Secular Europe, religious America

Public Interest, Spring, 2004 by Brian C. Anderson

Religious America

Looking to the United States, a very different religious scene appears--one not of desiccation but of robust faith communities and great spiritual thirst. Upward of 60 percent of Americans (nearly thrice the European percentage) claim that "religion plays a very important role" in their lives. More than 80 percent of Americans (90 percent in some surveys) profess belief in God.

America boasts countless houses of worship. U.S. News & World Report recently noted that there are "more churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques per capita in the United States than in any other nation on Earth: one for about every 865 people." And those houses overflow with worshipers. A full 22 percent of America's 159 million Christians (three-fourths of the adult population) say they attend religious services more than once a week, and almost three quarters of Christians attend at least once or twice a month. "More people in the United States attend religious services on any given weekend than watch football--in all the stadiums, on high school football fields, college campuses, and all the television sets of the nation put together," says Catholic theologian Michael Novak.

Many cable and satellite television and radio stations offer religious programming around the clock. Most bookstores feature well-stocked religion sections, and many of the books shelved there sell briskly, some even becoming best-sellers. Public figures from presidents to basketball stars openly thank God for granting them spiritual strength or success.

America also appears in some ways to be getting more religious, not less. The Pew Research Center found that the number of Americans who "agree strongly" with three fundamental tenets of faith--belief in God, in Judgment Day, and in the importance of prayer--has risen by as much as ten points over the last four decades. Fifteen years ago, the Economist points out, two-fifths of American Protestants described themselves as "born again"--signaling a strong embrace of Christ as personal savior. The percentage has climbed to more than half. Born-again Christians now make up 39 percent of America's adult population. Further, four out of five Americans say they have "experienced God's presence or a spiritual force," and 46 percent maintain it happens to them often. "People are reaching out in all directions in their attempt to escape from the seen world to the unseen world," pollster George Gallup, Jr., tells U.S. News. "There is a deep desire for spiritual moorings--a hunger for God."

Of course, secularizing forces do exist in the United States. America's highly educated, often left-leaning elites are every bit as secular as the most disenchanted Europeans. As the sociologist Peter Berger says of this elite: "Its members are relatively thin on the ground," but they control "the institutions that provide the 'official' definitions of reality, notably the education system, the media of mass communication, and the higher reaches of the legal system." These elites have wrought secularizing changes in law and culture over the last several decades--using the courts to drive creche displays from public property and to end prayer or religious instruction of any kind in public schools, for example. However, they have yet to persuade the majority of Americans to embrace a secular worldview themselves.