Good post. I have a feeling you would like this article/speech (but it's long and in 4 parts. You can find the other 3 parts just by googling):

U.S. Savage Imperialism: The U.S. Empire, the Mideast, and the world, part I

A relevant excerpt:

My take would be that starting with comparable religiosity in the early 20th century, late 20th/early 21st century religiosity in America is not a continuation of that early 20th century religiosity, but the emergence of a new wave of religiosity with strong sociopolitical roots. So basically, while there's been a general decline in the old religiosity in both Europe and America throughout the 20th century, the emergence of the new (late 20th century) sociopolitical religiosity in the U.S. accounts for much of the disparity.

As to why this new wave of religiosity:
wiki_The Decline of the West_Oswald Spengler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dec...igion.27s_role

Spengler is neither wholly pro-religion nor anti-religion, but he does differentiate between manifestations of religion that appear within a civilization’s developmental cycle. He sees each culture as having an initial religious identity, which eventually results in a reformation-like period, followed by a period of rationalism, and finally entering a period of second religiousness that correlates with decline. Intellectual creativeness of a Culture's Late period begins after the reformation, usually ushering in new freedoms in science.

The scientific stage associated with post-reformation Puritanism contains the fundamentals of Rationalism. Eventually rationalism spreads throughout the Culture and becomes the dominant school of thought. To Spengler, Culture is synonymous with religious creativeness. Every great Culture begins with a religious trend that arises in the countryside, is carried through to the cultural cities, and ends in materialism in the world-cities.

Spengler described the process by which Enlightenment rationalism undermines and destroys itself, passing from unlimited optimism to unqualified skepticism. The Cartesian self-centered rationalism leads to schools of thought that do not cognize outside of their own constructed worlds, ignoring actual every-day life experience. It applies criticism to its own artificial world until it exhausts itself in meaninglessness. In reaction to the educated elites, the masses give rise to the Second Religiousness, which manifests as deeply suspicious of academia and science.

The Second Religiousness appears as a harbinger of the decline of mature Civilization into an ahistorical state. The Second Religiousness occurs concurrently with Caesarism, the final political constitution of Late Civilization. Both the Second Religiousness and Caesarism demonstrate the lack of youthful strength or creativity that the Early Culture once possessed. The Second Religiousness is simply a rehashing of the original religious trend of the Culture.

OP I would check out Matthew Alper's book "The God Part of the Brain". He has a section of the book in which he explains his ideas on spiritual genes running deep in America.
http://www.godpart.com/html/table_of_contents.html

I'll agree to that.

I have read some, but I think will have to read all before I make further comments.

The forging of national identities sorta necessarily required rebellion against the church as a political force. As I'm sure you are aware the church was quite involved in Euro politics (to put it mildly!). Don't really need to watch the videos lol, this is a fine summary in wiki under 'History of the Catholic Church - French Revolution:

That's just France but I imagine similarish things played out across the continent while the church's political authority greatly diminished.

Interesting quote on anti-clericalism. Where did you get it from?

Contrary to Concerto's belief that 70% of the UK is Christian, these census results just showed up on BBC news today:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12799801

"61% of respondents said they did have a religion.

But only 29% also said they were religious.

Among respondents who identified themselves as Christian, fewer than half said they believed Jesus Christ was a real person who died, came back to life and was the son of God."

to op; if you havent already (not sure what to assume) have a look at charles taylor's 'a secular age' for a modern authoritative perspective on the difference.

talks about secularism as a result of varying 'conditions of belief'. compared to the very quantified and statistical help it looks like youve gotten so far, it offers a very nice, more irrational (albeit if a bit nebulous) contrast.

if nothing else, check out the wiki for an easy reference ur marker will appreciate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age

i wrote a 'critical summary'/essay on it awhile back, pm me if you want it, have no need for it

My guess is that Europe is more heterogeneous. In contrast in the US there are large religiously homogeneous areas.

For religion to catch a stronghold you need concentrated groups of believers to apply peer pressure. This is difficult if all religions in the area are in the minority as is the case in much of Europe.

Do you have a link to back this up?

Not one to miss the opportunity to derail a thread with pettiness, I wonder if Concerto is going to revise his view on this matter now that he has been contradicted by multiple people citing reliable sources, or if he will ignore all that and refer at a later date to the people who disagreed with him, and the facts they bring to the table, as atheists spreading nonsense (the fact that Jib isn't an atheist yet not withstanding). Concerto, care to chime in?

Oh, Polly rarely has much to say about why he want a cracker, or what happens if he doesn't get one.

You and I both know he will either return with a sneered rebuttal that can only be consolidated in his narrow world view, or pull the standard practice of abandonment. In Concertoland, he is never wrong, regardless of what is presented to him. Here is my recent favorite in which he pulls both tactics. http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/47...70/index4.html

Has Concerto ever said what he does professionally etc..? What his qualifications and learnings are?I'd care.
Sorry for derailing though

The most simplistic answer is that Europe felt the full force of the Enlightenment and that its legacy remains. Here in the UK our politicians very rarely mention religion, and our current Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Lib Dems, Nick Clegg, is openly atheist. Nobody makes it a big deal. Tony Blair was the only high-profile politician I can think of who made frequent references to his faith, and he was roundly mocked for it.

Personally, I don't know a single practising Christian in my family or peer group, and religion has certainly never featured in my life in anything but cursory sing-alongs when I was at school twenty years ago. My instinctive reaction when meeting a religious person is to suspect their mental health, it just seems like completely unnecessary displacement activity and/or compensation for underlying 'issues'. America seems deeply primitive in this respect with huge problems of national identity and mass psychology, almost like a Third World country.

I think the media also plays a huge role in this matter. I live in Western Europe and the media here is free from religious bias. All religions are viewed as...... religions. So they are viewed equally. Morality issues are not based on religion here but on humanity, which in my mind is more realistic. I think approaching morality issues in this way will eventually be taken over by the rest of the world.

In the U.S. morality is often based on Christianity + the media has far more religious (and political) bias.

I'd probably list a few things:

- Europeans are better educated and philosophically more sophisticated. Americans are largely morons in this area. They're also exposed to a far wider range of cultures, languages, philosophies and opinions. All of these lead to realizing that the religion of your family and neighbors and friends might just be a geographical accident with no basis in truth.

- Europeans have been exposed far more strongly to communism and other isms, which tend to discourage religion. All of Eastern Europe and part of Germany was under communism for 40 odd years - it adds up to a large flow of atheist ideologies between those countries and mainstream Europe.

- Europeans are more left wing/socialist, which academically tend to discourage religion.

- The predominantly protestant culture in the US is self reinforcing and is very resistant to outside influence. It emphasizes a personal relationship with God, as opposed to the authoritarian pronouncements and structure of Catholicism, which young people tend to reject.

in the (highly unlikely, i know) event that anyone would like to read my thesis on this topic, pm me. it's ~110 pages.

my thesis statement was essentially that each of these two regions (europe and the usa) responded differently to questions/issued raised by the enlightenment in three distinct ways, specifically: structural (government/institutional), philosophical (predominant thinking and teaching of intellectuals/academic 'elites'), and social (immigration/the role of religion in society) divergences.

prolly the single most important factor, if i had to choose one, was the fact that sep. of church and state in the us meant that church/religion in the broader sense was viewed as a separate entity from the state and thus was not subject to the same frustrations that the state was. this was not the case in europe, where religion was often viewed as an extension of the (often unpopular) state.

.

Thanks for bumping this thread. If nothing else, it shows what a dishonorable person Concerto is. A simple "I was wrong" would suffice.