Oxymoron

I'm wondering... why is it that USA has a secular constitution and yet produces large numbers of Grade A fundamentalist nutters, whilst the UK has a constitution mired in Anglican nonsense and yet has diminishing church congregations and mostly moderate to barely beleving xians?

Is this a broadly correct view of things?

Alonzo Fyfe

My theory:

Because of our constitution, Americans tend to get locked into discussions about what the law says -- what the Constitution says and the founding fathers would have wanted.

Countries without this feature, I hold, are much more likely to be concerned with what the law ought to be.

And, on the issue of what the law ought to be, secularists have a much stronger and less ambiguous case.

Splat

To Alonzo's analysis I'd add that religion has been able to flourish and diversify here because it has been allowed to do so, and many of your British nutters came here for that reason. That's what we tell ourselves, anyway.

Captain Pedantic

Personally, I think it's simply because we have a lower percentage of all sorts of nutters. Americans seem to tend much more towards extremes of opinion.

I think it's probably to do with the weather we get round here.

theyeti

A lot of it has to do with American history and culture. This country was largely settled by religious nuts who came here to practice their nonsense in peace. We still have the effects of that tradition opperating. Furthermore, Americans have never been subjected to religious wars and wars of extremist ideology, so our culture is less mindful of religious extremism than it ought to be. Europeans are probably more skeptical of religion because they've had to endure all the harm that it can cause when left unchecked.

theyeti

chrislee

Actually, Britain doesn't have a constitution.
There is an established church, but apart from
a few religious conservatives, it's mostly a
cultural thing.

It came as a shock for me to discover how religious even the Bay Area could be when I moved to California in 1989. I didn't expect creationists and fundamentalists in any quantity outside the Bible belt. And I certainly didn't expect them on school boards in Silicon Valley bedroom communities.

dangin

Doesn't the UK have a slightly better education system too?

I always thought we had wall to wall fruit loops because public education is for shit here.

avalanche:ix

i was only recently reminded that on some official level the netherlands has state sponsored religion too, that's to say, the royal family is christian, and that's supposedly the state religion therefore. ofcourse, this is all symbolic nonsense, and nobody here really cares about religion, same in most western european countries it seems. you can't really put it all on the shoulders of the nuts that emigrated to america, some of those nuts were geniuses.

maybe it has to do in part with the isolationist policies america has always seemed to take, especially in the past. that always seems to breed delusions of grandure and other fairytale constructions.

Grad Student Humanist

But there's nothing the schools can do when the parents want their children to be indoctrinated with their religious superstitions.

I'm a college instructor in Mississippi; I teach Composition 101 to incoming freshmen, all products of the Mississippi educational system. With no exceptions all of them are seriously indoctrinated into Xtianity and recoil in disgust when we discuss issues such as cloning, gay marriage and adoption, etc. What can I do about it?

Answer: not much. I am very open about my own liberal beliefs and thus try to at least introduce them to other perspectives. But that's all I can do. I can't try to undo the damage that's been done because: 1) My job is to teach them to write; 2) If I were to aggressively counter-proselytize then both their parents and the university would be on my back and I may lose my job (and rightly so since they're not paying me to be a liberal mouthpiece).

I think it's good that they're at least being exposed to both sides of the issues in my class, but I was also shocked at just how conservative and closed-minded a classroom of 18 year olds could be in America 2002.

Oxymoron

There was recently a bit of debate about the funding of religious schools. Most parents want to get their kids into these institutions because they are exclusive and there is some evidence they provide a "better" education, and not necessarily because of a desire to brainwash their offspring.

That said, even state schools have religious (Xian) assemblies as part of their weekly or daily routines. I have Jewish ethnicity, and I have vivid memories of being excused these services. Heh, little did they know I was an atheist from the age of 4 and was just using Judaism as cover So much for our multicultural society, though...