# Religious America...why? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 30, 2012, 10:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religious-america-why/617254 "2012-03-30T10:04:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Bibliothecarius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b2d939/32.png) [@Bibliothecarius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bibliothecarius)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2012, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religious-america-why/617254/81 "2012-04-06T13:41:13Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > . **Bibliothecarius** , your answer sounds as if you think everybody who lives south of the Río Grande is an exclusive descendant of those “poor, lost savages”. Most people have a mixture of bloodlines, with “white” and “red” being the most common ones but not the only ones. Not at all. I acknowledge it is now very ethnically diverse. I’m just saying that historically Christianity came to Latin America as a result of conquest, not as a result of people moving there in search of religious freedom for themselves as in the U.S. Even after many generations, there’s a difference between believing something because your ancestors believed it and they passed it on to you, and believing something because your ancestors were _forcibly converted_ to it and they passed it on to you. The same applies to European nations where the state endorsed various beliefs at various times in history and woe to you if you didn’t agree with them - convert or be killed for being a heretic. Christianity, after all, only moved from its state of relative obscurity as a Jewish messiah cult when Constantine got converted and proceeded to spread it through the Roman Empire. Religion in today’s world would look very different if he had left everybody else alone to believe whatever they wanted. This was one of the unique features of America - it was established as a place with no state-endorsed religion (well, more or less at least until our era…) and on the principles of freedom of (or even from) religion (many of the colonists would have liked to have created a state religion from their own beliefs, but that wasn’t feasible if we were to be one nation). In many countries even today, there is a state religion, even if it’s only really on paper and no one is put to death anymore for believing otherwise. For instance, the Church of England is still the officially sanctioned church in England, even though they have freedom of religion and it seems to be more acceptable to be an atheist in Britain than in America. But this is the one of the things that makes American religion different from religion in many other countries. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2012, 4:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religious-america-why/617254/82 "2012-04-07T04:50:29Z")
> [@Bibliothecarius](#): > > This was one of the unique features of America - it was established as a place with no state-endorsed religion (well, more or less at least until our era…) and on the principles of freedom of (or even from) religion (many of the colonists would have liked to have created a state religion from their own beliefs, but that wasn’t feasible if we were to be one nation). In many countries even today, there is a state religion, even if it’s only really on paper and no one is put to death anymore for believing otherwise. For instance, the Church of England is still the officially sanctioned church in England, even though they have freedom of religion and it seems to be more acceptable to be an atheist in Britain than in America. But this is the one of the things that makes American religion different from religion in many other countries. I recently read a fascinating book, _[God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World](http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Back-Revival-Changing/dp/B0042P58BK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333772940&sr=8-1)_. The authors point out that if you were a Church-of-England minister or a Lutheran Minister in Sweden or a similarly mainstream clergyman anywhere in western Europe, you had a guaranteed salary, a well-defined parish, and no personal motivation to grow your membership. (You might have a religious motivation, of course.) On the other hand, if you were a clergyman in the United States, you had no guarantees. Your congregation grew or shrank based on how much effort you put into serving them. As a result, it seems pretty clear that the USA has always produced more dynamic and committed preachers than Europe. Competition keeps 'em honest. Someone asked earlier in the thread whether this had always been true. Micklethwait and Woolridge say that it is, and cite sources such as d’Toqueville reporting that the number of churches and fervor of the congregations in the United States stood out from other countries. > [@Shakester](#): > > ``` > Also, and not something I know much about, but my understanding of everything south of the USA is that it's heavily Catholic. Is that the case? > > ``` > > I mean Catholic in a religious sense, not just “culturally Catholic” but actual church-going believers. Do the south-of-the-USA countries have a comparable level of religiousness to the US or are they more secular in practice? Based on what I’ve read, it’s traditionally been the case that the majority of Latin Americans self-identified as Catholic but were not particularly devout. It’s been said about almost every Latin American country that the typical person goes to church three times in their life: for baptism, wedding, and funeral. But as others have mentioned, there have been dramatic changes in the past thirty years or so, both in Latin America and in places like South Korea, China, India, and central Africa. The driving force for a lot of it has been evangelical movements started in the United States. American approaches to religion have been spreading across the world just as all aspects of American culture have. