Presentation of self in America
Americans tell pollsters they’re religious as all getout, very very very religious, as religious as it’s possible to be. But they’re not.
Beyond the polls, social scientists have conducted more rigorous analyses of religious behavior. Rather than ask people how often they attend church, the better studies measure what people actually do. The results are surprising. Americans are hardly more religious than people living in other industrialized countries. Yet they consistently—and more or less uniquely—want others to believe they are more religious than they really are.
Oh yes? Well if that’s true, it’s yet another reason gnu atheism is a useful and helpful thing. As gnu atheism spreads and seeps into the broader culture, people will begin to grasp that there’s really no good reason to want others to believe one is more religious than one actually is.
Religion in America seems tied up with questions of identity in ways that are not the case in other industrialized countries. When you ask Americans about their religious beliefs, it’s like asking them whether they are good people, or asking whether they are patriots…Asking people how often they attend church elicits answers about their identity—who people think they are or feel they ought to be, rather than what they actually believe and do.
There again. Gnu atheism, by being gnu – outspoken, movement-like, shared, popular – will free some people to stop feeling they ought to be religious. It will make that option more available to a lot of people. There are atheists who think that believers’ desire to cling to their beliefs should trump items like that option, but I think those atheists are wrong.
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I could have explained this to the pollsters. Self-reports are notoriously undependable. Sometimes the reports are over the top and sometimes they are under the top. And often they are estimates of what the polled think the answer ought to be, depending on who they are talking to and what the topic is. Also, how the question is pitched. And pollster questions are very cleverly designed. My hypothesis is that when pollsters ask questions, the questionee is always telling her identity in her answer. I know I do. That’s just how this stuff works.
And people over-exaggerate about religion because they don’t want to hurt little baby jesus’s feelings so close to his darling birthday, and they don’t want to get hit with a thunderbolt or an Acme Novelty Company anvil falling from the sky.
Long experience in this field has taught me as well that people often simply believe what they’re saying despite its being totally wrong. The results for Canada are interesting – Christianity is clearly reeling here, but people still claim they go to church.
I think compartmentalisation is at work here. America has a classically liberal foundation with a classically liberal constitution, and yet a strong belief in Christianity. These are opposing ideas. And so Americans compartmentalise their beliefs. Even great thinkers with compartmentalisation will flip and turn nutty when with their religious buddies. This is my explanation for people like Francis Collins.
I think the “Good without God” campaigns will eventually have a big impact here. People report going to church because they think they are good people, and they have been trained since infancy to think that going to church is what good people do. The fact that they haven’t gone to church in the past 20 years is just a momentary aberration that doesn’t reflect who they really are.
It’s pretty much the same as how people under-report their weight. I’m not really that fat; that’s not really who I am. Any minute now I’m going on a diet, and then you’ll be able to see the slim person I really am.
If they ever jump ship they’ll know that there are gnu atheist escape rafts willing and ready to pull them on board.
Well yes. It will be (it already is, to some extent) apparent that it won’t be a jump into a howling emptiness with no one to talk to. And there’s another thing – but I’ll do a post on that.
The way I say it, is that Americans are very religious when asked. I remember that my former neighbor was a very religious man. I could tell from the way he went off to his Church every Sunday. He always carried his Bible. The Bible was shaped like a bag of golf clubs.
I’d say that Americans are far more religious about football, baseball, beer, etc, than they are about theology.
The main difference between Britain and the USA, is that Americans are more prone to pretend that they are religious. There’s a lot of social stigma associated with being atheist.
This explains a lot. There’s a strong negative correlation between income and religiosity internationally. By rights, the US should be one of the least religious countries on Earth. It would appear it’s not as large an outlier as previously thought.