Why did Europe become less religious over time and the US didn't? | Hacker News Reader

Why did Europe become less religious over time and the US didn't?

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59 pointsrzk53 comments

One thing I noticed in the US compared to other countries is that its media is very much focused inward, at least from my experience in travelling to the US on business trips in the late 1990s and onward. It was very jarring the first time I experienced it. International news that was being covered by mainstream media in Canada and Europe was barely even a footnote in many US news broadcasts. My theory is that other countries rely much more on interactions with their neighbours, but that's just a guess.

> My theory is that other countries rely much more on interactions with their neighbours, but that's just a guess.

I think that's on target. This probably plays a role in that as well:

US population: 330 million (1 country)

EU population: 446 million (dozens of countries bordering each other)

USA has always had a large propaganda effort (be it intentional or not) to sell itself as the greatest nation of the world to its citizens, and it might be why it's so overly important compared to the "lesser" countries.

The USSR was seen as an evil peer until it collapsed, but now it is China. USA is the biggest, and if anyone dares to become as big, USA is still the best. This propaganda might have worsened its insular worldview.

Some of the second world war propaganda looks so very quaint in today's world. It had a very different style to what we see today. The push was to get citizens to unite and all pull together to make the war effort a success. Today the main goal of the propaganda that's being so widely disseminated seems to be to tear systems down and drive people apart. It's sad.

The view of the USSR as evil wasn't unique to the US, nor is the prevailing negative view of China.[0]

[0]https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-vi...

I don't say one is better than the other, I'm saying that USA insistently claiming they're the best is propaganda. Propaganda than younger citizens are having a hard time believing.

If you ask me, the USSR was indeed worse then, but current USA vs China, I can't say. You'd need a big scale to weight all their crimes, both foreign and domestic.

funny to see US afraid of propaganda but only if it's red.

The religiosity of the US seems to have been of a different kind than elsewhere. There's a good book that explains how America seems to have always been a land of magical thinking, including in the secular realm:

> America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, and by hucksters and their suckers, which made America successful—but also by a people uniquely susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem’s hunting witches to Joseph Smith’s creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Trump. In other words: Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age. The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...

The mythology around the American Constitution is another example of deeply ingrained magical thinking.

A group of holy men came together to produce a perfect piece of secular scripture whose meaning "originalists" try to extract from outdated verbiage. Anywhere else in the world, having to rely on 250-year-old legal code for important present-day judicial decisions would be considered a deep failure of lawmaking.

What the Constitution’s critics often miss is that it isn’t magic, it’s law, and as a piece of law the Constitution is neither a code (codified laws came later in America) nor is it exhaustive. It’s a starting point.

But since it is law, and carries the force of law, then if you disagree with the law the way forward is clear: you change or amend the law. If there’s any magic, it’s that laymen critics don’t often understand it well enough to criticize it in an effective and useful manner that would lead to useful improvements or replacements.

You can sit down at your computer and bang out 7 to 10 articles and call it a Constitution, but what choices would you make and why? What would be the ramifications of your changes and would they actually cause more harm than good compared to the status quo? The real magic is that if you put a gun to ten to fifty wisemen of the Present day, they probably couldn’t do much better and you would end up with a tweaked version of what we have because it turns out, they did a decent job of it back in 1789. No real magic, just forethought, debate, ambition and consideration for what has worked, what hasn’t and what is likely to work for the society in which they lived then and we live now.

Anywhere else in the world is likely using the Common law, which goes back a thousand years or more, or a version of the Napoleonic codes modified to the present day or German civil code modified to the present day.

> A group of holy men came together to produce a perfect piece of secular scripture whose meaning "originalists" try to extract from outdated verbiage. Anywhere else in the world, having to rely on 250-year-old legal code for important present-day judicial decisions would be considered a deep failure of lawmaking.

The core idea behind originalism is that agreements should be interpreted as they were understood at the time, and if something is impractical in modern day, then it should be changed through the legislative process with amendments.

"Living Constitution" is far more speculative and magical. Somehow new meanings are discovered that no-one in the previous 250 years had seen in the text nor voted for. This undermines democracy.

I find originalism kind of like the Protestant notion of sola scriptura: no where in the (Christian) Bible does it say that only the Bible can be the only way source of authority. No where in the US Constitution does it say originalism should be used.

