Hacker News Reader

Comment by intopieces | Hacker News Reader

It's important to note that Americans are far more religious than adults in other wealthy nations [0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/31/americans-ar.... Even with this decline, the US remains a Christian nation. The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive, so I have little doubt that the faith itself will endure.

View on HN

> The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive

In fact, a great part of it runs counter to the actual teachings of Christ.

It probably says something about the state of things that from this statement I genuinely can't tell which school of thought you're coming from, since each one says this about the others.

I have a lot of doubt. Sure, in some parts of the country, but in most parts religion is playing a significantly smaller part in people's lives with every generation.

Yes, the US scores much higher in religiosity ... when you use self-reported numbers. But it turns out a lot of Americans lie about church attendance, at least. If you survey how many butts are in the pews on Sunday and compare that to the population of a city and weight it by how often people say they go to church, there is a nearly a 2:1 discrepancy.

This isn't where I first read that statistic, but it is the first Google search that seems credible.

https://churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/139575-7-s...

But the self-reporting bias isn't unique to America. There are plenty of people in other parts of the world who say they belong to a religion but don't actually participate in religious activities with any regularity. It depends on the religion, of course, but at least with Christianity there's no fundamental contradiction in going to church only once or twice a year and still calling yourself a believer.

If there's a similar bias in other parts of the world, the statistics still leave the U.S. with a higher overall religiosity.

A weird thing happens in Iceland which is that people are born nominally "members of the Church of Iceland". Some portion of their taxes then go to support the church. If they want their taxes to go somewhere else, they have to proactively register as some other faith (and only those who care will bother). So you have a massive discrepancy between how many Icelanders are "statistically Christian" and it's not even Icelanders self-reporting, but the church itself for political/funding reasons.

How massive? As of 2017, statistically 70% of Icelandic citizens belonged to the Lutheran Church. But only ~11% actually attend church (http://www.iamreykjavik.com/religion-in-iceland)

I think something a lot of people tend to look over is that a lot of latin americans are religious and they so happen to be the largest group of people coming into the country.

With adaptive, are you referring to being able to pretend to care about unborn children but not actually caring about them after birth?

When you look at care for the poor, a great many Christians give to charities. The driving force behind many of the social programs was Christians. There are two issues, at least, today. First, there are many people who call themselves Christians that aren't. This isn't surprising. Jesus called it when he said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." They probably won't actually due the will of the Father. Second, for many actual Christians, Caesar is a poor provider for the poor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com