The United States is unique -- not sick, not healthy, just different from about every other country in the world -- and the recent Pew survey about religion in America helps to explain why.
Ours is a society of choice, founded and built continuously by people who opted to come to the United States to create a future and, by and large, to forget the past. The American dream is all about choosing who you are and who you want to become. Think about it. We Americans describe our identity as a collection of things we acquire. I “have” a family. I have a spouse and I have a child just as I "have" a job, I have an education, I have an income, I have a house, I have a car and, yes, I have a faith. Naturally I want to choose the one that seems the best fit.
In most of the rest of the world, people do not have families, they “belong” to them, and the families belong to a place, which belongs to a history, which belongs to a culture and belongs to a faith. You might not pray, you might not even believe, but who you feel you are is profoundly shaped by the sense of the past from which you came, and to which you belong. That may be a source of strength or frustration. It may be many things. But it is not a matter of choice.
This is the real clash of civilizations, and it is much broader than that between the West and Islam. The chasm of incomprehension between the society of having in the United States and societies of belonging in the rest of the world is felt more intensely every day. Global communications and travel bring these conflicting forms of identity into constant confrontation. When Americans find their way into the middle of sectarian conflicts like Lebanon's in the 1980s or Iraq's today, they often feel lost. We are about “freedom.” They are about “fundamentalism.” We’re thinking about where we’re going, they’re obsessed with where they came from. (In the United States “history” is actually an epithet, as in, “You’re history.”)
Extended families are the essential building blocks of social, economic and political life in societies of belonging, and those families are bonded by faith and the traditions connected to it. Governments in such places (think of any country in the Middle East) are just one family trying to tell other families what to do. That reinforces reliance on blood ties instead of national allegiances. Where else are you going to turn for support but to you family and your god? But individualistic Americans are very uneasy with that. So, we have “democracy” based on “one man one vote,” while they belong to “tribes” and “clans” and “mafias.”
What the Pew survey shows is that new immigrants coming to the United States bring with them a strong sense of belonging to family and to faith, whether Catholic, Muslim or Hindu. But in a generation or two, that passes. In the end, maybe we’ll all be Buddhists in America, until something else comes along that’s a better fit.
No, choosing to have a faith rather than belong to one is not healthy or sick, it’s just who we are.
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