Posted by TDean on January 03, 1997 at 13:52:30:
In Reply to: US Belief in God posted by David on January 03, 1997 at 09:13:46:
I don't think most of those Americans could tell you much about the God
they profess to believe in. It certainly is not the case that most
Americans attend church meetings regularly, or send their children to
classes for religious education (by the way, publicly funded schools
in the U.S. -- most people attend them for the first twelve years of
education -- avoid the topic of religion by reason of our constitutional
separation of church and state). Many cannot even articulate whether
"their" God is like one of those preached by a particulr church, or even
whether God is a person or an elemental force.
In the end, I think the "God" belief is almost like a belief in good luck
for many people. It would seem gloomy not to believe in good luck, so I
think most people would tell you they do. But they aren't going to rely
on luck for any of their day to day needs. The same holds true for
many "believers" in God.
We do, however, have a large minority of fundamentalist Christians,
especially in our Southern and Southwestern states, who do in fact
attend church, educate their children to believe in the Christian
God, and observe the tenets of their faith in a rigorous and
unbending manner. My thought is that for some of them, their faith
is part and parcel of their American identity. Historically, Christianity
in the States was a political force of democratization, not an oppressive
fist used by the nobility to enforce obedience among the rabble (as
somteimes was the case in Europe, I hear). We have always had an
ideal of the clean-living, hard-working, Christian family.
Finally, as for those persons in America who have faith in the Christian
God, and believe they have some sort of personal contact or relationship
with that God, I guess we're just hard to explain. It's more an
experience to be lived than a concept that can be explained.