things that happened earlier because of immigration from Europe. I don’t know exactly what these causes were, but it might have been the effect of the Second Great Awakening (the religious revival of the early nineteenth century) and Fundamentalism (a movement of the early twentieth century). (Get yourself a book on American religious history and look these terms up if you don’t know them.) I think that the presence of Fundamentalism in the U.S. is a lot of what people see as the difference between Americans and Europeans, and yet it didn’t exist before the twentieth century. The term “fundamentalism” didn’t even exist before the twentieth century.
We have it in Finland. According to the tax officials, it’s 1% this year for the Evangelical Lutherans and 1,50% for Russian Orthodox living in the Helsinki area. So we even get taxed differently according to what we are and what county we live in. 
From what I’ve observed on a day-to-day basis, religious affairs in general aren’t that important to a lot of (younger) people. I belong to the Evangelical Lutheran church, but the last time I was at any kind of religious happening was four years ago, at my brother’s confirmation. Most younger Lutherans, at least, seem to go through life attending the most basic religious happenings – baptisms, confirmations (this gives you the right to be someone’s godparent, and also the right to get married in a church, so for most people it’s worth the small hassle), weddings and funerals and such – but don’t really bother with the rest of it. There’s a word in Finnish, “tapakristitty”, “Christian by habit”, which encompasses this pretty well.
I also got to thinking about elmwood’s comment about Italian- and Polish-Americans. Could immigrant status also have an effect on observance of religious customs? I know it’s been stated that many formerly non-observant Muslims from Somalia started going to mosques more often when they came over to Finland as refugees in the 1990’s. If you’re going to a strange country where you don’t have that many prior connections or people you know, as e.g. the immigrants to America usually did, it would make sense (to me at least) that people would start to gather in places and situations that had some connection with their former homeland and where they could meet with others that shared their background. Thus, things like going to church would have more emphasis than they might “back at home” and might endure over generations.
I dunno. I might be talking out of my ass here.
Don’t forget changes outside of the US that would tend to reduce religious observance: the UK, for instance, saw a wide-spread and popular Secularist movement towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century – I don’t know whether the US had anything similar. Also, the two World Wars seem to have had a deeper impact on people’s lifestyles and attitudes in western Europe than in America (hardly surprising, of course).
WotNot writes:
> Don’t forget changes outside of the US that would tend to reduce religious
> observance: the UK, for instance, saw a wide-spread and popular Secularist
> movement towards the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century –
> I don’t know whether the US had anything similar. Also, the two World Wars
> seem to have had a deeper impact on people’s lifestyles and attitudes in
> western Europe than in America (hardly surprising, of course).
The end of the nineteenth century (more precisely, about 1880 to 1910) was also (I think) a relative low point in religious movements in the U.S. The First Great Awakening (the early eighteenth century), the Second Great Awakening (the early nineteenth century), and the initial era of Fundamentalism (whose early period of growth was about 1910 to 1930) were relative high points in religious movements. The time of the American Revolution and the two decades just after it was a relatively low period for religion in the U.S. Given that the period 1880 to 1910 was a relatively secular period in both Europe and the U.S., I’m not sure why the U.S. changed just afterwards. Fundamentalism was clearly a reaction the secularism of the period just before it. (For instance, it was a reaction to Biblical form criticism, which was a big thing in the late nineteenth century.) Why this reaction happened in the U.S. and not in Europe (or at least more in the U.S. than in Europe) is what I don’t understand.
World War II had a lot more influence on changing the attitudes of Americans than is usually admitted. It had a lot of effect in liberalizing the cultural beliefs of people, partly by sending so many Americans abroad to be in contact with foreigners and partly by sending so many Americans to live in other parts of the country. In some sense, the 1960’s were the delayed effect of World War II. The 1950’s were an unsuccessful attempt to hold back the changing attitudes that developed during World War II.
Are any of these parties really Christian though? I thought they were are all called ‘Christian blahblah’ in much the same way that other parties are called ‘Democratic blahblah’ or ‘Reform blahblah’ or ‘Social blahblah’.
For instance, “Christian Democrat” really means “Center-Left” - I have never seen a party in North-Western Europe make a play on religion beyond the basic ‘motherhood and apple pie’ level. I am not familiar with all the parties in your list, but I would imagine that most of them do not tend to wheel out the “If you are a real Christian you will vote for us because only we follow the way of the Lord” routine very often, whereas I believe in other parts of Europe it is not that uncommon for parties to seek the endorsement of e.g. bishops and so on - religion is an explicit part of the pitch rather than just a platitudinous label.
This is the problem with anecdotal observation, I guess. I have only met a handful of Brits who have any kind of religious belief, whereas of the Americans I have met a good proportion are religious. Both our experiences are true, but I have no idea which is more representative of the general situation.
I love Finnish. Looks great, sounds great, has really useful words too.