Why are Americans more religious than Canadians and Europeans?

[molendijk]

According to a survey by Angus Reid Public Opinion (angus-reid.com), 61 per cent of Canadians and 69 per cent of Britons think human beings evolved from simpler life forms. In The Netherlands, Germany and New-Zealand, these numbers are even higher (see skepsis.nl). As for the US, just 30 per cent of Americans agree.
Meanwhile, almost fifty per cent of Americans think God created people in the past 10,000 years, a belief commonly known as "creationism" that is shared by only 22 per cent of Canadians, 17 per cent of Britons and about 7 per cent of the Dutch.
Where do these differences come from?

[traq]

That's nothing. Somewhere around 50% of Americans believe in demonic possession (I'll post the link the the survey when I find it).

it's 57%.
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/2011/HalloweenRelease%2BResults.pdf

Also of interest, 52% of Americans believe a house can be haunted, while only 37% believe in ghosts.

[djr33]

Somehow I doubt some of those numbers. I'm not saying it isn't high, but I think it's probably not a clear binary distinction. (I'm not saying that holding both/partial beliefs isn't contradictory, though.) There are some (a minority) of people who believe evolution is wrong/evil/whatever. But I'd think that most Americans do believe in evolution to some degree. There may also be social pressures of which answer seems appropriate, depending on the context of the survey.

This might have something to do with education. Educated Americans tend to be much more liberal, and the same applies to those living in larger cities.


But who knows... the masses never cease to surprise me in survey results. A few years ago I read something about most Americans failing to identify 4 geographic locations on a map: California, Texas, Canada and Iraq. And to be clear, that doesn't mean they just didn't know where Iraq was-- they missed one of the others too. And that was a majority of Americans polled. [I'm not positive the third was Canada, but it was something equally obvious. I should look that up.*]

(But... it depends on where they're polling as well! That might explain a lot of this.)




*Edit: I can't find the original source for those exact figures, but here's some relevant information:
http://hateusa.narod.ru/art6.html
Slightly less extreme but equally astounding at times.
More data here: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/pdf/FINALReport2006GeogLitsurvey.pdf

[molendijk]

That's nothing. Somewhere around 50% of Americans believe in demonic possession (I'll post the link the the survey when I find it).
Wow! Now it would be interesting to know if those people are those who believe that God created humans and everything else in the past 10,000 years or so.