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Church/state separation and religious observance

Matthew Yglesias observes:

The thing that really jumped out at me was a graphic showing the percentage of people who attend religious services at least once a week in America and six Middle-Eastern and West Asian countries. I'd like to think my sense about this stuff isn't too unduly influenced by stereotypes, but I was quite surprised to see that American led this list with 45% of its citizens attending services at least once a week. Jordan was right behind at 44, Egypt and Morocco at 43, Turkey at 38, Saudi Arabia 28, and Iran 27.

What's interesting about this, I think, is that it reenforces the trend we see in the West, where countries that have experienced periods of close church-state ties (France, most of northern Europe) are relatively unobservant compared to countries with a stronger church-state separation.

Now I'm going to sound parochial, and the experience of 51 million people in Canada, Australia and New Zealand (CANZ) is not much more data ... but these countries like the United States never had an established church, yet have seen religious attendance wither as it has in Europe.

That is the most interesting contrast, and likely to point by elimination, to the factors that make America so religious. I'm not going to answer the question in my lunch hour, so I'll pose some more:

• Back to the races! The peculiar legacy of slavery and Reconstruction explains something about the distinctive development of the American labor movement. Since [at the margin] churches and unions compete for the time and money of the masses, it might be that racial unfreedom rather than religious freedom has something to do with the flourishing of religion.
  
• Or, since labor unions faced a more hostile organizing environment in the U.S., the church benefitted as an alternative collective civic institution. (The gap in religious attendance between the US and CANZ has widened recently, but can be seen in the 19th and 20th centuries).
  
• Immigration? CANZ had much more homogeneous migrant streams in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
  
• Professional and amateur sports? At least in ANZ, amateur sporting teams were a huge part of community life, and still are. Did the earlier development of professional sports mean that amateur sports in America didn't develop as a competing civic institution to the church?
  
• Taxes? None of these countries had an established religion, but did taxes and regulation of non-profits differ in a way that might have affected the viability of churches?
  

Answers please!

Posted by robe0419 at December 8, 2004 02:43 PM | TrackBack