> Somehow new meanings are discovered that no-one in the previous 250 years had seen in the text nor voted for.

Some argue that the (supposed) individual right of the 2A is like this: no where did it appear in legal discussions until 1960. Then the NRA (but not the pre-1977 NRA) started pushing it more.

Looking in as a Canadian from the outside: it sure seems like things can be discovered or realized in a way they never were before.

You're missing the forest for the trees. "Originalism" generally comes into play because an activist has invoked the "250-year-old legal code" to achieve something by litigation that they can't achieve through lawmaking. Consider the example of abortion: https://news.gallup.com/poll/235469/trimesters-key-abortion-.... While 60% of Americans believe abortion should generally be legal in the first trimester, just 28% think it should generally be legal in the second trimester (13 weeks+). (If you dig into the data, they think it should be illegal after that except to protect maternal life, fetal abnormalities, etc.) In fact, nearly every EU country generally prohibits abortion after 12-14 weeks.

Under U.S. Supreme Court precedent (specifically, Roe and Casey) abortion cannot be prohibited before viability--usually around 24 weeks. Nearly all EU abortion law would be unconstitutional under American standards. In the U.S., therefore, the words written 250 years ago by the framers is deemed to prohibit the states from adopting abortion laws that would be entirely consistent with other advanced liberal democracies.

Similar reasoning has been invoked to ban school prayer (which is mandated by statute in the U.K. and allowed in Germany and Italy) and government funding of religious education (which is common in the EU, and is a constitutional right in Germany, Belgium, etc.) The majority of Americans, however, still support things like school prayer. Again, a 250-year old document has been invoked to strike down laws and practices that are widespread in other advanced liberal democracies.

When activists wield 250 year old words to strike down popular laws, people get very interested in exactly what those words mean! These conflicts tend to be more intense in the U.S. than elsewhere, because we're a country where the coasts are France and everywhere else is Poland. Originalism doesn't exist in Germany, but neither do cases like Roe where the Court invents new rights out of thin air. Social consensus is much higher in Germany. It's a little bit easier to amend the German Basic Law than the Constitution (2/3 vote in both houses versus 3/4 vote of the states) but the German Basic Law has been amended 62 times since 1949. The U.S. Constitution has been amended just 17 times since 1792.

With this logic, most of the world is exhibiting deeply ingrained magical thinking by honoring 3000+ year old commandments like "You shall not murder".

Just because an ideology is honored and held in high esteem by its adherents (and to steelman your argument - even in higher esteem than it may deserve) does not mean we have better alternatives to the ideology.

That commandment is not the thing stopping people for murdering others, it's the legal system. I would go as far to say that the ten commandments are mostly absent in the decision-making process of most people, and hence quite obsolete.

Perhaps we could go even further and say that people are inherently not inclined to kill one another and the legal system only steps in when such exceptional events do occur.

(Here, I'm only talking about murder and not what is a "tribe" attacking another, which happens even now. For instance, a nation invading and bombing another nation, drone-bombing wedding parties or religious extremists trying to take over a nation etc.)

The only way to test that assumption would be to legalize murder and see how many people killed others. It's a morbid scenario, but I wonder how many would take the opportunity to murder for revenge or personal gain.

There was a post awhile ago about people who only avoid crimes because of fear of punishment.

I think it was around 3% of the population. That’s a lot of people willing to hurt others

The parent post argued about attributing special importance to the exact verbiage and intent as expressed in that 250 year old document. While we do still have laws prohbiting murder, we don't rely on Old Testament for guidance on what killing is permissible and what killing is murder, which details matter, and what shall the punishments be; we do consider the nuances expressed in that old document as obsolete and if people would try to make arguments about treating murder based on the nuances of how exactly Old Testament prescribes to handle murder (e.g. whether all murderers must get the death penalty as per Leviticus 24:19) then we would consider that as magical thinking and not really a valid argument.

This is nothing to do with originalism. Please don't strawman complicated viewpoints.

> a deep failure of lawmaking.

The real deep failure of lawmaking is telling millions of people what the rules are and then changing them because some elites decided that the proles were getting too successful.

Interestingly, this doesn't mention immigration. I would strongly expect immigrants to be more likely to hold onto religious traditions than folks back home. For example: American Muslims are significantly more educated than the population as a whole: 39% have a college degree, versus 27% of all U.S. adults. While college education is usually correlated with less religion, American Muslims are more religious than the average American: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/28/u-s-muslims.... Almost 60% pray daily, with 42% saying all five prayers daily. Meanwhile, 48% of Americans overall pray daily.

