Vox populi

But this is not a factor in Canada where church attendance is closer to European levels.

overly determinist cultural arguments aren’t very convincing, especially when they try to explain gross differences between societies…

This was actually the subject of a really good Cato Unbound discussion (even if you’re not the libertarian type) two months back or so. On one hand culture probably does matter for a lot of social phenomenon we observe. On the other…what the hell is it? There’s a lot of explanations (and both sides of the political spectrum are guilty of abuse on this) which basically attribute anything that cannot be explained to “culture”. You see, it’s their culture. They’re poorer because it’s their culture. They’re more violent (the Americans!) because it’s their culture. The reason the social welfare state works there but not here is because of the culture. In an absence of any good explanation culture becomes the catch all for all negative lack of knowledge that begs to be explained. As such I think economists have good reasons to be suspicious of “cultural” explanations of social phenomenon (however much you dislike Gary Becker). But less than 100% reasons.

Because “culture”, whatever it is, probably does matter. There are big things which cannot be explained by observed or even unobserved-but-plausibly-postulated mechanisms. But leaving it at that is a lazy person’s theory. So Henry’s 100% right that:

Good cultural explanations need to identify the specific mechanisms that make for cultural stability and change.

Churches in Europe are not monopolists. In Germany the state collects a tax and pays it to whatever denomination you belong to, or no denomination if you belong to none. Therefore the various churches are in direct competition for tax dollars. In Scandinavia historically only the established Lutheran churches were supported (in 2000 Sweden moved to the German system). In England only the Anglican church is supported, yet there are many Catholics and Methodists, who have been in competition with the established church for centuries.

So, other than being factually incorrect, this is an interesting post.

And in NZ the churches are not subsidised, but church attendance is at European-like levels.

Furthermore, as far as I know, in many parts of Europe only one church is subsidised – eg the Anglican church in England. Surely in such countries other churches have an incentive to hustle for members?

Nah. The Church of England is quiescent because they put massive amounts of money and time into urban evangelism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and acheived sod all. See Jerry White’s London in the Nineteenth Century.

The only real lock the churches have in the UK is there role in running some schools. They compete fiercely for students, claim a huge rate of succces with their students (mostly from creaming off more desirable students) and *still* can’t get them in the pews at 16.

I know this sounds a bit curmudgeonly, but this really isn’t Henry’s thesis and he should not have presented it as such. One can find roots of this argument at least as far back as Tocqueville, but its modern variant is associated with “rational choice” (or “supply-side”) theories of religion, e.g., those of Rodney Stark.

While there’s a lot of evidence for the theory, it doesn’t explain all variation and it rests of some potentially questionable assumptions about human religiosity. Henry also doesn’t consider sophisticated social-constructionist alternatives, such as Casanova’s argument about “secularization”:

We need to entertain seriously the proposition that secularization became a self- fulfilling prophecy in Europe, once large sectors of the population of Western European societies, including the Christian churches, accepted the basic premises of the theory of secularization: that secularization is a teleological process of modern social change; that
the more modern a society the more secular it becomes; that “secularity” is “a sign of the times.”

Indeed, it strikes me that this argument better explains the rapid postwar unchurching of many western European countries. If this dimension of “secularization” were solely the result of the monopolistic character of established Churches, then we face some serious issues about the timing–and speed–of this change in European society.

IIRC, Poland provides evidence for this being something more than monopolization as well: underlying trends among Polish youth point to a (relatively) rapid convergence towards European practices.

Another data point: Wales has not had an established church since 1920 (and has plenty of competing denominations!), but regular church attendance is only marginally higher (14% rather than 12%) than in England.

I was under the impression that one of the main differences is that in the US, churches provide important social and economic services in local communities, in the absence of a welfare state. But in the UK and Europe, churches are almost exclusively religious organisations.

I think higher density of urbanization is a better explanation than competition of churches. High density urbanization explains not only lower religiosity but many other cultural differences too.

Wouldn’t some of the explanation here have to involve capacity to compete through advertising?

In Ireland adverts that are directed towards religious or political ends are banned under Section 10 of the Broadcasting Act (the political bit of which has led to a bizarre decision this year over this ad). I don’t know, but I’m willing to guess that this sort of regulation is pretty common across Europe.

