{"id":2624,"date":"2008-05-19T21:15:18","date_gmt":"2008-05-19T21:15:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/19\/religion-happiness-and-history\/"},"modified":"2008-05-19T21:15:18","modified_gmt":"2008-05-19T21:15:18","slug":"religion-happiness-and-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/05\/19\/religion-happiness-and-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Religion, Happiness, and History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Drum wades into a discussion over a claim that religion leads to happiness (started by Will Wilkinson<\/a> and picked up by Ross Douthat<\/a>), and offers an alternate theory<\/a> for why religious people are happier in America by unhappier in Europe:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Enh. I really don’t buy this at all.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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… Continue reading Religion, Happiness, and History<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}