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2012, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religious-america-why/617254/83 "2012-04-07T05:33:26Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#): > > **Napier** , I would say the “Religious Right” political strategy was built upon a preexisting base of generalized devotion and traditionalism which the Conservative Movement opportunistically hops on, and provides organization and focus that multiplies its visibility and power. We see this mainly on the right. It’s very telling that there’s apparently a large block of evangelical\* Christian Republicans who are uncomfortable with the fact that Mitt Romney is Mormon. Yet I’ve never heard anything about Democrats having similar misgivings about Harry Reid, who is also a Mormon (having been raised agnostic but accepted conversion to Mormonism during college), and having publicly expressed the opinion that Democrats better express the practical values of Mormonism than do Republicans. \*I mean _evangelical_ strictly in the American sense. ---
**Author:** ![Bemused](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/46a35a/32.png) [@Bemused](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bemused)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2012, 7:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religious-america-why/617254/84 "2012-04-07T07:47:11Z")
The USA has a history of intense religious fundamentalism that goes back to the days before the creation of the nation. After all, a substantial fraction of the emigrants to the New World were going in order to be free to practice their religion as they saw fit. The sheer genius of the US Constitution, which simultaneously enabled those religions AND kept them out of government, has harnessed the power that religion gives people and communities for the common good while restraining the evils that religion brings about when it gains control of government. For a couple of centuries, this balance existed more or less unchanged. Occasionally, religion would stir a bit, but then would get slapped back into its place (Scopes trial, for instance). In the last 30 years, however, that balance has been smashed. It has been smashed by a lot of clueless people who have decided that they, themselves are the almighty and the Anointed Ones, and they believe that those who adhere to a religious belief are inferior for believing in myths. The true irony of this is that many of these self-appointed Anointed Ones themselves adhere very strongly to a religion - the religion of Atheism, which is logically indistinguishable from any form of Theism. So, these self-righteous ones have been poking the sleeping giant of religious fundamentalism with a stick, while simultaneously smashing all the shackles that kept it in its place. Those shackles, after all, were mostly a social covenant of “you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone.” So now these totally Clueless Anointed Ones have awakened the giant. And the religious fundamentalist Giant of the United States is hands down the single most powerful force that exists in this nation. And it is being unshackled and irritated. We are all going to regret it. The atheists don’t have even a small fraction of the power needed to beat it; it will most certainly beat them. And it’ll take down most of our rights when it does so. While I can think of many evil governments that were not theocracies, I cannot think of one theocracy that was not an evil government. As for atheism being logically indistinguishable from any form of theism, all forms of theism break down fundamentally to the statement that “This which is not disproven is therefore proven” and therefore God exists (we have faith). Atheists just turn it around: “This which is not proven is therefore disproven” and therefore God does not exist (we have faith). The logical fallacy of both positions is manifestly obvious. Atheists try to justify their position by using science; science has not proven the existence of a creator, therefore there is no creator. Well, the bald fact of the matter is that science has nothing at all to say about a creator, either positive or negative. While science will never prove the existence of a creator unless science discovers the place where the creator signed his creation (“created by God, in 5000 BC” buried in a simply encoded form in the decimals of Pi starting at the 100,232 decimal place when expressed in base 63, or some such) it is a logical certainty that science will never positively disprove a creator either. After all, anything that science turns up can be quite adequately explained away as “God created it that way.” Thus, science is not the tool to use when denying a creator and those who use it as their justification merely demonstrate their ignorance of science, the scientific method, scientific process, and what science can and cannot do. And, in their air-headed self-righteousness, they are actively at work putting the forces that will finish off the Republic into motion. ---
**Author:** ![An\_Arky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/87869e/32.png) [@An\_Arky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/An_Arky)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2012, 11:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religious-america-why/617254/85 "2012-04-07T11:36:59Z")
You’re a few centuries late with that stuff, bub. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/religious-america-why/617254.md?page=4)