Following on from Daniel Nexon’s point about secularisation, and at the risk of making a overly deterministic cultural argument, a noteable difference in the US and the UK around matters of religion is the public/private dichotomy.

In England at least, most people don’t talk about their personal religious beliefs in a public environment. Politicians never do. You won’t hear any main stream politician thanking god for getting into Parliament, or saying “god bless the UK”. And it’s a bit socially embarrassing when someone does, quite honestly.

The fact that religious belief (as opposed to, say, discussions of theology) tends to be privately expressed and privately discussed would make it culturally very difficult for any group to hussle for punters.

In many European countries, churches are established and have official state support, so that they don’t have enormous need to tout for churchgoers. They’re monopolists, and as Albert Hirschman suggests, monopolists tend to be lazy.

I stopped reading at this point. If this post had been about naval strategy, it would probably have included a line like “No one has yet invented a warship capable of travelling under water” or “Italy has the largest navy in the world”.

Seriously, did Henry just miss the entire last three centuries of European religious history or what? Is he still stuck in the era of cuius regio eius religio?

filter: true, but the US doesn’t exactly keep its clergymen away from the cameras either, does it?

sharon: very good point. Entirely plausible. Do states in the US with better welfare systems have lower church attendance?

Interesting chat, despite the lack of Althouse-like meltdown.

I think scientists have brought their current lowly status upon themselves with their silly, costly research into things like string theory and the 40+ year search for the elusive Higgs boson.

God looks pretty reasonable compared to 10+ dimensions.

If you assume a scientist’s time is worth zero, you are correct, soru. How many hours are spent on string theory?

As for the Higgs bosun, only 10 more years before there’s a payoff?

That would make a total of 52 years looking for that little rascal.

I’m for science that has an actual shot at benefiting humans within, say, an average human lifespan.

Something science stopped working on sometime in the 60s.

A couple of plural-of-anecdote points…

Bloix @ 5:

In Germany the state collects a tax and pays it to whatever denomination you belong to, or no denomination if you belong to none. Therefore the various churches are in direct competition for tax dollars.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. The German state collects a church tax from registered members of, and distributes the proceeds to, the two de facto (but not de jure) established churches, the RCs and (mainstream) Lutherans, as well as to the (much smaller, but growing) Jewish community. Other Christian denominations (Methodists, Mennonites, splinter-group Lutherans, snake-handling glossolallians and whatever you’re having yourself) are known technically as Freikirchen and get nothing from the state. (They also lack the vast financial and real estate holdings of the RCC and mainstream Lutherans.) The free churches depend on the ongoing financial support of their membership, and this tends to affirm Henry’s observation — the established churches are state-subsidised, have a large notional membership and are empty; the free churches do not compete with them for tax dollars (or euro, anyway), and have a much tinier, but much more committed and active membership.

(BTW, if you don’t belong to any denomination, you simply don’t pay the tax, which is not de minimis. This is the main reason why increasing numbers of nominal church members take the steps necessary to formally deregister as members.)

The two established churches do not really compete directly, either. Conversion from the one to the other is vanishingly rare, and so far as I can see there is no active inter-denominational proselytism. Proselytising activity seems primarily inward-directed, i.e., each of the two churches trying to persuade the large numbers of its own purely notional members to become more active. In Germany, whether one is RC or Lutheran says less about one’s beliefs than it does about what part of Germany one is from (or, given the much higher degree of geographical mobility in the past couple of generations, where one’s ancestors were from) — cuius regio lässt grüssen!

Sharon @ 13:

…in the US, churches provide important social and economic services in local communities, in the absence of a welfare state. But in the UK and Europe, churches are almost exclusively religious organisations.

That’s not quite true; at least, not universally. The churches are importantly involved in education in the UK and Ireland. In Germany, they have little to do with education as such, but play a significant role in running or supporting kindergartens, old-age homes, hospitals, advice centres for addicts etc. (That’s one of the justifications proffered for their receipt of the church tax — the churches are expected to be part of the welfare state.)

Isabel @ 17

For example, in some (Roman Catholic) countries, many monasteries had a “wheel” where people would put newborns that they didn’t want to raise; later, the cities themselves organized the reception of these abandoned babies.

