On Sat, 8 Jul 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Any hypotheses as to why the U.S. should be so uniquely plagued by
> religiosity?
I think there are two questions here: (1) why does the US have more fundamentalists than other christian countries? and (2) why are appeals to god part of our political boilerplate? And I think they have the same answer. The US stands out in that its formative experience of religion was of dissent protestantism. (As opposed to Anglicanism or state Lutheranism, which have apostolic bishop structures.) It marks our national and political culture in all sorts of ways. But I think the main answer to (1) is that we've got more fundamentalists because we've got more of every kind of Protestant. We've spent centuries being a breeding ground for sects. It would be surprising if we hadn't grown more of them than other western countries. (Although in terms of forming our political culture the main event, to my mind, was the Great Revival of the 19th century and its Catholic analog rather than the original Puritan settlement.)
I think the answer to (2) can best be rephrased as another question: why can't you make any political mileage in this country by being against the Church? As you can in say France, Spain or England? The answer to that is involved, and I'm sure we won't all agree. But I think its simply a fact that militant atheism has never been part of the Democratic party tradition, while it has been an abiding current of left parties in other countries. (Anti-fundamentalism is a poor substitute no matter how much some of us would like to flog it, since professional American politicians always concede the baseline by saying they aren't against religion.)
In short, the answer to (2) is that attacking religion has no upside here for a politician, and citing it mildly has no downside. It's not hard to see how something like that becomes political boilerplate.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com