"The American observer of Europe is often baffled at European claims to secularism since official expressions of religion are so public and yet -- apparently -- so taken for granted. A 10th-century depiction of the crucifixion, for example, is part of every Danish passport, regardless of whether its bearer is -- as many nowadays are -- a pious Muslim."
There's a difference between culture and religion. Having a 10th-century depiction of the crucifixion in my passport doesn't imply that I'm religious, but it does remind me that I come from a country with a long and rich history and culture. In Northern Europe religious artifacts are primarily seen as cultural heritage, not as a way of showing your devotion to a god. I can't speak for Southern Europe, but from my limited experience of living there it doesn't seem very different.
"American church attendance and religious belief is not off the European scale if one compares it with Europe's Catholic regions. A smaller percentage of Americans consider themselves religious than the Portuguese and Italians. Proportionately fewer Americans say they believe in God than the Irish and Portuguese."
The article compares all of America to a small very religious part of Europe. That would be like saying that Americans produce 20 times as many cars as Europeans because the average number of cars produced per capita in Detroit is far above the average number of cars produced per capita in Europe.
The US is the country with the smallest percentage of non-believers (3%), and as stated in the article Portugal and Italy aren't far behind(4% and 6%). The article doesn't however mention Sweden or France that are 46% and 43% non-believers.
>There's a difference between culture and religion.
That's an interesting statement. Only in the West, and only in the last few hundred years can religion be conceived of as a discrete object, separate from culture.
Indigenous American and Hindu culture, for example, have traditionally had no such division between religion and culture. With the rise of global capitalism we may be starting to see a secular/nonsecular divide in traditionally Hindu areas (India, duh) but this is a very modern development.
edit: I should say, none of the above necessarily negates anything you said. I just think it's interesting.
edit number 2: Also, the above could also be further illuminated in a short description of the differences between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Worth checking out each concept on Wikipedia if y'all are interested.
Lots of Asian countries have a common culture that spans groups following different religions: Indonesia, India (and particular Indian regions), Sri Lanka etc.
Also, most of the major religions spread to different cultures a long time ago: A thousand years ago a Russian and a South Indian could have both not only been Christians, but both Eastern Orthodox, or an Indonesian and a Libyan could both be Sunni Muslims, or a Sri Lankan and Laotian could both be Theravadan Buddhists.
If people of disparate cultures could share common beliefs, sure religion and culture have always been separable. Especially pertinent to your examples are the South Indian Christians who have undoubtedly shared the culture of the Hindu majority for 2,000 years.
What you say is true, as far as I know. It is entirely possible to share the culture of the people who one lives nearby and yet practice a different religion. It is also true that this has been going on for a long time. In the case of the spread of Abrahamic offshoots (Islam and Christianity), a couple of thousand years. In this sense religious expression has always been fluid. However, I think that is different than viewing religion as an object. It is a modern move to split culture into many different categories: public, private, family, government, religion, education, medical, etc, etc. This way of understanding and ordering the world is a particularly Western (some might say Germanic) form.
Furthermore, there are languages that still survive to this day that have no word for "religion" as such, something I talk elsewhere in this thread. This says to me that in some cultures religion cannot even be conceived of as separate from culture because the language does not provide the imaginative capacity to understand it that way.
"Indigenous American and Hindu culture, for example, have traditionally had no such division between religion and culture."
Isn't that just a bias from watching too much discovery channel? We are used to seeing other cultures presented as being preoccupied with fancy rain dances, perhaps because they look good on television. But they must have a "normal day routine", too, which I would consider to be culture as well? It might be the "bag of rice in china phenomenon" - mundane daily life might not make for interesting movies, so we disproportionally often get to see special events from other countries.
I don't think so. I do think there is a problem when we view other cultures from the outside, and when we focus only on the "fancy" aspects of culture because it's more interesting than how people arrange their bedding, or whatever.
However, I think you are focusing too much on religion as ritual specifically. Yes, indigenous Americans, for example, have certain rituals, rites, and special events that stand apart as specific expressions of their unique culture. If those rituals seek to connect the individuals who participate in them, and the community as a whole to an "ultimate reality" or an unseen world, we in the west call it a religious ritual. Most indigenous American people (all, as far as a I know) do not even have a word for "religion," however, so the mundane and the "fancy rain dance" are each simply forms of culture with no defining boundary.
Christianity in the US is also very different. I have met very few Creationists in Europe or Asia, and almost all those I have met have been members of evangelical churches of a type that has American roots.
> Spiegel should really know better than manipulating numbers like this.
I read the magazine since I was about 8 years old (24 years ago). They used to do top-notch invetigative journalism. Over the course of my lifetime I could wittness a big decline in quality.
I was actually surprised to see this article from Spiegel. I don't read it on a regular basis, but to me they have an excellent brand. It was very disappointing.
"The modern American creationist, interestingly enough, no longer takes scripture as sufficient reason to believe the Biblical account of the origins of the world. The debate is, instead, conducted on the turf of science, with creationists attempting to argue the fine points of the age of the fossil record, suggesting that orthodox evolution has gaps as a seamless explanation, and otherwise indicating their acceptance that the modern world speaks the language of science."
The key is "speaking the language" of science, not actually _doing_ science.
Neo-creationists use scientific terms and talk about scientific theories, but do not advance any scientific theories or apply those terms to their own thinking. The creationist standpoint is and always has been that a literal interpretation of particular English translations of the Bible is unquestionably factually accurate, and that anything which contradicts that interpretation is to be attacked by any means available.
The only difference is that now they talk about things "irreducible complexities" (which aren't) and "the lack of transitional forms" (which isn't) as a scientific-sounding cover.
