Yes, Americans are religious. Personal religions are a means of rebellion against the state. Americans see rebelling against the state as a duty == as patriotic. Organized religions are a means of reinforcing state power. American religiosity is personal. Adherence to that religiosity is not only traditional, but a way for different regions of the country to rebel against the federal government which they see as spreading coastal values on traditional people everywhere, and a center and south that resents it.
European atheism is tied to the desire of the emerging middle class to sieze economic power, political power, physical property, and social status from the institutional church. The USA never had the relationship between the aristocracy and the church, nor did the churches have political power, property or economic power. Puritanism is, like Judaism, a personal religion that had more moral rather than institutional origins. Furthermore, the founders saw christianity as a moral teaching system for good citizenship, not a means of oppression or political influence. So the Darwinian revolution in the USA was one of changing the way Americans looked at religious content more than it was a necessary political and economic conflict as in Europe.
The benefit of that puritanism is evident everywhere though: people obey rules, and they don’t engage in petty theft on the scale that europeans do. The violent crime in the states is a product of minority violence. “White” violence in the states is about the same as in canada and western europe.
American Patriotism is simply an expression of puritanism. Arms are a civic puritan duty. Just like the french persist in their revolutionary mythology, so do Americans.
When women in Europe (and Quebec) got their freedom, they took out their frustration on the church. In the states, the feminist movement was closely connected with the church — it was started by evangelical women, and supported by evangelical men. So, because the church was not the institution they rebelled against, men in general were the target of their propaganda and frustration. American men may be more militant than european men in general, but the male female relationship in the states is more of a business partnership, especially among the educated classes than one of familial inter-gender intimacy. This may be why the men’s rights movement is so active in the states and without a significant counterpart in europe.
The consumer society, the customer service ethic, and the luxury of scale rather than quality is how americans express civic virtue with one another. The french for example behave as if they took over the roles and habits of the nobility in public. Americans see the merchant-consumer relationship as the civic virtue.
Americans are very classist, almost as classist as Britain, but they demonstrate it by their consumer signals (homes and cars), their use of language, and their educational institutions. Americans tend to trust people in their class and less so in other classes. This division appears to be accelerating.
Everyone who can own a home considers themselves middle class. The middle class has heroic connotations. We don’t have a ‘working class’ that is distinguishable from the ‘middle class’. The upper middle class is more analogous to the British concept of middle class: professionals and business leaders. Our upper class consists largely of financiers and the eighty or so monied families that make up our financial upper class. Those people are largely invisible to the public. (see Paul Fussel’s book ‘Class’ for an accurate understanding of american social classes.)
Americans have many many universities and colleges and they are not formally ranked in any meaningful way. So, you can get an engineering or law degree many places but without knowing the institution that granted it, you don’t know how good it is. So to some degree, your college or university tells someone your social class – and probably your IQ.
Americans also view social class as being highly mobile. (At least from lower middle and middle to upper middle. It isn’t really.) They will often support small businesses and tradesman as demonstrations of their contentiousness and support of the middle class virtues.
In the postwar era, Americans had the temporary privilege of having the only industrial economy left standing. This allowed a lot of cheap but not good quality goods to be manufactured and sold at high profit. This also allowed working class people to live a lower middle class lifestyle. But as this artificial economy has eroded by the worldwide postwar recovery and the end of world communism, these americans are experiencing a loss of status and economic power. This is creating social tension in a way that is different from the same process that is occurring in europe during this period of deleveraging.
Police can lose their jobs easily in the states, and unlike europe, they are not assumed to be in the right. They are literally ‘afraid’ a lot of the time. (The side effect is that the USA tends to invent most of the investigative technology in the world in order to eliminate personal judgement from the problem of law enforcement.) Ticketing is a profit-making activity for many police departments so the cops prey on people rather than help them. Helping people just exposes them to career risks. So police tend to just focus on things that they can prosecute safely and win. In the USA we joke that they allow the ‘crack-heads’ to roam the streets committing dozens of crimes so that they don’t have to pay to house them in jail, while at the same time ticketing the mom in a mini-van so that they can have new shiny lights on their cars. This leads to public resentment. Police are not your friends in the USA. If you want help, just ask anyone on the street. They’ll fall over themselves to help you, almost anywhere.
The American Military
Americans pay for policing the western world’s system of finance and trade through their military. They sell debt to the world. The world uses the dollars to purchase oil. Then the US inflates the debt away. They do this rather than tax countries directly for the service. That’s how it works. In exchange, there is higher demand for the dollar, which then allows american citizens to have a much higher standard of living than everyone else, and the US gets a profitable military complex. The military is Americas largest industry and it’s an incredibly profitable industry.
American middle and upper class people signal their social status by their fitness interests. They don’t smoke. They stay fit. You can tell a person’s social class by what type of fitness they participate in.
Its A Very Big Place
The continent is very big. You can drive from Seattle to Boston, but its three thousand miles, and it’s the short route across the country. All of Europe would fit east of the Mississipi river. That’s the boundary between the eastern ‘wet’ states, and the drier plains and desert states. The different regions consist of different economies, and in large part, people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds.
The concern of most american administrations during the 1800′s was that they needed to populate the west not only to profit from it, but to prevent the ‘warlike’ europeans from causing problems. The civil war was fight between the industrial north and agrarian south over the whose political power that would result from the westward expansion – anti-slavery was simply a populist excuse.
If America broke into regional ‘countries’ each would be quite different, And americans would act a lot more like europeans. (I suspect that’s the future of the USA. Rather than a United Europe, I suspect we will have a regionalized USA, and a western-nations defense network.)
Crime is a highly controversial in the USA because it is so predominantly in a part of the minority community. The ‘white’ community crime rate is about that of Europe. The reasons for this are varied and controversial. But the idea that ‘Americans’ are more violent than europeans does not survive scrutiny. In particular, a few urban centers account for a disproportionate amount of of violent crime. To some degree there are class culture and race problems in the USA that cannot be solved because the historical animosity is too entrenched, and the political advantages of manipulating the minority and the politically profiting from the conflict are too valuable to the parties.