Why is the US so much more religious than other western countries?

Why is the US so much more religious than other western countries?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Awakening
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

meme answer: because we're dumb
real answer: i don't actually know

LOS

Religion seems more intergrated into their society like the countries motto 'one nation under god', politicians being very openly religious and wanting it more in society and schooling, evangelical movements and it also has a high population which means more people who are religious

because it's the land of god

>formed from a Presbyterian rebellion
Gee i wonder why

The U.K conquer them centuries ago ,they brought the cristianism making the nation very religious. Religión is part of their culture ,Europe was expanding their religion around the world

Americans believe Jesus was a white farmer from Kentucky

After WW2 Europeans threw God out the window.
For Americans it was just something you see on tv.

>Americans believe Jesus is a mestizo serf farmer in Idaho
ftfy

they dont , not 90" anymore kid

their ancestors were religious fanatics expelled from Europe for its insanity.

America is not homogenous, which has led to fierce devotions to one's respective ethnic and religious backgrounds. When the catholics arrived, the protestants got angry as fuck and besides some lynchings, probably doubled down on their devotions to the church.

The near-constant influx of immigrants is probably also key. A lot of immigrants from around the world are quite religious, and they in turn support american religious institutions when they arrive

Now they have the new-wave traditionalist religious tards rising back up as Warriors of Kek.

top fucking kek

Fucking evangelist. They are worse than Catholics and Islamists

Because the US has much lower intelligence than other western countries

The same could be said about Australia, in terms of immigrant ethnic and religious diversity, but we aren't remotely as religious as the USA.
I think it is more due to how the fabric of the nation as been weaved. Like most things, religion is more closer to sports teams than their non-American counterparts.
There is this eternal sense of competition and trying to cling to something greater than oneself in order to ascend that dangerous delusion of making it to the top of the rat race/The American Dream, which generates large amount of socially constructed division and drawing the world into black and white, us vs them teams on one big playing field of life.

If any other western nation has the number of people as yours, we'd likely be just as infamously stupid, because people are stupid.

>immigrant ethnic and religious diversity
Yes, but Aus and the US received that diversity in very, very different ways. America has never been completely tolerant of any group besides anglos.

Ben Franklin complained about the German menace and their culture. Over time, the Germans "became white", and then Italians and Irish underwent even harsher persecution because they were catholic. The second largest mass lynching in US history was of Italians.

Eventually, they "became white" as well, and now Muslims are getting shit. The narrative always changes to pit everyone vs. the new guy, and that has solidified a lot of religious identity. Not just in the intolerant majority, but the newcomers as well, who cling to their traditions to help weather the storm.

Don't get me wrong, I know Australia has strong intolerance as well, but things like the White Australia policy seem to favor people as long as they were white European. Before the mid 20th century, America despised "other" groups coming in, even if they were European.

That being said, I don't think my idea necessarily contradicts yours. There's a ton of reasons that all add up as to why we're so religious, and the 'eternal sense of competition' is definitely a component. The overachiever "I can come out on top" mindset here can cause stress and lead to people turning to religion for some form of hope. Also, your point on divisions is key- immigrants have frequently been portrayed as a "threat" to the "way of life" or the "dream", and that "true AMericans" should buckle down on their faith.

That was one colony. The core colonies were Anglican businessmen who were no more radical than the ones running around in England at the time.

Addendum: There was actually a group in Australia called the Australian Natives' Association that was actually opposed to Irish and British immigration. That blows my mind.

cus they're dumb

>America
>religious

Maybe in the south but in my state, is say 80% of all teens don't believe in any religion

>>America
>>religious

For western standards yes. Even Maine (the least religous US state) has a way higher weekly church attendance rate than the vast majority of western european countries

Maine might be a weird exception because the population there is so incredibly old that they go to church out of habit.

Why is Sweden so non-religious?

if it hasn't been said before, you know how memey it is for americans to celebrate some deep ancestry?
the tie-in is that to preserve these ancestral lines you preserve the culture which in turn is also a practice of preserving the religion

What year were these data taken from?

From my experience, no one attends church anymore, most people describe themselves as Christian only because their parents were or they went to a few classes of Sunday's school as a child.

Whole bunch of unfiltered and unrestrained Prodies came here up until the late 19th century and set up their own thousand different flavors of Protestant communities, which really didn't collectively form much of agreed consensus on the nation level with any legal policy making, unlike in most places in Europe, where you tended to have one dominant church denomination with it's own centralized clergy that inevitably clashed to most revolutionary circles when they always got involved in politics or got socially involved. With just one dominant church denomination, it's easier to get them out of the political scene and make them lose influence when it comes to debating and picking fights. But when you have Baptists, Catholics, Mormons, Orthodoxs, and dozens-or-so different protestant sects, more people just converted to a different sect if they were dissatisfied with the sect they were already in instead of feeling apathetic to religion it-self.

