In this Pit thread, I asked a question which I will rephrase to better suit Great Debates.
How come religion is such a big issue in the US? In much of the developed world, and certainly most of Northern and Western Europe, religion is or is becoming a political nonissue. Anyone who opposed abortion on religious grounds here in Sweden would be seen as a rather quaint and odd person. We have civil unions between same-sex partners, and there was never any outcry one way or the other; it just happened. Spain, machisto Catholic country as it is, has gender-neutral marriage laws now.
Sure there are a few holdouts, like Ireland, but they’re the exception.
But on the other side of the Atlantic, you are passing religion-based amendments to make sure gays can’t marry, your school boards want to teach religious alternatives to evolution, and abortion is actually a hot political issue, which is nearly incomprehensible to me.
I think a lot of it has to do with US politics. The Republican party knows that much of their success is due to fundamentalist votes as well as donations.
Most people in the US don’t wake up in the morning worried about gay marriage or abortion. A very noisy minority does. However, their votes and money have been seen as crucial to the Republicans. The Republicans have to at least pay lip service to the views of these fundamentalists.
Well, that’s just pushing the question one step further away. Why is it the case in the US that one party owes much of its success to fundamentalist votes? How can the fundamentalists be so strong there?
I suspect it’s to do with a history of immigration of people escaping religious persecution in Europe. If your ancestors held religious beliefs strong enough for them to migrate to the US, then you are likely to have similar strong beliefs. The ones left behind in Europe were those who supported the established religion, oir who didn’t care much one way or the other.
Was the percentage of people leaving Europe for the US because of religious persecution really that high? The reasons I’ve heard are usually poverty, famine and the like.
I have read this as well. Many of the migrant groups were persecuted protestant sects. When they arrived in the US, those that ended up in rural areas stayed (became) much more conservative. Those that lived in coastal cities, with more trade and cosmopolitany, generally became more open and progressive.
Religious is a bigger political issue in the United States then in most of the rest of the western world for the simple reason that we have more religious people here. According to Wikipedia:
As a result it’s far more profitable for politicians to play for the religoius vote here, and frame non-religious debates in relgious terms. I don’t think this can be said to be a new thing, folks in the US have always been fairly religious, and as a result it has always played a roll in politics.
So the question becomes why do we remain more religous then say, the once religion dominated Europeans. There probably isn’t a simple answer, but I think that part of it is due to the Europeans rather more bloody experiences with religous wars and prosecution and the fact that once upon a time (and in the living memory of people in places like Ireland and Spain) the Church was a powerful and rather intolerant institution that, looking back, seems like something people would want to avoid. In the US we’ve seen far less of these sorts of these sort of influences and so the various religions have lost less of their creditbility.
Some of the earliest settlers left to escape religious persecution, but all the mass immigration movements (and some of the smaller very early ones, e.g., Jamestown) were for economic reasons or slavery.
there is one huge difference between religious Americans and religious Europeans: European religions are highly bureaucratic, institutionalized, with political hierarchies . Americans take their religion personally, not institutionally. Institiutions gain and lose influence slowly, with less immediately visible political effect. Private individuals can change quickly.So if more individuals choose to “get saved” today than 15 years ago, it is reflected quickly in election results.
Because we didn’t have to endure the Reformation, the wars of religion, the oppression of the Catholic and Protestant churches. By the time America was founded those issues had been thought about heavily by the Founders and they set up a system whereupon America could enjoy her religions and not be destroyed by them.
Europe has spent century after century tearing itself apart in religious and ideological dissent, so much so that, imho, the real question is: why do Europeans take their beliefs so seriously?
Anybody who brings modern politics into this discussion really has no clue as to what they’re talking about as this is an issue of historical development, not current events: the declining religiosity (?) of Europe viz the US has been going on since the founding of the Republic.
Interesting question! Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we’ve got Puritans as our (spiritual, at least) ancestors? All that “city upon a hill” jazz. I also seem to remember something about the original thirteen colonies being rather segregated with regard to religion–didn’t Anne Hutchinson flee because of persecution?
But then again, that was a terribly long time ago and doesn’t go too far to explain why we still have this uber-religious mindset…
BTW–the Bible belt was & is intensely rural, often with long travel required to reach urban areas. In the 18th & 19th Centuries, this meant days of travel, on horse or afoot, along dirt roads or game trails, to reach a city.
The local churches thus doubled as assembly halls & social centers. Any public gathering was likely to occur under local religious auspecies (sp?). This require approval of local religious leaders. The first lending libraries were church-affiliated, too.
Thus, Southern/Midwestern/Bible-Belt culture evolved around the churches.
Significant immigrations to the US have come about long since the events you mention - Ireland has been mentioned already, and there’s obviously many others. They were about poverty, and the ‘land of opportunity’…not ‘the land of freedom to exercise religious beliefs’. Some of the comments in this thread suggest to me that some Americans take to heart the story of the Pilgrim Fathers, and base all other immigrations around that model.
A brave statement. Especially as you fail to define ‘modern’
Cite? Every reference I’ve seen to this matter has indicated that the significant divergence in the decline in relgiousity (however you measure it) in Europe compared to the US has been over the past 60 years. There’s an obvious event that took place preceding that…
The irony is that the US religious organizations of today fight so hard against the first amendement, which is probably the key to their relative succsess here when compared to how thier European counterparts have faired.
Out of curiousity, is American religion still in decline? I have a vague sense that while the current political climate has made people feel their is a religoius upswelling int the US, that this may not in fact be the case. Anyone have any relavant statistics? I think it would help clarify what we’re discussing in this debate.
As a comparison, I’ll note that in forty years, Quebec passed from probably the most intensely religion-based society north of the Rio Grande to probably the least. “Modern” religion/politics probably has something to do with it, I’d wager.
By “modern”, I mean yammering about “Republicans/Bush/Christian Right/Moral Majority” etc etc etc, i.e. post-1980ish. The differences between Europe and America in re: religion was palpable in de Tocqueville’s day and have only become more so since then.
Well, the French Revolution was a profoundly irreligious (anti-religious?) event, as was the driving out of the Jesuits prior to that (not to mention the Enlightenment itself, taken to its logical conclusions, left little room for Divine revelation). The Scopes trial of the 1920s was itself but a replay of the debates carried on in England 50 years prior, and frankly, I can’t imagine a 19th century American philosopher (if such a thing existed ) declaring that “God is dead”, regardless of what they (or Nietzsche irl) actually meant by such a statement.
If you want an actual cite as opposed to some blathering of examples, here’s a passage from Oxford Don J.M Roberts History of the World, Book VII, Chapter 1 The End of the Europeans’ World: Strains in the System (pp 700-701):
Roberts goes on for a few more pages on this theme of declining religous influence in 19th-century Europe, including the effects of Biblical scholarship, the rise of science (especially Darwin), and the takeover of many social services (aid to the poor, for ex.) by the state that were once the sole province of the various churches. There’s quite a bit more all throughout the book, but I hope the passage quoted suffices.