In Germany, some RC-run hospitals have reintroduced that “wheel” (Babyklappe). Mothers can give up a newborn at the hospital, with no questions asked and nothing reported to the authorities. (Obviously, she could give up the baby anywhere and it wouldn’t be exposed on a hillside; but her data would be taken and recorded, the police would be informed etc.) I have very little time for the RCC, and am unreservedly pro-choice; but I admire this idea. If a mother wants to carry her child to term but cannot raise it, and is willing to give up the child rather than abort it so long as her confidentiality is maintained (and isn’t bothered by the thought that the child would likely be raised a catholic), then fair play to her. It is all the more admirable in that the catholic hospitals that do this are, technically, breaking the law (or at least were, when they started doing this a few years ago; the legislature might have made some accommodation since then).

IIRC, from the last go-around on this that I heard (back on Usenet in the mid-1990’s), that Souther Europe has higher attendance that Northern Europe, despite lesser religious competition.

Mrs. Tilton, apparently in the US 45 States have instituted similar “safe havens” (like police stations, hospitals, etc) where people can anonimously abandon newborns. While I can understand that this was an acceptable solution at a time where no effective contraception existed, it saddens me to see that it still has a role in our time. I would much prefer to see sexual education and free contraception more available. And I certainly hope that the survival rate of these babies is higher than before, where it was little more than acceptable infanticide, anyway.

‘Something science stopped working on sometime in the 60s.’

The true part of that claim is that there have been no really major society-changing discoveries from big-P physics since the A bomb, or perhaps the transistor.

No anti-gravity, invisibility, warp drive, teleportation, time travel, exotic power source or weapon.

There are 4 main explanations for that observed fact:

1. environmental: it so happens there was nothing relevant plausibly discoverable.

2. cultural: something about the culture of physics is wrong – it is too experimental, not experimental enough, etc.

3. institutional: something about the incentives or organisation of physicists has made any such discovery less likely

4. contingent: just random luck that nobody thought of the right idea

I think it is quite a stretch to claim confident knowledge that the answer is #2.

Did you drown a bunch of kittens in a previous life to have been sentenced to bloggingheads.tv?

I read the post and was all excited to get the Hume indolence quote into play, only to find that it had been done at 3 am in the very first comment…

And what’s my reward? One guy complains that Henry didn’t realize that the idea goes back to Tocqueville, and one guy complains that he wanted to quote from Hume first.

Pedantry just doesn’t pay.

Henry: I apologize for implying that you were deliberately misleading us. But it did seem that a number of commentators misread you on this point.

Any of the historians here know how Albion’s Seed was received within the field?

The central thesis is that four competing strands within US culture can be traced to very specific migrations from Britain (and to a much lesser extent Ireland) that set up institutions and cultural frameworks that persisted quite a long time from the early colonial period, and in some aspects into the present.

There’s a good argument in there, with cultural attributes, speficic carriers, institutions and effects. On the other hand, he goes through topics so lickety-split that there’s not enough there to get really consistently convincing on the specifics. (I may be the first person to complain that the 800-page doorstop of a book is way too short.)

Anyway, the book has been out almost twenty years, and it bears on this discussion, so any expert opinions out there?

I’ve lived in both Scotland and England and can confirm that neither established church has a religious monopoly. More worryingly, I have no memory of paying either church a subsidy. How did the wily buggers slip that past me?

The reason that more Americans than Europeans believe in God is that more Americans are bonkers.

Isabel @ 32:

While I can understand that [the “wheel” for giving up babies] was an acceptable solution at a time where no effective contraception existed, it saddens me to see that it still has a role in our time. I would much prefer to see sexual education and free contraception more available.

I am in complete agreement with you. However, where a woman is, for whatever reason, pregnant, and sees her options as (1) without the “wheel”, abortion and (ii) with the “wheel”, abortion or giving up the baby, then the “wheel” is a Good Thing. It increases the choices available to the woman, and that is to be desired.

This is, I suspect the only force that keeps some of the nominal catholics that mrs. t. talks about from defecting completely.

You’re largely right, I think. Lots of essentially irreligious people want — perhaps for sentimental reasons, perhaps because denominational affiliation is an element of their identity — to be “hatched, matched and dispatched” from a church. If you’ve struck yourself from the rolls, the priests are likely to balk (and fair enough, I suppose).

