jeroenrottgering

Both are western powers, both have wealthy societies an both have banned religion out of their politics, but still the average religion in the US is dar higher then Western Europe. What has caused this?

larkin

Because they are not educated and they are liable to believe anything.

Frog33inUK

The way modern states were formed differs.

European countries, which have a longer history, went through a phase of philosophical enlightenmet and resistance to religious and social schackles, people fought for centuries against the power of the Church to acquire more social and individual freedom.

Sankari

Europe was the birthplace of the Enlightenment. The USA was settled by English Christian fundamentalists. Not too difficult to guess how that was going to work out.

Well... not really. The USA certainly hasn't. Religion plays a huge part in American politics, and Americans would never dream of electing an atheist president. In Europe, it's completely different.

Belisarius

Probably because America has never has a religious war, unlike France, Britain Germany, Poland, Austria, Hungary, etc. While religion remained important after the Wars of Religion, the 30 years war and the English Civil War, no-one wanted a return to such blood-letting and over the succeeding centuries the power of the Church declined.

Frog33inUK

As Bill Maher said, in Europe "if a politician knows a character from a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback."
Say no more...

Rongo

I think there's two separate issues here. On a personal level, Americans are generally more religious than Europeans, and I think a lot of that traces back to the original settlers of this land, many of whom were religious zealots who fled Europe to escape persecution.

But on a governmental level, I think the United States is extremely dedicated to the separation of church and state, resulting mainly from the experiences of our European ancestors. True, there's a lot of lip-service to religion in American politic campaigns, and squabbling over such things as whether the Ten Commandments can be displayed in a public courthouse, but that's as far as it goes. I think freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, are both alive and well over here.

Sargon of Akkad

You're quite incisive, aren't you Larkin?

Perhaps I get the wrong impression, as a foreigner looking in from the outside via media and video, but it seems to me that there's a distinct "you dictate, we listen and accept" attitude towards authority in the US.

This seems to go hand in hand with such strange things like saluting the flag (why?), reciting the pledge of allegiance in schools (are you worried they'll support Mexico?) and the mass-media forgetting what investigative journalism is and just parroting government press releases as fact (you can't take the government's word for it).

As an Englishman, its very hard to understand this sort of thing, because Britain is literally the polar opposite in all of these things.

For us, its more a case of "you dictate, we ridicule you for attempting to dictate, call you a pillock and ignore everything else you have to say".

We don't respect authority to the point where nobody can admit to liking a politician. We certainly don't think they're capable of running the country, but someone has to do it and we're too busy not doing it to bother.

Frog33inUK

I think it would be interesting to look at the "key words" used in political dialectics in the US, the UK, France etc
I would be an interesting indicator of what concepts governments think are effective to convince peoples to follow them or at least that what is decided for them, and in their name, is the best solution.

I am interested in knowing what American, Biritish etc users of the forum think these key words are.

Rasta

What does that make Australia?