Floridian faith

During my recent trip to Florida a couple of things struck me about the differences between how religious faith is expressed here in the UK and how it appeared to be expressed in the USA. I find it interesting to compare and contrast the differences and theorise about why they are there; As an adult I have visited the USA many, many times and perhaps have become desensitised to the slight variations between our two cultures, however this trip was my son's first and we discussed these differences from his perspective a lot during our time there, here is what we observed in the process.

Many Americans seem to have no hesitation expressing their faith in public, tons of times whilst watching TV we had sports people and movie stars thanking the "lord" for their performances, ordinary people publically sharing their deepest convictions, presenters and politicians pronouncing their religiosity and thanking their God on behalf of everyone else. The first time we saw someone saying "praise the lord and god bless bla, bla" my son turned to me and shook his scrunched his face up in a quizzical look it was a picture. We just don't get that here; it would be seen as cheesy or bad form to blather on about your particular religious beliefs on telly (unless that was the subject of the program of course), this is especially noticeable with politicians. In the USA it seem mandatory for senators and officials to mention God, over here they would be considered slightly odd if they did. I'm not sure why this is so prevalent in the USA is it because people there are keener to "go with the flow", is religion more of a sensitive issue? Certainly Americans generally seem to be obsessed with team sports, competing and "winning" in a way that is much less obvious here but is this a desire to be "one of the team"?

I know plenty of Americans, who aren't religious at all even though they might not consider themselves Agnostic or Atheist, so why do so many outwardly vocal religious people seem to end up in the public eye? I've read many theories on religiosity in the USA some people think it's to do with an "immigrant" mentality and religion being a cohesive and familiar force for groups of people in unfamiliar and perhaps hostile surroundings. Some say it is to do with there being no state religion thereby freeing market forces to build an infinite number of businesses based on providing religion. It could be a side effect of Americans generally being more outgoing than Brits, I'm not so sure, clearly it is a complex question and many factors come into play. My own pet theory is that it's more to do with the value system in the USA, having worked for many US companies and seen how they operate and interact with society I think that being seen to be a "team" player, being positive and not rocking the boat are far, far more important social enablers over there than they are here. Of course we have the same elements here but they are much less polarised IMO.

Promotion of God is everywhere in the USA, you see it on billboards, on TV and on the radio, God really is big business over there in a way in which it is not here. It became a source of fun for us whilst in the car to flick through the stations where it seemed that every other channel was proselytising some flavour of Christianity or other; the kids had fun testing out their imitations of a Southern accent by repeating things they heard, like "Jayzus" as well as stuff on the country and western stations, my daughter now loves Dolly Parton of course :-(

I even came across these little pieces of graffiti at one of the theme parks, I can't imagine this happening in the UK it even strikes me as somewhat contradictory, isn't defacing a public building supposed to be naughty?

Another example of outward religiosity was whilst we were watching the shuttle launch, a little kid probably about 8 or 9 came over to us, I didn't really notice but he handed Jack a little business card who handed it to me very puzzled, it said something like "you can be on our team" on the front, on the back there was a whole splurge of stuff about being saved, going to hell followed by the contact details of a specific church, I wished I'd taken a picture of it but at the time I was inclined to rip it up and bin it immediately. How ridiculous, an eight year old child being used to proselytise to another eight year old child, I'd say that was pretty immoral.

I was pleased however to note that there was a lot more Atheist content being aired on some of the talk shows, Dawkins was mentioned a couple of times and some of the recent poster/billboard controversies (especially in Florida) were discussed, stem cell research was a reasonably frequent topic too. I concluded that the zeitgeist has definitely changed since I used to frequently visit the states, maybe that is because of Bush going or maybe some kind of backlash against the political meddling of the far right I don't know, it sounded like a positive step to me though.