A lot of migrants, the Pilgrims in particular, left Europe for religious freedom, and specifically for the freedom to practice stricter forms.

In my family the descendants that migrated in the fifties are still fervent protestants, but here (Netherlands) only a handful are still religious, and I would say not very strongly so.

“ the freedom to practice stricter forms” is an odd way of saying they migrated in order to reduce the freedom of their children.

It's called the freedom to curtail other people's freedoms, it's a well known right recognized in the universal declaration of fundamental(ist) rights

I'll openly say this is based on nothing - but my Jewish family is both highly educated and still religious, but religion holds a cultural significance and the significance of a community rather than a true 'belief' significance- a Jewish Atheism. I could see the same being true of Muslims - they are holding on to their traditions (which happen to be religious).

In most Muslim countries religion and culture are distinct. For example in Bangladesh the religion is Islam but the culture is more Indian. In my experience, American Muslims are more similar to Catholics. People who aren’t actively practicing might just be going through the motions, but ones who affirmatively reject the underlying beliefs would usually identify as something other than Catholic. There is also a strong social pressure to “return to the fold.”

This reddit thread lacks numeric data. Here is a survey from the Pew Research Center (their methodology is sometimes arguably biased, but the overall tendencies should be OK).

> How important is religion in your life?

> (I summed "very important" and "somewhat important")

> USA: 82%

> Germany: 57%

> Spain: 46%

> UK: 42%

> France: 37%

> Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2008/09/17/chapter-2-reli...

On the same page, the graph that correlates Purchasing Power with Religiosity is also very interesting. The correlation is obvious, with the USA an outstanding exception. This anomaly probably has multiple causes, as the main Reddit answer explained, and especially the "unsafe environment": many people live in the USA with social conditions worse than in most western countries.

My estimation:

Germany - Former GDR (East) : 2%

Germany - Protestants (North) : 10%

Germany - Catholic (South and West): 20%

optimistic values, added lots of slack. Based on gut feeling.

Europe, with its "regulated religious market", people couldn't switch religions as freely so organizations had no incentive to provide good services. Demand dropped because quality fell

This is certainly true, the CofE has the status of Official state religion and makes absolutely no effort to “recruit and retain” churchgoers, if anything it views ordinary churchgoers as a massive inconvenience for the bishops who would rather swan about their palaces enjoying centuries of accumulated wealth and privilege.

Coming from Germany to the US that's my impression as well, here churches, especially non-catholic are free to market to various demographics. In Germany people are mostly either Catholic or Protestant but generally stay home on Sunday (at least when I left 30 years ago).

What's interesting is that a lot of Germans happily pay "church tax", the two churches take in billions, which they spend on social services in addition to their own overhead. So in Germany churches are regarded as a mix of service providers (for the eldery, daycare, etc.) with a preaching service most everyone ignores.

I had the impression this is because most people who went to the America from Europe where religiously repressed (or religious nutjobs, depending on your perspective).

My guess is that it's correlated with urbanisation.

The USA still has lots of people living in more rural areas, and those tend to be more religious.

Cities give people more options and places to hide - it's very hard for a church to exert that much influence, compared to a small town. So people can split off and do their own thing.

The answer in the subreddit is missing the historic dimension. The French Revolution toppled old powers , including religion and it labeled it as superstition. Universal rights were proclaimed (not granted by god), contrary to every religious doctrine. Secularism became a dogma. This had huge influence in the nascent new nations of europe. The spread of socialism and communism ensured further that christian religion would never recover. If there was demand for religion in europe, there would probably be a more vibrant market, but it that demand wasn't there.

I think it goes hand in hand with Europe's embracing of vice that has diluted the impact of religion on society. Not just alcohol and elicit drugs, but sexual libertine and pushing to legalize prostitution, which over time has possibly eroded those moral underpinning of religion that kept people tied to the church.

I heard some famous intellectual on Bill Maher one time say something like this:

"When it comes to the British colonies, the US got stuck with the Puritans, Canada the French, and Australia the convicts."

A couple Reddit comments posed the question of population density. Western Europe is extremely urban; the US much less so. How does the difference look once we control for this?

