God and the Atlantic: America, Europe, and the Religious Divide

Christian Scholar's Review ^ | 2021 | Kendra Weddle Irons

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Thomas Albert Howard's "God and the Atlantic..." is a thoroughly researched examination of the contrasting religious paths between Europeans and Americans...

Moving beyond Alexis de Tocqueville’s oft-quoted appraisal of American religiosity, Howard’s analysis progresses in two directions.

First, he examines negative assessments both from the left (America viewed as overly religious) and the right (America’s religion is too distinct from Europe and thus represents bad religion).

Second, he explores two European elites who each wrote about and lived in the United States: Philip Schaff, a Swiss-German Protestant church historian, and Jacques Maritain, a French Catholic philosopher...

British intellectuals who were loyal to the Anglican Church saw in American popular democracy a weakening of the “rightly-constituted authority” . The presence of Methodist camp-meetings and revivals, the communities of Millerites and Shakers, and the explosive growth of Mormons all indicated deficiencies in practice that, had the religious authority been rightly in place, could be avoided...

Frances (Fanny) Trollope who commented in 1832: “It was impossible to remain many weeks in the country without being struck with the strange anomalies produced by its religious system...The whole people appear to be divided into an almost endless variety of religious factions” ...

"Colonies do not attain, even remotely, to the level of the mother-land’s civilization” quipped Heinrich von Treitschke in the 1860s...

Joseph Edmund Jorg, for example, claimed America’s Sola scriptura was creating not a theocracy but a “Bibleocracy” (73). As the individual read without corresponding assistance, religion simply became subjective.

Not all Europeans had negative assessments of religion in America...

---

TOPICS: History; Religion
KEYWORDS: america; atlantic; belongsinreligion; christianity; europe; religion; westerncivilization

[whitney69]

It might have been a good study at the time it was researched but with the growing increase of religions and participation in countries all over the world it is not going to stand on its own as it was out of date even before it was published.

One of the biggest increases in individual countries has been the growth of islam.

Islam grew faster (16.2%) than any other major religious group in the decade leading up to 2020, according to Pew Research Center estimates. Muslims continued to be the second-largest religious group in the world after Christians.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/10/islam-was-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religion-from-2010-to-2020/

And with that growth it sprouts an even faster growth with it embedded in each country. More Pew research indicates another 347 million went into islam since 2020.

https://religionunplugged.com/news/islam-grew-and-christianity-didnt-in-just-a-decade

wy69

[whitney69]

It might have been a good study at the time it was researched but with the growing increase of religions and participation in countries all over the world it is not going to stand on its own as it was out of date even before it was published.

One of the biggest increases in individual countries has been the growth of islam.

Islam grew faster (16.2%) than any other major religious group in the decade leading up to 2020, according to Pew Research Center estimates. Muslims continued to be the second-largest religious group in the world after Christians.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/10/islam-was-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religion-from-2010-to-2020/

And with that growth it sprouts an even faster growth with it embedded in each country. More Pew research indicates another 347 million went into islam since 2020.

https://religionunplugged.com/news/islam-grew-and-christianity-didnt-in-just-a-decade

wy69

[CondoleezzaProtege]

I think it helps to understand why European conservatives and European Christians don’t view the world the exact same way as Americans on the right do, even with some commonalities.

[Albion Wilde]

bump