The people have spoken, the results are in. Pluralities or majorities in eighteen of twenty-two countries surveyed for the Pew Global Attitudes Project think that Americans are not religious enough. According to the report “this is especially true in all three Arab nations surveyed—Jordan (89%), Egypt (81%), and Lebanon (64%)—as well as in Indonesia (67%) and Pakistan (55%). Majorities also hold this view in India (57%), Brazil (55%), Mexico (56%), Kenya (53%) and Nigeria (57%).” For that matter, 64 percent of Americans surveyed think that Americans are not religious enough.
While there is general consensus that America should be more religious, I suspect that this reflects nothing more than the general consensus that religion is a good thing and you can’t have too much of it. It would be interesting to know what manifestations of religiosity in American public life the individuals polled in each country were considering when giving their answer. Especially the pluralities in Great Britain, Germany, and Japan and the majority (71%) in France who think that the United States is too religious.
June 21st, 2010 | 10:10 pm
Maybe the better way to phrase this is that most people in the world think the U.S. should be more like their own countries. People who live in religious countries think the U.S. should be more religious and people who live in less religious countries think the U.S. should be less religious.
No surprise there. What is interesting is that the percentage of Americans who think the U.S. should be more religious is higher than the percentage in Poland, Turkey, India and Pakistan and the same as in Lebanon.
It seems likely Americans interpret the question the same way they would interpret the question as to whether you should exercise more, drink less and lose more weight. The “right” answer is always yes when applied to yourself.
June 22nd, 2010 | 1:55 am
Mark: I think you’ve got it just about right. And as for the social scientific survey upon which the results are based, I think Joseph Bottom (in his post “Socially Speaking”) likewise just about has it right: “the word social should basically be read as meaning not.”
June 22nd, 2010 | 9:54 am
Americans are among the most religious people in the world, the polls show.
However, American culture is amoral and immoral, increasingly so. How can this be?
Look a little closer, and those who profess to believe in God, and therefore are counted as “religious” actually believe in a god of their own imagining. Unless we believe in the God Who Is, we will continue to be counted very religious in polls and terribly anti-religious in real life.
June 22nd, 2010 | 10:27 am
Americans are among the most religious people in the world, the polls show.
I can’t find the graph right now but data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project show that there is a strong negative correlation between GDP per capita and how important people rate religion in their own lives. As a country gets wealthier, religion declines.
The U.S. is something of an outlier here and may well be the most religious developed country, but many poor countries are much more religious than the U.S. For instance, 82% of Americans said religion was very or somewhat important to them in 2008. By contrast, the numbers in poor Muslim countries were around 98% to 99%. In Europe, the numbers are between 30-50%.
It certainly is the case though that affiliation with a congregation has declined over the past several years while people who believe in a “universal spirit” or a non-personal God has increased by about the same percentage. Americans have been leaving traditional religion for deism or some vague theological belief that people may have trouble articulating.
June 22nd, 2010 | 11:44 am
Can there be anything of less relevance or importance to Americans than what the rest of the world thinks of our relative religiosity?
June 22nd, 2010 | 1:58 pm
I tend to agree with Chuck, with a significant exception. If I thought the other countries of the world had accurate information about us and were generally reasonable people themselves, then I would care what they thought about us.
June 22nd, 2010 | 2:41 pm
Every great civilization or culture had a religion. If you want to see what a culture without religion looks like, look at Europe. Its culture is dead. Nothing comes out of contemporary European culture that is worth remembering.
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