In other words, they believe in creationism just because the Bible and their church say so, but they try to make it sound scientifical for their propaganda. Science has a hard-earned cachet that comes from many years of delivering the goods, and creationists would like to co-opt that.
So true; he has 27 diverse countries to flagrantly cherry pick from, however when I read "But talk is cheap, and these findings may indicate desire as much as reality" I was amazed for a second thinking he was going to analyze his techniques and sources for biases but alas, no such evaluation ensued. Fainly reminds me of Gladwellian journalism.
> a sober look at its empirical basis suggests that it is an inverted pyramid, a lot of conclusions perched on flimsy premises
Der Spiegel examines the US vs Europe in a large number of dimensions and finds that the US differs far less than one might expect. For example, the white murder rate is less than that of Britain. Or that we are doing pretty well in the pollution department. Even the majority-minority tensions in the US are starting to appear in Europe because of immegration from poorer regions.
Majority-minority tensions? Is this an euphemism for racism and xenophobia?
My observation is that most of us Europeans are pretty racist and xenophobic and big hypocrites about it too.
Now, while I will not erase the above, keep in mind that both the EU and US are huge and diverse places and generalizations are generally useless. Huge in different ways and diverse in different ways.
I didnt mean it as an euphemism, maybe a shorhand. The article draws a parallel between racism in the US as a residue of slavery, and xenophobia in Europe as a result of immigration of lower class workers who are different and dont care much about the culture of the host country.
Integration in the US has taken huge steps in the last half-century. My ex-wife's relatives were put in US concentration camps in WWII. I remember seeing whites-only and colored signs in the south. I remember the civil rights movement of the 60's and 70's. The article speculated whether European countries are facing the same kind of transition from individual monocultures to diversity.
I'm not sure about hypocrisy but it's true Europe is definitely much less tolerant of foreigners. Then again the US is a country of immigrants so it would be a hell of a stretch if it were the other way around.
Despite the myths of a hyper-motorized nation, Americans own fewer passenger cars per head than the French, Austrians, Swiss, Germans, Luxembourgers and Italians
"Per capita, Americans rely on their cars more than Europeans. But adjusting for the size of the country, automobile usage is lower only in Finland, Sweden and Greece."
It sounds like some interesting mental hoops were jumped through here. I wonder what exactly this is supposed to mean? cars/(person * m^2), perhaps? If so, I'm not sure how meaningful that number really is.
That is a nuance that doesn't show up in the crudest statistic, motor vehicles per capita, because the USA has a huge fleet of working vehicles. In fact, it uniquely has nearly as many "goods vehicles" as passenger cars in the latest figures from the UN Economic Commission for Europe:
Another case of lies, damned lies and statistics. When I lived in the U.S. I found the differences to be much bigger than I expected. Obviously, I did not expect or find a god-fearing nation of Darwin haters. Rather, I found a society that is different on every level. Despite being void of any religion or conservative views, I found myself to be a traditionalist. Given an alternative perspective I found the key principle behind European society to be tradition, whereas in the U.S. it is business. These principles have perpetuated into every aspect of society, from holiday celebration to city planning, on to social welfare, politics, religion, etc. It was quite a culture shock to me, but I really learned to appreciate the differences. Or as I described it an American friend: Europeans know how to party, but Americans know how to have fun.
More recently I've moved to another European country with entirely different socio-economic and religious statistics. Same old.
This is related to something I often say: The US is more liberal than Europe.
Much of Europe feels relatively rigid, in the sense that there are ancient attitudes, customs, social structures, and institutions that would seem out of place in the US.
You might say Europe is to the left of the US, but then we'd be talking about something else.
Assuming your premise is correct: What did you expect?
The origin of modern America dates back about 400 years, the origin of Europe about 2000 years. Also, the reason for many early US immigrants was to escape ancient European social structures. Europe was already crowded before America was explored: there simply was less room for outside influence from other parts of the world.
Even so, there are also quite a few attitudes, customs, social structures, and institutions in the US that would seem out of place in (most of) Europe. In fact, the sentence may even hold true for many comparisons within Europe.
I doubt, one could conclude that -- due to such differences -- one country or nation is more liberal then the other.
What matters is the nature of those differences. For example, in one place it's considered acceptable for a government to regularly collect money for a church. In the other, this would look very suspicious.
No offense, but it does not even make sense to talk about Europe like that. Europe consists of lots of different countries, that are very different and often don't even know much about each other.
Though I must admit I have no idea how much of that applies to the US, too.
There's a difference between culture and religion. Having a 10th-century depiction of the crucifixion in my passport doesn't imply that I'm religious, but it does remind me that I come from a country with a long and rich history and culture. In Northern Europe religious artifacts are primarily seen as cultural heritage, not as a way of showing your devotion to a god. I can't speak for Southern Europe, but from my limited experience of living there it doesn't seem very different.
"American church attendance and religious belief is not off the European scale if one compares it with Europe's Catholic regions. A smaller percentage of Americans consider themselves religious than the Portuguese and Italians. Proportionately fewer Americans say they believe in God than the Irish and Portuguese."
The article compares all of America to a small very religious part of Europe. That would be like saying that Americans produce 20 times as many cars as Europeans because the average number of cars produced per capita in Detroit is far above the average number of cars produced per capita in Europe.
The US is the country with the smallest percentage of non-believers (3%), and as stated in the article Portugal and Italy aren't far behind(4% and 6%). The article doesn't however mention Sweden or France that are 46% and 43% non-believers.
Source: http://www.swivel.com/graphs/show/8244121
Spiegel should really know better than manipulating numbers like this.