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Comment by procgen | Hacker News Reader

> Religion enters almost every conversation I have in the US in some way.

I'm an American and this is very surprising to me. In fact, I find it difficult to believe. Can you give some examples?

Yep! Now, I've primarily been travelling to Texas, Kentucky and Ohio. But things like most people mention bible study, it's assumed you're going to church on Sunday, more religious aphorisms and sayings.

Primarily, most of my interactions with clients are on a blue collar level, although an affluent blue collar level. Not sure if that changes the circle a number of HN readers might be in?

I also might notice it more because I specifically try to avoid religion in any conversation, it's a topic that really has no upside to talk about with clients.

I mean -- you've been in three of the most religious states in the U.S., and you're interacting w blue collar workers. There is a fairly tremendous sampling bias.

But I agree that very religious Americans do manage to work their religion into conversations in which you just wouldn't think it would come up.

I mean, 30-35% of the country is still evangelical and evangelicals love talking about religion. You could randomly choose a state and the GP's experience is probably true. Texas, Kentucky, and Ohio... but in my experience Arkansas and parts of Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia are actually more religious than those three. Admittedly, a lot of my travel has been through rural areas -- but still, 30-35%!

In Boston I could go half a decade without a stranger bringing up religion unprompted. But in Arkansas, nearly every conversation was loosely tied to religion. And it was in my best interest to pretend I was still Pentecostal to get by.

>you've been in three of the most religious states in the U.S., and you're interacting w blue collar workers.

you're saying that like they went to Arrakis and interacted with the Fremen lol. Blue collar red state workers are what a lot of the US looks like. Two thirds of Americans do not have a university degree.

All I'm gleaning here is that trying to generalize the experiences and preferences of 400+ million people between the U.S. and Canada isn't a particularly useful exercise. Beyond what country / state / county you're in, I have to imagine that age, race, socioeconomic status, general social preferences, and probably a whole other slew of factors play a significant role in how often people experience religion being thrust upon them in.

Not to say that this is necessarily a useless conversation, but it feels odd to me considering many dang people there are.

Your inclusion of “without a university degree” is doing a LOT of work in that sentence to make it seem like rural (and let’s admit it: white) evangelicals are anything close to a majoritarian bloc in the United States.

You don't need to be an evangelical, and certainly not a white evangelical, for religion to pop up in your conversations. Big cities are quite secular, but that's pretty much it... This is also one of those figures where the area-versus-population thing in the US matters a lot. In the vast majority of the land in the US, I'd agree that religion pops up in a huge share of conversations, but this does not imply that it appears in the vast majority of conversations in the US.

Goalpost, move thyself! Nobody was talking about land vs people until you brought it up. I personally am not pursuaded.

> Yep! Now, I've primarily been travelling to Texas, Kentucky and Ohio.

This is land^ “The US” is also land. It’s not moving goalposts to acknowledge that you two may be talking past each other based on this ambiguity :)

Your family or in laws maybe?

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