Jesus is my seat cushion that may be used as a floatation device

[cosmolinguist]

This, written by an Englishman living in North Carolina, explains better than I've been able to (my USian family just blinks at me in confusion), just how different the British attitude to religion is. He's saying what would be for Britain tediously obvious stuff about climate change and the importance of teaching good science and so on, but as so many other things that are obvious in the rest of the industrialized world (where abortion, the dealth penalty, gun control, socialized health care, and many other hot topics in the US are not even an issue, are not argued by the extremes of the right or left wing), they're very contentious in the US.

I lie back and imagined that this guy might soon find himself in a country more like the one he left, where (as matgb pointed out), a Tory front bench spokesman just admitted to being an atheist on national TV. What would it take?

A lot. I sighed. It seems impossible really, but of course such paradigm shifts always do.

But then I started thinking of another newspaper article I read yesterday, about the demise of religion, specifically Christianity, in Canada and a feminist explanation for the reason it declined so suddenly in the '60s.

It is impossible to refute or underemphasize the fact that religion was suddenly confronted in the 1960s by changes in the social construct of gender and a resulting severing of the centuries-old linkage between Christian piety and femininity.

Women — the traditional mainstays of institutional religion — in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church's patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive "angels in the house" with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.

Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings...Birth control gave them the deliberate choice to be sexual, to move out of enslavement to fertility, to delay and limit the size of families. Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae (On The Regulation of Birth), shocked even loyal Canadian Catholics by upholding the church's ban on contraception.

He makes a very good point, and from personal experience I can confirm that my dislike of the Cathollic Church goes all the way back to the fact that I learned at an early age that it had no interesting career opportunities for me even if I'd wanted them.

But there's something else that's occurred to me now in the context of thinking about what it would take for America to be like that. Because my first thought on imagining a religionless (or at least less-religioned) US was not about the sad disappearance of potlucks but about a neighbor of mine (well, of my parents now of course) who died of brain cancer a couple of years ago. And my own family when my dad didn't have a job for a couple of years. And millions, surely, of other Americans who have benefitted from bags of groceries, like we got, or benefit suppers to help pay for medical bills, like our neighbor got. Much of that sort of thing is organized by churches. "Faith-based" organizations are responsible for a big chunk of the volunteer work and chartiable giving done in America.

I didn't think, until now when I thought it strange that I hadn't thought of it, about any kind of mystical or metaphysical impact the loss of a churchgoing, theistic population, I just thought about what it would mean for me... or people like me, since I'm not there any more. As long as unemployed people and ill people are shat upon by the USian government, as long as there's a dearth of non-religious do-gooding (by the government as much as individuals! see "whatever happened to New Orleans"), churches will try to fill that vacuum.

My knowledge of all history everywhere is extremely vague, but when I read about the religious sea change in Canada in the 1960s, I couldn't help but think about the one other thing I do know about that place and time, which is Tommy Douglas. He's the Prometheus who brought socialized medicine to Canada. It seems obvious but it wasn't mentioned in the article, and I'm sure it's a gross oversimplification on my part, to think that people were less interested in church as secular institutions were developed to take care of everybody. But I'm sure of the benefit suppers for people with cancer, the mass food-shelf donations, the sense of community that is one of my favorite things about coming from where I do, and it's all based on churches, on organized religion.

Of course all that stuff is possible without religion, and of course USians with no religion can rely on other social networks of friends and family... but until a better governmental safety net comes in to place for the sick, poor, unemployed, etc., I wouldn't blame USians for keeping up with their god-bothering.

Comments

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

We secularised the good bits of religion and called it the Welfare State. Then we fucked it over by letting cheese-paring shiny-polyester-arsed bureaucrats in to run it (into the ground).

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

> "Faith-based" organizations are responsible for a big chunk of the volunteer work and chartiable giving done in America.

A rational society should not need volunteers and charity. It should look after its key resource - its citizens. If you're going to have government (something I'd rather not have), at least have government that cares for people.

[cosmolinguist]

A rational society should not need volunteers and charity.

Very much agreed. And if a country does need them to the extent that it is not rational, it's not surprising that the US needs so much.