Another reason is that a fair few people with no strong religious feelings are supportive of “religion in general” — everyone should have one, they feel, though they are largely indifferent to what it is. Another anecdote: a friend’s father was a farm equipment dealer in a rural part of Bavaria. He was a (rather apathetic) atheist, but never formally left the church. He thought his business would suffer if he did; the pious yeomanry wouldn’t give their custom to a godless heathen. What’s interesting is that he was a prod in a heavily RC area. The neighbours didn’t care that he dug with the other foot (they would have done, a generation or two earlier), just so long as he had some (not too outlandish) religion.

Katherine, I don’t see how that is a reasonable wish.

Mr. Henry,

It seems to me that this is not a good example at all of an explanation for social phenomena. It really isn’t sufficiently concrete, and is no better than the “arm waving”. We really do need to go much deeper for mechanisms, and prove them empirically and through experiments before we can make such explanations useful.

Let me make another example, or parable, of a cultural explanation that went wrong, one much more concrete than that religious one. Back in the 1960’s James Coleman ran a very large scale series of studies on what could be done to get black students performance up to national standards.

The results showed conclusively that what made a difference was not teaching approaches, funding, or any other input variable, but simply the nature of the students – middle class students simply did better no matter the situation – a cultural phenomenon, probably. That observation at least has been repeated and proven reliable since (no matter what Kozol says). So the conclusion was that the best policy was to integrate the schools (or rather, the study results were often used as a justification for this already established policy), on the grounds that putting poor black students in a white middle class context would transfer successful bourgeois values through “peer effects”. There was little in the way of examination of the mechanics of peer effects, or experimental analyses of policies.

Hence the wave of attempts at integration, through busing schemes and, often, extremely expensive attraction schemes (magnet schools, and much larger scale failures like the Kansas City experiment). Nothing worked. The whole business was not just a failure in integration, as the public successfully resisted it, but where there was a degree of integration, black children still underperformed.

In recent years the analyses of large-scale testing databases, by people like Hoxby, has shown that there is indeed a peer effect, but it is very limited, and perhaps requires a critical mass of the bourgeois that is very hard to arrange in practice. It also seems to be a very complex business in the interplay of cultures, as similarly underperforming Hispanics don’t seem to benefit from such peer effects. I have seen other studies that show that it is much more effective on the upper quintile of black kids. All of which which implies a very different sort of integration policy is needed to create a practical effect, if any. In any case, this is certainly not the path to a solution.

Other results from different natural and deliberate experiments show other more effective methods, which go along the path of specialized educational approaches tailored to the population, which contradict integration as a public policy. Even they just nibble around the edges of “the gap”; this remains what I think is the biggest and most frustrating problem in American sociology.

Ogbu’s work on integrated, middle class black children shows, in my opinion, that the problem is definitely cultural at a micro-scale – maybe specific child-rearing behaviors from birth to age 3, where the differences are already apparent. But it will be necessary to get very deeply and thoroughly into this micro-scale of culture before one could reliably use cultural analysis as a guide to public policy.

Which brings us back to that matter of religion. It seems like a much more complex phenomenon without a fraction of the body of data that the primary US educational problem has, which has resulted in gross and very expensive policy errors.

“Good cultural explanations need to identify the specific mechanisms”. Yes indeed, and these seem to be very specific, much more specific than your example. Which is not an argument for abandoning cultural analyses, but for a great deal more attention to them, as it seems to me the potential payoff from a better understanding will be enormous.

It’s a simple question, walt.

Could an average American name even a single living American scientist?

@Mrs. Tilton

In Germany, some RC-run hospitals have reintroduced that “wheel” (Babyklappe). Mothers can give up a newborn at the hospital, with no questions asked and nothing reported to the authorities.

Just to mention it, the first “Babyklappe” in 2000 was introduced by a civic group (is that the right term?) in Hamburg-Altona. It´s a private group of citizens called “SterniPark” financed by private donations. And while some RC-run hospitals have followed that example, publicly-owned ones have done the same.

It is all the more admirable in that the catholic hospitals that do this are, technically, breaking the law (or at least were, when they started doing this a few years ago; the legislature might have made some accommodation since then).

