You’re forgetting - as you damned northern hemispherians so often do - Australia and New Zealand.
Au & NZ themselves were never in any danger during WW1 - though we joined in at the start and not three years later like the yanks. (Also, it ended in 1918, not 1917.)
Aside from Darwin, Broome, and a fewminor attacks elsewhere, Australia certainly wasn’t devastated by WW2, and as far as I know NZ didn’t suffer a scratch.
Yet both countries are among the least religious nations on Earth. 100 years ago Au & NZ were just as religious as the UK and continental Europe, so the loss of faith can’t be attributed to the devastation caused by the world wars. It’s not “the US vs Europe” - it’s “the US vs the rest of the developed world”.
Basically everywhere that used to be “Christendom” is now mostly Apathist. Except the USA.
My theory about the religiosity of the US is that it in part caused by the US being such a geographically huge, endlessly mobile, culturally diverse country. Along with the things previous posters have mentioned, one major thing religion provides is a built-in community/identity. You can move to a new place and be warmly welcomed by your co-religionists whereas otherwise you would be an outsider for a long time. This is not a big issue in Europe but relocation is a very large part of the US experience and identity.
The fanatic tribalism of the radical right wing in the US feels to me partly fueled by a sense of oppression and contempt by the people who have more power, a ‘circle the wagons against the enemy’ motivation. Shared belief is the key to being identified as ‘one of us’.
I think this is a big part of the draw of mega churches, by the way. They often arise in faceless formless suburbia where there is no other obvious sense of community. They not only provide a religious center, they also do things like provide a ready-made friend and extended family feeling, as well as practical services like child care, elder care, etc. Newcomers are often assigned to a sponsoring family to make sure they feel very befriended, have everything they might need and all their questions answered and that they hook up asap to organized activities.
For those who don’t feel disconnected, lost, lonely, troubled, or that their lives lack meaning, there wouldn’t be any appeal, obviously.
Perhaps in more stable cultures, the need for community is taken care of outside of religion, but here, those structures are often very lacking.
I understand that, too, and I wasn’t trying to imply that Pennsylvania was the only place where new denominations could form. I was simply pointing out that because part of the Penn business model was not giving a shit about religion, it was fertile ground for new religious movements, and also, that it wasn’t solely founded as a haven for Quakers in the same way that Massachusetts was for Congregationalists or Maryland was for Catholics.
Let’s not get too bogged down in this. At this point, it’s a hijack.
Has the US always been really religious? It seems to me that there has been a major upswing in religiosity, especially on the right, in the past 30 years.
It comes and goes as a political force. I think the US seems more religious now in part because its less religious and more religiously diverse. Even when I grew up, everyone belonged to a church (whether you believed or not) in my smallish town. The debate was more over “which” religion, but the differences between the Lutherans and the Catholics in town weren’t huge. And Catholics married Catholics. Now…the very existence of Muslims or Jews or Catholics or atheists in your neighborhood threatens the soul of your future grandchildren. And We Must Do Something.
My formerly Catholic cousins all ended up in Megachurches for this reason. They moved to 'burbs and needed community. The Catholic church can’t provide the community - the congregations tend to be smaller and older - a mega church has a huge population and you can find a group that shares your interests - young singles, newly married, starting a family. Interested in needlepoint or books or playing softball. (Granted, within the limited world vision - you aren’t going to find groups for “people who want to get shitfaced” or "people looking to swing.) Its like “need friends? - add water!”
I think you also have to include poor education into the construct. The pockets of hyper-religiousity tend to form where the schools are poorest. Then the mega-church community forms it’s own school, and the spiral begins. It only takes one generation to create a poor, poorly educated, and reactively super-pious community.
The other thing is that it happens here because we allow it to happen. I can’t imagine Germany or the UK allowing an insular community to spring up and begin “marrying” 13-year-old girls to old men who already have 2-3 wives and 17 children. That sort of thing requires an extremely rural geographic region and a confusion of Governments pushing responisbility off one on the other.
In law enforcement alone you can see City, County, State,and Federal officers all trying to make each other dedicate the budget necessary to deal with these complicated situations. Everyone is clear that crimes are being committed, but it’s not clear who sould put a stop to it, or how.
I’ll note that, while Osteen and some other “megachurches” focus on “prosperity theology”, that is by no means the rule. Many megachurches are more closely aligned to more traditional conservative / fundamentalist theology, and all of the fellowship and affinity activity is essentially a recruiting tool to get people into more serious Bible study and traditional worship.
