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RJ O’Connor's avatar

Thank you, Lilly Endowment, for allowing many of Ryan Burge’s post to be public. His analysis provides meaningful insights on important trends in religion.

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Spouting Thomas's avatar

Ryan, thank you (and the Lilly Endowment) for this post, but I think it would be illuminating in the future if you could include the US on these sorts of charts for quick comparison.

I've always found the lower religiosity of countries like Australia and Canada to be fascinating, since they would seem to be the closest cultural peers to the US, as fellow Anglo settler societies. My theory is that because religious migrants played a much larger role in early American history, this effect has reverberated through the centuries. In addition, for perhaps somewhat US-specific reasons, a less centralized and more competitive religious environment emerged in the US (see "The Democratization of American Christianity", by Hatch), resulting in Christianity here displaying greater adaptability to modernity and to the circumstances of the New World than in the other Anglo settler societies.

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