My parents fled their home country for freedom of religion in the USA. Many other immigrant groups have as well.

I do not think this is actually the case. Is there any hard data saying that Europe is "less religious" than the USA?

U.S. adults are more religious than Western Europeans (2018)

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/09/05/u-s-adults-...

> In fact, by several measures of religious commitment, religiously unaffiliated people in the U.S. are as religious as – or in some cases even more religious than – Christians throughout Western European countries. For example, while 20% of U.S. “nones” pray daily, only 6% of Christians in the UK do so.

But this concerns only western Europe, that is precisely the least religious part.

Lots of Eastern Europe is even less religious due to the Communist legacy. Czechia is pretty much the most atheist place on earth if I had to make a guess. I think pew in 2015 or something placed 70%+ of the population as irreligious. If you've spend a day there and met someone under 40 who is religious I'd be impressed

There's one exception which is Poland due to the intimate ties of nationalism and Catholicism. But even so even in places that are religious in Eastern Europe it's almost more political or nationalistic than it is 'spiritual'.

Have there been any studies about whether U.S. adults are more likely to lie to pollsters than Western Europeans?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect

One datapoint; My maternal grandmother is from the north of France and is now well into her 80s. While very Catholic herself she never pushes me or any of her ((great)grand)kids towards it. My wife and I never had our son baptized, never even entertained the idea and I have not heard her complain about it. When she came to visit me in the US in the early 2000s and asked to go to church, I found and took her to a local Catholic church; all went well. She even noted how 'comfortable' the church itself was. I get that; the church from her town was built in the 15th century and it reflects that. It's cold and dark and when you step out, it's probably cold and rainy. The one here was bright, warm and in warm and sunny California. The most interesting part, in the process of looking up a church for her, I showed her a brochure (it was the early 2000s) for an evangelical megachurch (by California standard); she was not into it at all. She seemed to have seen right through it with the flashy local pastors. Commented about how it was just tricking people. I didn't have the heart to tell her.

Googling finds lots of surveys and studies and statistics that say that the USA is indeed substantially more religious than Europe, especially Western Europe.

I was wondering the same thing. The US isn't a homogeneous blob, neither is Europe. For instance you'll likely find that religion is much more important in Poland than it is in France. In much the same way, I suspect, as in Alabama vs California.

> For instance you'll likely find that religion is much more important in Poland than it is in France. In much the same way, I suspect, as in Alabama vs California.

And I'm willing to bet that Poland, the most religious state in the EU, is less religious than whatever is the least religious state in the US.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/23/americans-a...

I'll take on that bet.

The graph you linked is a bit silly. The values are skewed by a bunch of African nations with a very low Human Development Index. Europe & the US are much more balanced in that regard, and you might want to consider comparing like for like.

Wikipedia's "Importance of Religion by Country" [1] page seems to rank Poland squarely above the US in terms of how important religion is -- based on a Gallup poll. There's a page [2] ranking the US states by similar metrics in case you're interested.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Importance_of_religion_by_coun... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

The US is orders of magnitude more homogeneous than Europe, though.

Western Europe is more secular than US, but as a whole there are still plenty of religious places, a lot of basement mosks in the outskirts of cities, you won't find that in US because of the difference in demographics.

It's so funny watching people trying to ignore the obvious answer and desperately try to make up nonsense.

Why did China, Russia, etc become less religious? Why did northern europe become protestant? Why is indonesia muslim?

The answer is because the elites wanted it that way. Religion is a way for the elites to control the population. Maybe Europe, China, Russia, etc found better ways of controlling the population?

If the elites need religion again to control the population, we'll have a revival. But modern societies have other tools for population control. It's why we are becoming less religious in the US. Maybe more religious than europe but less than we used to be.

No mention of "white supremacy?" Curious, I think that's a big factor.

Each European nation has its own claims to identity; whereas America more-or-less loses much of these individual identities in favor of "Whiteness" which sort of unifies and (badly) smooths those differences out among them, at the expense of black folks and others. I don't think you can maintain something like that without some kind of religious "glue" to support it, i.e. to be the veneer of goodness over the racism that lurks underneath.

I'm sure this crosses over with a lot of that "protestant work-ethic" type stuff, especially as it allows some people who didn't do a lot of work to make claims to have done so, e.g. "Thomas Jefferson built Monticello."

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