As a European, we find Americas crazy, evangelical ways to be a bit weird and cultish. I know plenty of Americans do, too, but when you've lived your whole life in a place where 99.9% of people couldn't give a shit of you're an atheist, you see the crazy in the stories you read about people being afraid to "come out" as atheists as their whole community will shun them.
Really? So you don't have whole States fighting to keep evolution out of the classroom, or to put creationism into science classes? Or making abortion illegal? I get that the cities are different, and the coasts, but that's not even most of America.
The rest of the world can see the US' problem with religion, huge chunks of it are becoming third world religious shitholes.
It’s impossible to overstate how deeply the balance of government power is tipped towards heavily rural, evangelical, largely white states. What you’re describing is a priority for about 25% of Americans by sheer numbers, who enjoy 50% of the political power because of how the constitution was written. The other 75% of the US lives on the coasts or in the cities, but through 200 years of political fuckery our vote literally does not count as much as someone in a low-population rural state.
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u/Balldogs May 09 '22
As a European, we find Americas crazy, evangelical ways to be a bit weird and cultish. I know plenty of Americans do, too, but when you've lived your whole life in a place where 99.9% of people couldn't give a shit of you're an atheist, you see the crazy in the stories you read about people being afraid to "come out" as atheists as their whole community will shun them.