Kevin Drum wades into a discussion over a claim that religion leads to happiness (started by Will Wilkinson and picked up by Ross Douthat), and offers an alternate theory for why religious people are happier in America by unhappier in Europe:
This is way outside my wheelhouse, but here’s another possibility: Europe has suffered through centuries of devastating religious wars that didn’t end until fairly recently. If you live in Western Europe, there’s a pretty good chance that you associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief, not with church bake sales. So whatever you think of religion itself, seeing the end of religious wars, religious terrorism, and massive state-sponsored religious bigotry is almost bound to make you happy. You’d have to be almost literally crazy not to be happier in today’s secular Europe than in yesterday’s religious Europe.
Enh. I really don’t buy this at all.
I mean, what large-scale religious wars has Europe had within living memory? There were religious dimensions to both the troubles in Northern Ireland and the Balkans, but those were so bound up with nationalism that it’s hard to call them fundamentally religious conflicts. Other than that, you’ve got a smattering of terrorism. The great conflicts of the last hundred years have been essentially secular– the two World Wars had nothing whatsoever to do with religion, and neither did the Cold War.
You can trot out the argument that history runs deeper in Europe, and argue that the religious wars of the 17th century still resonate, but I don’t buy that, either. I mean, look at Britain, France, and Germany.
If history were really destiny, then why aren’t the British, French, and Germans all at each others’ throats? After all, the British and French have fought umpteen bloody wars since 1066, and the French and Germans have had three significant wars in the last century and a half.
These are countries that fought on opposite sides in the two bloodiest conflicts in human history, and yet today they get along better with each other right now than either does with us (and, remember, it wasn’t quite 250 years ago that the French helped us win the Revolutionary War– historically speaking, we should get along brilliantly). They don’t have a problem because history is just that: history.
In some sense, this is just a variant of the “implacable ethnic hatred” argument that gets trotted out whenever two groups of people start squabbling in some part of the world that Americans know nothing about. “These people have been fighting each other for hundreds of years,” people will say, “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
But that’s nonsense– the fact that two groups of people fought each other in a war a hundred years ago doesn’t mean that they have to be at each other’s throats today. Old grudges will get dug up, to be sure, and cited as evidence of the rightness of one cause or another, but if people are fighting today it’s because of things that are happening today, not something that happened a century or two ago.
The “implacable ethnic hatred” line is usually an excuse to avoid grappling with the real causes of current conflicts, which generally involve a scarcity of money, power, or essential resources in the area in question. Dealing with those issues would be difficult and expensive, though, so it’s easier to write the whole thing off as an inevitable consequence of history, and leave it at that. But it’s amazing how fast centuries of hatred and bloodshed can be put aside when both nations are rich and happy.
In the same way that it doesn’t really make sense to blame modern wars on something that happened in 1432, it makes no sense to attribute European secularism to the Albigensian Crusade. If people in Europe have a low opinion of religion today, it’s because of something that’s happening today, not something that took place before anyone in Europe today was born.
As far as the question of why Europeans don’t go to church goes, put me down as a supporter of Ross Douthat’s explanation:
my suspicion is that the difference has something to do with the role of the welfare state as well – that the benefits of belonging to a religious community are greater in the U.S. than in Europe in part because our welfare state is smaller, and religious participation provides both tangible and intangible forms of security that are more valuable in a society where the free market is more freewheeling and the welfare state weaker. If you’re a Christian who prefers the American model, you might say that the Europeans use government as a substitute for God; if you prefer Europe’s path to modernity, you’d probably say something about Americans clinging to churchgoing because it’s the only protection available against the harsh brutality of our jungle capitalism.
Of course, regular readers of this blog won’t be surprised to hear that I agree with this, as I’ve said similar things myself on several occasions.
It could be as simple as being in the minority tends to make you unhappier, and being in the majority – about anything – tends to make you feel happier and more secure. A kind of confirmation bias (a majority has the same viewpoint as me so I must be right) and a sense of uncertainty for someone on a “losing” side, a vague sense of social exclusion and stigma. We like being on the winning team, and when we are not, we sulk. Whether it’s actually a competition or not doesn’t come into it.
And in the US practising religious people are in the majority while in Europe they are not.
If you are looking for events that determine the current European psyche there’s the (aftermath of) World War 2 and the just overcome iron curtain.
While World War 2 made (Western) Europe the way it is today (peaceful, rich, powerless) the fall of the wall brought new problems for Europe to solve.
The average European won’t have a wider horizon than the average North American. And in all those conflicts and events religion didn’t really play any role.
Who cares about some war that happend centuries ago in an Europe that must seem quite alien to any contemporary European. In many ways the USA have a much more constant history over the last 250 years than the Europeans. Europe has been abruptly changing, especially over the last 250 years.
There were “religious dimensions” to the “troubles” in Northern Ireland? That is quite the understatement, unless you are just looking to build up your hit count.
I’m not sure what point you are trying to make about living memory, since (a) the Ottoman Empire did not fall until after WW I and (b) the recent horrors in the Balkans go back to events that are less distant than the “War of Northern Aggression” in the mid 19th century in the US, and “Forget Hell” can still be seen having a role in US Presidential politics today. Just because the participants are not alive doesn’t mean their great-grandchildren have forgotten.
Sometimes the things that are happening today are a direct result of things that happened in the 20th, or even 19th, century even here in the US. Just look at the connection between fundamentalism and the leadup to the Civil War.
