There’s no reason to believe that the French have evolved significantly different brain structures than the Americans, and yet two thirds of France is either atheist or agnostic. Spain has moved from a Catholic state to a secular democracy in less than four decades. The Aussies put their faith mainly in beer. Even in the US, the proportion of the population reporting no religious affiliation has doubled in twenty years. Surely, Paul argues, if religious impulses were hardwired they would be as resistant to extinction as our propensity for language and tool use. Surely, if imaginary friends were necessary to help us deal with our own mortality, the French would be right up to their necks in denial along with the rest of us? And yet religion tends to wither in prosperous, developed nations; it only flourishes in lands where life is still stressful and insecure, as it has been throughout most of human history. And, of course, the USA.
You can see where this is going, can’t you?
In figure after figure, Paul racks up the numbers. Homicide rates. Infant mortality. Abortions among teenagers. Divorce and marital-longevity. Life expectancy, venereal disease rates, poverty, income-disparity, length of work week, efficiency of resource exploitation, incarceration rates… the list goes on. Amongst the seventeen developed nations for which data were available, the USA ranks at or near the bottom in pretty much every scale of dysfunction, and is so far above the others in terms of religiosity that you can barely see it from the ground. The US isn’t the only developed nation with problems, of course: religious Ireland and secular Denmark have lower life expectancies, while Japan, ironically, has both the highest life expectancy and the lowest life satisfaction (the C-3POs of the developed world, the Japanese seem to have been made to suffer). But those are hiccoughs in the pattern. By virtually all metrics, the US is both the most religious and the most stressful place to live in the developed world.