[spinningtoofast.livejournal.com]

Your point about Churches (and other religious establishments) providing a lot of the social care in the US is a very good one. It annoys me to know end that the left in the UK is so willing to write off Americans as bible-thumping credulous idiots. There's no willingness to understand WHY religion plays such an important part in people's lives.

Interestingly - Tommy Douglas was a Baptist Minister, and was motivated by religious belief. A lot of the early CCFers were fairly religious. The idea that there is a religious left seems lost on a lot of people, but it was the religious tradition I grew up with - God wants you to support revolutions in Latin America, etc.

I think Canada falls between Europe and the US on this. We like our religion kept out of our government, but a lot more people are privately religious, and certainly religion is not publicly held up for ridicule the way I feel it is in Europe. There's a lot more of a 'live and let live' attitude between believers and atheists, and I think more of an appreciation by atheists that 1) not all members of x religion think alike, and 2) that people's religion is an important part of their identity, and it should be respected, as long as they're not hurting anyone.

To illustrate - a couple of weeks ago, it was discovered that there are now slightly more regular church-going Catholics in the UK than Protestants. And you'd think it was the apocalypse! Even the Independent was basically saying "hey, we'd better watch out no one tries to oppress gay people and women". Meanwhile, Canada is a Catholic-majority country, and we have actual gay marriage (not 'civil unions') and abortion on demand.

[cosmolinguist]

It annoys me to know end that the left in the UK is so willing to write off Americans as bible-thumping credulous idiots. There's no willingness to understand WHY religion plays such an important part in people's lives.

It annoys me too, and baffles me. Especially as I come from one of the places where religion could hardly be further from the bible-thumpers. Indeed, Midwestern Christians are mostly as derisive of the charismatic Christians as any Brit, and for the same reason: they seem really weird to us! Religion is right up there with emotions and sex lives in the list of things that people are never ever going to talk about.

I noticed (when I was checking my facts to make sure I had the dates right when alluding to them in this post) that Tommy Douglas was a Baptist minister, and that fact alone would boggle the stereotypical USian mind, which has somehow conflated "religion" with "Republicans," and thus with rich people, and thus poor people don't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting decent health care, just because they think it's important to vote for the guy who says the most things about God. There's just none of the distinction that Canadian Christians seem to have made, where even if you think something is immoral doesn't mean it should be illegal for everybody.

[spinningtoofast.livejournal.com]

Fundamentalist Baptists are fair game for mocking - it's more that there's a definite portion of the UK population who think every last American is like that. And that there's no effort made to understand why evangelical religion might be attractive to people, or to relate the growth of the Christian right in the US to a comparable European phenomenon (for example, the growth of far-right fascist groups).

To be fair, my experience of general UK ignorance about the Christian left may actually be an experience of latent anti-Catholicism in the UK. People are always really shocked to find out that I went to a progressive Catholic school, and even more shocked to find out that there's such a thing as Liberation Theology. And it gets really illogical at times - I mean, obviously the 'average' Catholic uses birth control; Italy has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe!

What I actually said about respecting other people's religion was people's religion is an important part of their identity, and it should be respected, as long as they're not hurting anyone.
Emphasis on the "not hurting anyone". I once spent an entire summer denouncing the Pope on French CBC.

You may not care about what your Muslim colleagues it (and nor should you) but you'd be surprised how many people do get bent out of shape over things like that. Or about what Muslim women wear of their own volition. Or about whether or not someone believes in transubstantiation - all things that have absolutely no impact on anyone else's life. I don't know if I believe in God or not, but I don't think that people who do are stupid or deluded, which is frequently the attitude I've come across in the UK. (And Terry Eagleton has discussed this much better than I ever could).

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

belief in God is a self-evident absurdity

Yup, it is. But I know lots of intelligent people who still do. I'd rather believe in Doctor Who.

* shrug *

[miss-s-b.livejournal.com]

Whereas I think /everyone/ is stupid, myself included ;)

[spinningtoofast.livejournal.com]

That should say "what your Muslim colleagues eat"

[etoilepb.livejournal.com]

Religion, on the smaller scale, is one thing. People will always have it, I think.

The issue is the large scale. Countries don't run off of idealism. They run off of reason and pragmatism. You can't run a 3000-mile-wide nation any better off of born-again Christianity than you could run most of the Asian continent off of Communism.