Also, there's been some studies here that suggest the reason why Americans rank higher in being religious is more of because of the types of questions traditionally asked in said polls are socially perceived and interpreted differently here than the same types of questions used in polls in other countries. IIRC, there was one study where they focused on one rural small community with just a few churches if they've been to church recently in a series of phone-call surveys over a couple of months, and actually tracked the amount of attendance in the churches of said community, and found out that most of those who answered "yes" to attending church recently were lying and weren't matching to the actual attendance rates.

up until around the '50s but for the most part earlier people almost entirely defined themselves and had social circles within their congregation and larger denomination. Ethnic identification wasn't really that big in the US until the '50s-'60s as a result of the first wave of secularization and avowal of Anglo-American identity in some circles

keep in mind that we have always been much more religiously diverse than any country in Europe since the mid-17th century

Maine is the state with the least church attendance in the US.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance

Sweden isn't much more non-religious than other western european countries. It's just the norm

>old white people post on facebook asking why youngin don't "go to church" or "have family morals" anymore
>they themselves don't go to church

Honestly best answer if probably

>Maine is the state with the least church attendance in the US.
>en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_attendance

New England's (Protestant) religiousness has been on the decline since 1686, with the temporary establishment of the Dominion of New England which ended Puritan dominance. Puritanism never worked outside of the theocracy and was decimated by pluralism that watered down traditions and then basically killed by the Great Awakening

Nah man it was Black Phillip's doing.

think about who we were essentially founded by user

it's a combination of that and your meme answer, which is actually a real answer

Religion wasn't tied to the state so it became an integral part of american freedom

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Awakening

I'll take a crack at it

While many different European groups came to America at first(Southern Euros like Columbus did most of the early exploring ofc) the country is fundamentally British in origin, and the first Brits to come here apart from those in Roanoke and Jamestown(both religious on their own right) were the Pilgrims, religious extremists. These people had a pretty "cruel" conception of God as someone who hated sinners and only accepted a lifetime of obedience with complete censorship of all fleshly desires.

This had a massive impact on the development of New England and put it politically and religiously way to the right of much of Europe. For example, when Cromwell tried applying Puritannical reforms to England, he got executed partly due to the lack of public enthusiasm. But the more select pool of extremists in America took their religion extremely seriously, much like Islamic extremists do today. They were able to maintain this partly due to the rural farm culture of the colonies, which tends to lead to more conservative views than the urbanized environment that developed in Europe.

The American Revolution was actually lead largely by deists, who believe in a god that made the world doesn't really do anything now, and this is why there are references to "Providence" in the Constitution but a strong adherence to separation of church and state. But these views were only held by the upper ruling class. Everyone else still clung to their Bibles. However, during the 19th century there was a shift in Christianity. The roots of "Jesus loves you, say the prayer and you're saved" evangelicism started to come about with the Second Great Awakening. The first one happened a few years before the Revolution but isn't really relevant, but the second one is necessary to explain the evangelical revolution that happened later. This shift in thinking lead to a slight relaxation in religious matters, but religion was still very important.

Because religion is like a prerequisite to a multiculti society. It has a power to unite people of diverse backgrounds. Europe failed to integrate muslims because it has no religion. On the contrary, it is being integrated to Islam.

America literally started as a place where the English dumped all their religious nuts.
The pilgrims were too extreme even for people back then

(cont).

As America was starting to shift its attitudes on religion, a new revolution was occurring in England. Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859 and triggered a cultural shift in Anglo society. Science had already started to develop a conception of the world that did not fit with a literal view of the Bible with the concept of "deep time" and uniformitarianism, both theories that advoated the idea that the world was millions or even billions of years old, but evolution showed that humans were the descendants of apes and were not specially created.

While this idea was accepted by many Brits, America largely rejected it, especially the lower classes. However, as the United States grew wealthier and more religiously diverse(cracking the dominant hardline Protestant culture), evolution started to grow in popularity. This lead to the Scopes Trial, where teacher John Scopes was tried for teaching evolution in a public school. He lost his case, but the anti-evolution prosecutor looked foolish during the case and most Americans were sympathetic to Scopes.

World War II demoralized Europe and probably contributed to a loss of faith there, but America was largely unaffected by the war apart from the mass death of soldiers.

All that I just wrote was largely just background. The modern evangelical movement here, which strangely defies the tendency of developed nations to reject religion, has its roots in the 60s and 70s. While the 1950s is remembered as a conservative and religious time, much of that was a psy-op by the government to provide a cultural counterweight to the atheist USSR. The churches of the time were actually pretty liberal and rejected literal views on the Flood and embraced evolution. However, the "Cultural Revolution" of the 60s fueled reactionary views among Christians, especially in the South, and this allowed a new crop of fundamentalists to prosper.

because god created earth, including you and me

m that rural tradition
-the Cold War culture war
-reaction to the Cultural Revolution
-an aging and guilt-ridden generation of Boomers
-9/11

I don't know too much about how Europe liberalized but I think it's due to
-greater urbanization
-greater respect for intellectual authority
-demoralization from war, especially both world wars

Shit I had a long write up here but only copy and pasted part of it

tl;dr-boomers pissed off christians who created modern evangelicalism, then those same boomers revitalized it in the 80s with Reagan and after 9/11.

We don't have a state religion, which makes it easy for people to be religious without interference or social pressure.

>evangelist
Roman Catholics are the largest single Christian denomination in the USA. Protestants can't into cooperation.

holy kek

why is this even a discussion? Keep the population dumb and docile, obedient and they'll follow every retarded decision you make

You know we're religiously diverse here, right?

>hint: Mormonism, he can't tell the difference between Utah and Idahoe

I wish I lived in a Scandinavian atheist paradise.

meme answer: i don't actually know
real answer: because they're dumb

My guess is farmland has something to do with it... today, anyway.

They dumb and sheep. Christianity is the same shit as Islam.

Based Blackman is right.