Uhh, not exactly. At least not now.
Actually German law uses a legal “fiction” here. The one who might be in trouble here is the mother because she abandons her newborn child. Thus breaking the law. However for a period of 8 weeks German law will view this as simply giving away your child to someone trusted because you were unable to care for it. Like for example a single mother having to stay in hospital and letting her parents care for the child.
Which means that the mother can rethink things and reclaim her baby during this 8 week period without any legal problems.
After 8 weeks though the hospital has to inform the state child care agency. After which legal proceedings are started for an adoption.

The hospital or private group isn´t in any legal trouble here. In fact they can even advertise their telephone numbers to advise troubled pregnant women. Or advertise the locations of their “wheels”. Just common sense since otherwise the newborn babies might end up in less “hospitable” locations and face death.

The remaining legal problem is that according to German Basic Law, adopted childs (when grown up) have a right to know who their birth parents are if they want. Obviously that´s impossible with the anonymous “Babyklappe”.

@isabel

Mrs. Tilton, apparently in the US 45 States have instituted similar “safe havens” (like police stations, hospitals, etc) where people can anonimously abandon newborns. While I can understand that this was an acceptable solution at a time where no effective contraception existed, it saddens me to see that it still has a role in our time. I would much prefer to see sexual education and free contraception more available.

Well, contraception probably isn´t the main problem here. After all, in Germany a girl aged 16 can go to a gynecologist to get the pill without the consent or knowledge of her parents. In fact the doctor is legally forbidden to mention it to her parents without her consent.
However “incidents” do happen (especially in the passion of the moment so to speak). And I can well believe that some young girls, afraid of the reactions of her parents, try to hide their pregnancy. And then try to get “rid of” their newborn baby because they simply don´t know what to do.
Now that´s true for any society. But I should point out the director of that program mentioned that some of the telephone calls they´re getting about the program come from young Muslim girls. Which parents are maybe a bit more “conservative” than German society at large.

And I certainly hope that the survival rate of these babies is higher than before, where it was little more than acceptable infanticide, anyway.

That´s probably a given.
If the newspaper articles are right, in the years before that program around 30-40 newborn babies were abandoned by their mothers per year in Germany. More than half of them didn´t survive.
Since then the death rate has gone down dramatically.

Just a small nitpick. :)
It wasn´t seen as “acceptable infanticide” before. I mean, the numbers were “small”. But each case did get a lot of coverage in the media. Because it involves helpless little babies. And everything that might help them is okay in my book.

Fuck you and your fucking question, alphie. I’m not your monkey. Make a goddamn point and I’ll address it.

Nice logic there, walt.

My point is that everyone believes in the scientific method…as long as you agree to their core beliefs and biases first.

Bush is the greatest president ever.

Iraq is a tremendous success.

The tens of billions of dollars we’ve sunk into the search for the Higgs boson has gone towards extremely important research.

etc.

The average American couldn’t name a single living American scientist because?

They’re a bunch of self-interested wankers who don’t want anyone to judge them by any standards but their own, maybe?

Detlef @ 60,

the Babyklappe that I am familiar with is the “Operation Moses” in Frankfurt, an RC initiative. And (at least, when the Babyklappe project began) the Klappen wereviolating law by declining to record and report information as to the mother. As you note, the state seems to be accommodating such projects now.

Sorry, that second sentence should have been italicized too… probably should have used a blockquote.

“although my intellectual biases would lead me to predict that incentives count for more than culture here,”

Henry, I don’t know what biases you’re working with, but you can’t have incentives without culture; it’s culture that makes the incentives meaningful. Sahlins etc.

What do people think of Steve Bruce’s argument in God is Dead: Secularization in the West, that secularization in the West is ongoing and pretty much inevitable barring changes in political systems?

On the coast in Spain, at night; summer with 4 or five families of 3 or more generations each lounging by the pool. No asshole germans or brits anywhere nearby. One american and a couple of Filipino maids.

Me, expecting a bemused response: “I love this country. Everybody’s Catholic, and no one believes in god”
My host: “Exactly! It’s perfect!”

As usual, the discussion here is predicated on the author’s own tastes and mores being themselves free from any determining factors. And the discussion dwells within the bounds of the rational-actor theory of the moderate left.
[I like my new tag-line.]

“Good cultural explanations need to identify the specific mechanisms that make for cultural stability and change.”

There’s no need to be specific in themselves. All that’s necessary is that they can be shown to undermine anti-determinist arguments. And that’s not very hard.