Happiness and religion

Here is the key statement from Kevin Drum

If you live in Western Europe, there's a pretty good chance that you associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief, not with church bake sales. So whatever you think of religion itself, seeing the end of religious wars, religious terrorism, and massive state-sponsored religious bigotry is almost bound to make you happy. You'd have to be almost literally crazy not to be happier in today's secular Europe than in yesterday's religious Europe.

Religion in America is just a whole different story. Sure, it's caused its share of problems, but nothing even remotely on the scale of what happened in Europe. We still have a pretty innocent view of religious belief here, and this probably accounts for part of the reason that religion is associated with happiness here but not in Europe. Whether that makes us exceptional or just naive I'll leave for others to debate.

Since I am an anglophile and history buff, I agree with the Europeans. I "associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief." I have read histories of the Thirties year War, and of the religious wars in England and in Europe. Kings Charles II and Phillip of Spain are particularly interesting when viewing the religious wars of Europe. So are Kings James I, Charles I, Charles II and James II of England. All fought wars more for religiosity than for politics.

That's not an argument for or against belief in God or Christianity. It's an argument against strong religiosity and against religious control of the police, the courts and of the military capabilities of government. It is also a recognition of the social reasons for general happiness.

America came from the British tradition after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and that tradition was built into the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We took the solutions of the European religious wars as a given, and do not realize how many people died to create that social understanding.

Kevin Drum discusses the social effects of aggressive religiosity and the European welfare state, the latter being something the Europeans learned after the American Revolution. While the English separation of church and state as the solution to the religious wars is a part of our tradition, the Industrial Revolution and the Welfare State are not. In those instances, we have only our own history on the American Industrial Revolution, so the Welfare State and the other answers the Europeans have developed are not part of our American tradition. We have to work our own, American, way to solutions to the problems of the Industrial Revolution, within their Welfare State solutions, and that appears to be bringing up the problems caused by government inspired religiosity.

America has things to learn from Europe, but we ultimately will find our own solutions. My own opinion is that the separation of church and state will ultimately remain a key part of the solution, and that to remain an middle class industrial nation America will also have to adopt a version of the welfare state.

Kevin Drum presents a very interesting set of ideas, none of which go as far as I just did. Go read it.