Timeline for Why is the US so religious compared to other Western democracies?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 17, 2020 at 1:39 | comment | added | Jason | An American ex-pat colleague once told me "My country is easier to understand if you remember that a lot of the first European settlers were religious fanatics or mercenaries." | |
| Mar 15, 2020 at 16:02 | comment | added | Ted Wrigley | @Fizz: I haven't run across that particular paper. From the abstract, I'm not sure how it applies. So sure, conservatives are more prone to personal, idealized faith, and view people who take religion as a social activity dimly. But that doesn't mean that they are not impressed by devout pastors or peers. Even one who is earnestly committed to a personal relationship with the divine carries out their practice within a congregation of like-minded others. | |
| Mar 15, 2020 at 13:35 | comment | added | 264 champagne bottles on ice | "Intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness" actually psycnet.apa.org/record/1985-19955-001 | |
| Mar 15, 2020 at 13:28 | comment | added | 264 champagne bottles on ice | I'm not sure what your background in social sciences is, but what you mentioned in the last comment, in psychology it has been called internal vs external religiosity. There was highly cited paper in the mid 1980s on this. | |
| Mar 15, 2020 at 4:18 | comment | added | Ted Wrigley | @Fizz: I'm not suer how you're applying 'transmission channels' here: not a term I'm familiar with, and I'm suspicious of economic reductionism. Religiosity passes down less through family orientation than through community religiosity (meaning one is less likely to express devotion through parental influence than through the influence of church leaders or religious peers), and religious attitudes often persist even where overt religious behavior has been abandoned. If you think solely in terms of individual pathways of transmission you miss the pressures of collective understanding. | |
| Mar 15, 2020 at 3:54 | comment | added | 264 champagne bottles on ice | Yes, but you haven't gone to the length of exploring what economists would call "transmission channels". Are people more religious because their families were so (thus upbringing explains is)? Is there some other part of US society's machinery that does this (or complements the upbringing channel)? Etc. | |
| Mar 15, 2020 at 3:18 | comment | added | Ted Wrigley | @Fizz: I cannot convince you of the power of acculturation if you do not want to believe in the power of acculturation. I'll remind you, however, that there are more than a few people who still still reference the Crusades when talking about the current problems in the middle east. 300 years is not that much time in terms of cultural attitudes... | |
| Mar 15, 2020 at 2:04 | comment | added | 264 champagne bottles on ice | Basically this answer seems to boil down to "The US is still deeply religious because many of its original settlers were motivated sectarian pit-bulls" (quoting from the last para.) Alas there's not much evidence provided in this answer that this is still the reason, hundreds of years later... | |
| Mar 14, 2020 at 21:30 | history | edited | Ted Wrigley | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
grammar fix
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| Mar 14, 2020 at 18:41 | history | edited | Ted Wrigley | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
fixes
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| Mar 14, 2020 at 17:34 | history | answered | Ted Wrigley | CC BY-SA 4.0 |