All Along The Watchtower
Progressive Realist
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« on: January 16, 2012, 12:43:30 PM » |
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Bumping this topic (apologies in advance).
Yes, this is all true. America collectively and generally is a nation of self-selecting, culturally biased, narrow-minded "Christians." There are some interesting aspects of America's historical development, however, that could help us understand why this is the case.
The American colonies were founded by religious charlatans, fundamentalists, outcasts, refugees, and cranks from Europe. As a nation of immigrants from the start, America has a tradition and history of people who, in hard conditions-economic, climate, and geographical-would cling to religious dogma zealously.
Furthermore, the US has never had an established Church to rebel against, and the kind of churches that America's freedom of religion allowed have historically been more often of the more emotion-based, anti-intellectual, and sometimes outright anti-philosophical variety. This has been especially true in the South, where low levels of education, an underdeveloped agrarian economy, and a long-established (and violently destroyed) slave society were all conditions that conspired to establish Protestant religious dogma as the only game in town, religiously.
It should be noted that America has been a religious "free market" for a long time. What has happened in the more recent past is a kind of right-wing religious backlash that is heavily intertwined with the far-right "movement conservative" political backlash of the 1970s to the present. Issues of race, nationalism, economic anxiety, and the abandonment of so many by the increasingly globalized economy all have played large (and overlapping) roles in these developments.
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