Hi, I’m curious why religious belief has faded in most of the developed world, but not in the United States. This is probably going to be a hard question to answer when comparing Japan or South Korea to the US since our cultures are so different to begin with. But it would seem to me that cultural norms from Western Europe would be very similar to the United States, yet something has caused a rift in terms of levels of religious belief between these two wealthy areas of the world. So why are we so much more religious?
Perhaps people in other Western countries take these words more seriously:
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Marcus Aurelius
A simplified explanation is: Europe pushed its religious extremists out centuries ago, and they migrated to the U.S. The descendants of those extremists are still religious; many of the descendants of the moderates who pushed them out of Europe are no longer religious.
I have often wondered the same thing. My thoughts lean towards the historical excessive power of the church in Europe, where they owned most of the land and held the political reigns as well. Once Henry VIII stuck two fingers up at the Pope, and dissolved the monasteries; once Napoleon had declared France and all the parts of Europe that he conquered, secular, I think that it has been all downhill for the Church.
England is still a nominally Christian country and The Church of England is the established religion, with some bishops getting a seat in the House of Lords, but for most people religion of any kind is largely perceived as irrelevant to their lives.
Religion is just one aspect of a wider cultural fundamentalism. American culture is more fundamentalist and extremist in pretty much every aspect, not only religion.
This is what happens when you feel Right and Good and God are on your side and you have been chosen to expand and disseminate these values.
It is more violent in every way. Guns, death penalty, prison sentences, interaction with police and other authorities. When you know you are on the side of Good and Right then everything and anything is justified, including limitless violence.
Same thing about international relations. No other country is so quick to threaten and use violence. And yet Americans think of their culture as peaceful and understanding of others.
Same thing about nationalism and the use of national symbols. No European country is like that.
To find anything comparable in Europe you’d have to go back to… you know who.
Or they killed each other in the various Catholic vs. Protestant wars and massacres of the 16th & 17th century. Which we’re not in any particular hurry to repeat.
Here’s one possible data point*:
Religious belief in America is, and always has been personal belief–Not institutionally-imposed belief.
Religious issues in European history have almost never been about personal belief, but about the political institutions which proclaimed those beliefs, and determined the social order.
(And then controlled the government and catered to/persecuted individuals in accordance to those beliefs.)
When the institutions became impotent, the people’s religious belief did, too.
I’d say Australia and New Zealand are closer matches to the US in terms of being Anglophone new world countries colonised by Europeans relatively recently. Frontiers and all that. Yet AU & NZ are even less religious than Europe.
I wonder if social safety nets are relevant? In Europe you turn to the State when things go wrong; in America, do people turn to their church?
This is not entirely true. I know (rather a close friend of mine knows well, having spent a sabbatical there) a mathematician at the University of Passau in the SE corner of Germany. He and is his wife are Protestant. The wife is a social worker and only Catholics are allowed in the civil service in Passau. There are no schools there but Catholic schools, although they could choose to be bussed to a Protestant school 15 km away. The church in Passau is pervasive and oppressive. Presumably the people want it that way.
Not true. There might be some areas where you need to be catholic (schools run by the catholic church, etc.), but not the civil service. Certain social charities are run by the catholic church, so maybe that’s where the idea came from, but legally, there is no way you can tell a civil servant which religion to follow.
Part of the reason is the protection of religious freedom is encoded in the US Constitution, so the government needs to take a hand’s off approach as well as respect people’s religious views.
Giles made a good point in post #3, America is where the extremest went to.
Also:
I would disagree with this. You can say that the US was founded by a lot of splinter ‘cults’ such as the Pilgrims. And that would be the individual personal belief of the head of the cult, but that does not involve the personal beliefs of the rest of the group.
There is no way in the world this can be true. European courts would demolish that in less time than it takes for Three Hail Marys.
Also, for many people here it’s just a relabeling.
There is and has always been people who’d “attend Mass three times in their lives: for their own baptism, wedding and funeral”. Well, they actually attend more times, since they have friends and relatives, but you get the gist; you’re more likely to find them waving candles and taking pictures at the side of a religious parade than in line for Communion. Once upon a time, not so long ago, these people would have considered themselves “Christian, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman”, simply because there were no other labels avalilable; now the same people call themselves anything from “non-practicing Catholic” to “atheist”.
Dunno… Perhaps Europeans are less… insular? More cosmopolitan? Have travelled outside of their country of birth more and seen more of the world and the Lord’s ‘mysterious’ inaction in some of His most pious nations? coughPhilippinescough
Dunno… Just spit ballin’.
I’ve seen this debate before, both on this board and elsewhere. It’s obviously a complex issue with no single simple correct answer. However, the debates invariably conclude that the closest thing to a single simple correct answer is that the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state in America allowed Americans to both choose religions that were the best fit for their individual personalities and to disassociate dissatisfaction with secular authorities from dissatisfaction with religious authorities.
If I’m in Italy and I don’t like the Catholic Church, I really don’t have that many other practical options as far as religious communities go. If I’m in America and I don’t like the Catholic Church, I can become a Methodist or a Baptist or a Mormon or a Lutheran quite easily. If I’m in England and I think the government is corrupt or oppressive, it’d be hard not to view the government controlled Church of England the same way. But if I’m in America and think the government is corrupt or oppressive, that has very little to do with the Catholic Church.
I tend to think that the major difference is that the government-enforced orthodoxy in Europe made religion less responsive than it did in the US. Religion in the US has been constantly reinventing itself, both gradually and in several dramatic “great awakenings.” This has led to a process that could be seen as analogous to biological evolution-- the sects (or even just factions within sects) that are most appealing and responsive to people’s needs at a given point in history are the ones that become dominant. The result is that the general religious milieu in the US is far better equipped to retain and recruit followers than is the case of the religious milieu that developed in the less responsive top-down religious structures of Europe.
I’m not sure that there are really more extremists per capita here. There are just more of them because there are more of us; and ours get a lot of press.
It is certainly also true that they can go farther down the path before reaching any checks or balances than in most places in the world. I can’t imagine GB or Germany allowing the building of a 5,000 - 10,000 person compound like "The Crick". But that’s more an issue of land availability than anything else. There would be no way to hide until fully established the way they can here.
Is it really any stranger than Vatican City? We’re just more accustomed to that.
I can see that in arguments like this, a lot of simplification os required and appropriate, but I’d say that this account of the relative powers of church and state in European history is overly simplistic. Long before Napoleon or even Henry VIII, Europe underwent a long period of struggles for power between ecclesiastical and secular actors. Even in late antiquity and the middle ages, the situation is far more complex than a summary of the church holding “political reigns as well” would imply.
There is no way this is possibly true. It may be the case that this particular teacher wanted to teach at a Catholic school and experienced difficulties for being Protestant - but even in that case, it’s unlikely that this would have prevented her from getting a job: The current trend in the case law inGerman courts even for schools run by the churches is to differentiate between areas which touch upon the pastoral activities of the church (such as religious education as a subject in school, where the churches may require teachers to belong to the respective denomination), and areas that have no such relation. In the latter category, to which I’d say mathematics belongs, the teacher’s denomination is not a factor upon which recruitment decisions may be based.
But a statement such as “there are no schools but Catholic schools in Passau and surroundings” is most definitely untrue, and so is a statement such as “only Catholics are admitted to the civil service in Passau and surroundings”.