As the offspring of a fundamentalist family long since shut of that insanity, I’ll tell you that in my experience, the self-reported happiness of the faithful is largely false. I’ve never seen so many doom-and-gloom sad sacks spend so much time talking about how evil they are, the world is, sex is, etc, worrying about their families and friends out there dealing with Satan’s world, all the while proclaiming their great “Joy in the Lord” and overall happiness. If that’s happiness, I don’t want any.
I mean, what large-scale religious wars has Europe had within living memory?
…from certain points of view, it might be possible to detect evidence for a wee bit of a religious angle in the “Christian-majority- vs.-Jewish-minority” portion of WWII.
I think though that religion-vs-politics is a false dichotomy. To paraphrase von Clausewitz, religion is politics by other means. It’s a continuum of identies, where there’s no bright shining line between the two.
It depends on which country in Europe you go to, there are huge differences. But I would say there is “too much history”, and this does affect the way people view formerly establishment institutions like the catholic church.
The traditional high religiosity in the countryside was under assault since the industrial revolution and the 20th century brought one disaster after another – WWI, followed by industrial crisis, Nazi occupation and WWII, followed by the communism in East Bloc.
In many countries the problem with church was not that it was despised as much as that it became compromised and irrelevant.
I spent 40 years in a part of North Western Indiana populated, in part, by Serbs and Croats. It turns out that Serbs (Orthodox Catholics) blame Croatians (Roman Catholics) for aiding in a Nazi-initiated persecution of the Serbs during WWII. The Serbs are absolutely convinced that RC officials helped the Nazi’s torture and exterminate Orthodox Serbs. I have no idea how true a story this is. But, perception being everything, it is one small indication that WWII was all about religion in some areas of the world.
I think there are two factors in play.
1. Many European countries have an official religion, and often a portion of tax revenue is used to support the Church (some countries let you choose which religion it goes to, but it still goes to some religious organization). This led to the Church (whichever one is favored) becoming compromised, as milkshake put it, due to the series of disasters that was the twentieth century. In the US, the official wall between church and state has helped keep the churches strong because they are forced to demonstrate their relevance to the population.
2. Another factor, which I have mentioned before, is that in most of the US religious groups are the only organizations providing any sense of community. Part of this is the lack of a welfare state that Douthat mentions, but suburban sprawl that typically fails to include any public community gathering spot is a major contributor to this problem.
If history were really destiny, then why aren’t the British, French, and Germans all at each others’ throats?
It’s not history that’s destiny, it’s mythology. The Wars of the Reformation have a very different place in people’s conception of their national characters than many other, more recent conflicts. Heck, I’m a Scot – much of our national character is heavily influenced by a total fantasy loosely based on a completely unrepresentative selection of historical events from the 13th century, despite the fact that there are many much more significant events (from a historical perspective) that most people have never even heard of. The actual historical facts are completely irrelevant.
Very true – from a historical perspective. But that’s not how most people see it. Just as most Americans think the Civil War was purely about slavery, so most Britons think the Troubles were purely about religion. That’s why the respective sides still chant sectarian religious slogans at each other at football matches. Celtic are still regarded as Catholic, and Rangers are still regarded as Protestant. Nationalism, republicanism and sectarianism are inseparable in (much of) the public mind, regardless of what any learnéd academic might think about the matter.
To further illustrate my point with an example, consider the popular conception of the Jacobite rebellion of 1754. Ask any Scot to tell you who was fighting and what it was about, and at least 9 times out of 10 they’ll tell you it was the Scots against the English, in the cause of Scottish independence. This is, of course, utter rubbish – more Scots fought on the Hanoverian side that the Jacobite side, and independence was most definitely not the goal. Yet this (the completely wrong version) is popularly regarded as one of the most important events in our history (which is also rubbish).
Interestingly, this is one example where the very significant religious aspect to the conflict has been completely overlooked (in the public mind), in favour of a totally bogus nationalist interpretation that doesn’t make any sense at all if you know even the most basic facts of the matter.
There is a huge difference between “history” and “what people think about history”.
I think part of it is a distrust of ideologies in general. The last time Europe started a war over ideology, 70 million people died, including a healthy chunk of my family. And then another ideology–communism–trapped half of Europe behind the Iron Curtain. I believe that in Europe, having a strong faith in anything is tied to memories of genocide and suffering on a scale that cannot be imagined.
In the same way that it doesn’t really make sense to blame modern wars on something that happened in 1432, it makes no sense to attribute European secularism to the Albigensian Crusade. If people in Europe have a low opinion of religion today, it’s because of something that’s happening today, not something that took place before anyone in Europe today was born.
Does this also apply to all the claims that one group or another in the Middle East is still pissed off about the Crusades?
Or does that not count because it isn’t Europe?
Does this also apply to all the claims that one group or another in the Middle East is still pissed off about the Crusades?
Absolutely.
They’re not really pissed about the Crusades, they’re pissed about the creation of Israel and the preposterously unequal distribution of wealth in the Arab states.
They’re not really pissed about the Crusades
How can you be so sure? People have an amazing ability to become emotionally attached to obsolete and irrelevant causes.
Anyway, the more I think about this, the more convinced I am that the original question is backwards. The unstated premise is that there is something unusual about Europe’s secularism which needs explained. I would argue that it’s the USA’s religiosity that is unusual and requires explanation. And such explanations are not hard to find – for example, the major social role played by churches in widely dispersed rural communities.
I also think it’s a terrible mistake to try and think about Europe as a homogeneous entity from either a cultural or historical perspective. Europe only appears uniformly secular when looked at from a distance and compared to an extreme outlier like the US or Saudi Arabia – and even then, only in very recent history.