Is There a Difference?

In the wake of the invasion of Iraq, anyone reading the major European newspapers would have noticed that a wide gap appears to have opened between public opinion in Europe and the United States, one that goes beyond policy disagreements over the war. Something new in European coverage of America is its focus on religion.  Since the 1960s, the European churches have suffered a dramatic decline in church attendance and participation.  One of the results is that religious language has become increasingly unacceptable in European public life.  America has moved in exactly the opposite direction, with a new boom in churchgoing, the emergence of massive megachurches, and the new prominence of the Christian right in Republican party politics.
    In this paper I argue that the differences in American and European religion are both real and important, and that they have been widely misunderstood.   The assumption that a modern nation is naturally a secular nation is deeply ingrained in European political culture, and in American academic discourse, despite the very widespread evidence of religion flourishing in societies that are by any definition of the word modern.  The result is widespread confusion, among historians as well as journalists, about how to contrast Europe with the United States  in matters of religion. European observers who have in the past dismissed American religion as purely superficial now describe American religion with a mixture of ridicule and fear, thoroughly misrepresenting the extraordinary diversity of American religious life.
    The contrast between European and North American patterns of religious change is rooted in history.  In this paper I will outline an general theory of religious change in the modern world as an alternative to the theory of secularization.