This… really shows how wide is the Atlantic. I know many Europeans who identify with being Christians, but in all of the cases it is just a way to show their national loyalty, their national identity, their conservatism or their opposition to modern culture, their preference for a higher value system that does not worship money and business and consumption but has a more human-faced, soul-oriented, “deeper” approach. This is how they are Christians. Nobody, literally nobody I know has literal faith, the kind of faith people would pray with. The closest to that is having a faith in Christian values being useful for human growth because they remind people that money and consumption is not all.
So it is always surprising to me that America has pockets where faith is still alive pretty much in the old, pre-1800 sense, as if Voltaire, Hegel, Feuerbach or Marx never happened. Where it is not a culture or identity or values, but literally faith.
Or maybe these pockets exist here too, but the newspapers are not writing about them and I have no idea where they are.
Pockets? It’s between a quarter and half of the US, depending on how you put the threshold for “literal faith.” Secularization is also mostly hollowing out the ‘mainline’ denominations, that are more European in their presentation of things, while the hardcore denominations are growing.
This is very easy to determine. The kind of cultural Christianity that is going on here is basically like conservative guys saying “XY is against a Christian system / order of values”. They are not saying “Jesus/Bible said no”. Are these people saying the former or the laer?
I didn’t get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.
From your username it looks like you’re Dutch (it is literally “the flying Dutchman” in Dutch), so I’m surprised you’ve never heard of the Dutch bible belt and their favourite political party, the SGP. They get about 1.5% of the vote in the national elections and seem pretty legit. And those are just the Christians fervent enough to oppose women’s suffrage. The other two Christian parties have around 15% of the vote, and may contain proper believers as well.
These pockets definitely exist in the UK. There are a fair number of devout Christians here, although they don’t shout about it because mainstream society is so hostile to Christianity. They are also easily the nicest people I’ve met.
Physically where? I am moderately familiar with the Black Country area, having done some industrial projects, and it looks like a pretty undereducated area, which should correlate with this. Yet I have not seen any sign of it.
I think your intuitions are steering you wrong if you’d expect this kind of thing among the “undereducated” (your word). That might be true in the US, but in Britain most people from those social echelons simply don’t attend church, and haven’t for generations, as an effect of urbanisation. Of course, there are relatively poor and uneducated people with that relation to religion in the Black Country, but they aren’t Christians.
If you want to find devout Christians, you need to find educated, middle class, small-c conservative types—HTB and the like aren’t filled with manual workers. Or else, recent immigrants—but they don’t normally attend CoE churches.
This… really shows how wide is the Atlantic. I know many Europeans who identify with being Christians, but in all of the cases it is just a way to show their national loyalty, their national identity, their conservatism or their opposition to modern culture, their preference for a higher value system that does not worship money and business and consumption but has a more human-faced, soul-oriented, “deeper” approach. This is how they are Christians. Nobody, literally nobody I know has literal faith, the kind of faith people would pray with. The closest to that is having a faith in Christian values being useful for human growth because they remind people that money and consumption is not all.
So it is always surprising to me that America has pockets where faith is still alive pretty much in the old, pre-1800 sense, as if Voltaire, Hegel, Feuerbach or Marx never happened. Where it is not a culture or identity or values, but literally faith.
Or maybe these pockets exist here too, but the newspapers are not writing about them and I have no idea where they are.
Pockets? It’s between a quarter and half of the US, depending on how you put the threshold for “literal faith.” Secularization is also mostly hollowing out the ‘mainline’ denominations, that are more European in their presentation of things, while the hardcore denominations are growing.
Yes but is it faith or a culture of values?
This is very easy to determine. The kind of cultural Christianity that is going on here is basically like conservative guys saying “XY is against a Christian system / order of values”. They are not saying “Jesus/Bible said no”. Are these people saying the former or the laer?
Mike Huckabee:
From your username it looks like you’re Dutch (it is literally “the flying Dutchman” in Dutch), so I’m surprised you’ve never heard of the Dutch bible belt and their favourite political party, the SGP. They get about 1.5% of the vote in the national elections and seem pretty legit. And those are just the Christians fervent enough to oppose women’s suffrage. The other two Christian parties have around 15% of the vote, and may contain proper believers as well.
These pockets definitely exist in the UK. There are a fair number of devout Christians here, although they don’t shout about it because mainstream society is so hostile to Christianity. They are also easily the nicest people I’ve met.
Physically where? I am moderately familiar with the Black Country area, having done some industrial projects, and it looks like a pretty undereducated area, which should correlate with this. Yet I have not seen any sign of it.
My own experience is in London and Cambridge.
I think your intuitions are steering you wrong if you’d expect this kind of thing among the “undereducated” (your word). That might be true in the US, but in Britain most people from those social echelons simply don’t attend church, and haven’t for generations, as an effect of urbanisation. Of course, there are relatively poor and uneducated people with that relation to religion in the Black Country, but they aren’t Christians.
If you want to find devout Christians, you need to find educated, middle class, small-c conservative types—HTB and the like aren’t filled with manual workers. Or else, recent immigrants—but they don’t normally attend CoE churches.
They certainly do. Some of them send out suicide bombers which is when the mainstream media starts to notice them… :-/
Yeah I mean those are imports, I was meaning traditional ones. (Breivik does not count as one, as he is more of a political type crazy.)