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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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'.

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.

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

> 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...

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.

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