Not true- it only SEEMS that way because, until about 40 years ago, there was absolutely no NEED for conservative Christians to become vocal or active in politics.
In the 1950s, the people you think of as conservative Christians typically voted a straight Democratic ticket. Why? Because EVERYBODY agreed on the social issues! Even the most liberal Democrats would have laughed at the idea of gay marriage in 1956. Even the most liberal Democrats opposed porn and accepted prayer in public schools. NOBODY in the Democratic party was pushing for abortion.
Hence, there was no reason for Christian conservatives to worry about social issues, and they could safely vote their pocketbooks. Since most of them weren’t (and aren’t) rich, they voted for the Democrats.
The rise of the Religious Right was CAUSED by the shift of the Democrats to the Left. If the Democrats hadn’t shifted left, there’d have been no reason for a Moral Majority or a Christian Coalition. It’s NOT as if Christian conservatives decide one day, "We’re going to take over America. Rather, they woke up and realized, “The values we always assumed everyone shared are under assault, and we have to fight back.”
I suspect the USA is an outlier because even though the US has a very high per-capita GDP, it also has a much higher inequality of wealth and income than other nations with comparable per-capita GDP. This page has a plot of income inequality vs. frequency of prayer, and the USA is not an outlier at all, it’s right in the middle of the distribution.
There’s an idea that it’s mainly poor uneducated people who are religious in the United States and this simply isn’t the case. 41% of people who attend church have a college degree. It’s 52% for the mega churches. I’m not even sure if poor people even go to church in the same numbers as the middle class.
If what Marx said was true, “Religion is the opium of the people…”, then I would agree there are masses of people in the US who seriously need to go to rehab.
It would be refreshing to have one single major candidate not be a part of any organized religion. I don’t have much trust in world leaders who get text messages from some god.
I think you can push that effect back much farther than WWI - WWII. Consider all the wars and persecution that Europe suffered in the name of this or that version of Christianity; America has had its religious problems, but we’ve never had a civil war explicitly over religion. They had centuries to develop an underlying cultural feeling that religion is something people kill you over, and that religion is something the authorities force on you. WWI & II may have produced a general sense of “the old ways aren’t working, we need to change”; but the underlying experience of centuries of religious war and religious persecution no doubt helped shape what direction they’d jump when they collectively decided change was necessary.
In other words, the principle of the separation of church and state has as an unintended side effect preserved the cultural strength of religion in America by preventing it from discrediting itself to the same extent as in Europe. If the Catholics and Protestants and whatnot had spent the last century or two burning towns over who was in the right then America would probably be more negative about religion.
On the “Has the US always been really religious?” question, I was struck while reading another thread on SDMB – this one – where it was mentioned that people protested or objected to, and then someone defaced, whimsical depictions of the “north wind” (essentially, a cloud with a human face puffing a breath) in the concrete work of a highway project in Lubbock, Texas, because they perceived it as pagan idolatry.
By contrast, in the 1930s the Chicago Burlington and Quincy railroad introduced a new train called the Zephyr after the Greek god of the west wind. They promoted the heck out of it, as they were trying to keep ridership up during the Great Depression.
But they didn’t just name the trains (the original Zephyr was a smash success and had several successors) after a relatively obscure Greek god that admittedly would not show up on the radar of all but the most easily-offended even today. (After all, there are still Zephyr trains, there’s a Zephyr automobile, etc.) They had newspaper and magazine ads with a crowd of Greek gods and goddesses hovering over the Zephyr trainsets. They called one Zephyr trainset the Train of the Gods and named its cars Apollo, Mars, Neptune, Cupid, Vulcan, Mercury, and Jupiter. A matching train was called the Train of the Goddesses with its cars named Venus, Vesta, Minerva, Psyche, Ceres, Diana, and Juno. In short, they played the Greco-Roman gods schtick to the hilt, in the 1930s, apparently without significant fear of getting tons of bad publicity for “promoting pagan idolatry.” I can imagine the websites, radio-talk-show chatter, and general kerfuffle if a company nowadays used the same schtick in its marketing. :eek: I was honestly surprised the first time I saw the gods-hovering-over-the-Zephyr ad in a book, in a “wow, they had the nerve to go there!” way.
