It all looked so promising. The US had mastered the atom and nuked Japan into submission. The hard sciences were widely respected and scientists revered. The old days of witch-burning seemed a thing of the past as the US embraced scientific endeavour as never before.
60 years on, we have this:
Welcome to Idiot America.
LET'S TAKE A TOUR, shall we? For the sake of time, we'll just cover the last year or so. A federally funded abstinence program suggests that HIV can be transmitted through tears. An Alabama legislator proposes a bill to ban all books by gay authors. The Texas House passes a bill banning suggestive cheerleading. And nobody laughs at any of it, or even points out that, in the latter case, having Texas ban suggestive cheerleading is like having Nebraska ban corn. James Dobson, a prominent conservative Christian spokesman, compares the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. Pat Robertson, another prominent conservative preacher, says that federal judges are a more serious threat to the country than is Al Qaeda and, apparently taking his text from the Book of Gambino, later sermonizes that the United States should get with it and snuff the democratically elected president of Venezuela.
The Congress of the United States intervenes to extend into a televised spectacle the prolonged death of a woman in Florida. The majority leader of the Senate, a physician, pronounces a diagnosis based on heavily edited videotape. The majority leader of the House of Representatives argues against cutting-edge research into the use of human stem cells by saying that "an embryo is a person. . . . We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth." Nobody laughs at him or points out that the same could be said of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or whoever invented the baby-back rib.
And, finally, in August, the cover of Time —for almost a century the dyspeptic voice of the American establishment—clears its throat, hems and haws and hacks like a headmaster gagging on his sherry, and asks, quite seriously: "Does God have a place in science class?"
Fights over evolution—and its faddish new camouflage, intelligent design, a pseudoscience that posits without proof or method that science is inadequate to explain existence and that supernatural causes must be considered—roil up school districts across the country. The president of the United States announces that he believes ID ought to be taught in the public schools on an equal footing with the theory of evolution. And in Dover, Pennsylvania, during one of these many controversies, a pastor named Ray Mummert delivers the line that both ends our tour and, in every real sense, sums it up:
"We've been attacked," he says, "by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture."
What happened?
Well the US is the most religious country in the western world, something like 40% attend church every week and same number believe that everything in the bible is true. It is a Christian version of Iran. That explains things like people wanting christian creationism taught in the schools, nationwide movement to introduce abstinence only sex education in schools, one town in Louisiana banning low rider pants, furor over one singer accidentally flashing her tits live on TV. It also explains adjusting even for Blacks and Hispanics US birth rates are higher than other western country. Those religious folk have like 3 or 4 children*.
On top of that the USA has had a better experience of the 20th century, especially WW1 and WW2 than Europe did, it won both of them with relatively little cost and became much more powerful because of them. Americans are much more nationalistic than Europeans. A lot of Americans for example want the US to withdraw from the UN, seeing as a prop for America's enemies.
Interestingly enough the US political class are much more secular than the voting public, institutions like the supreme court have been overriding the wants of the religious folk and led to a lot of resentment of the courts, imposing unpopular decisions like banning creationism being taught in the schools or legalizing same sex marriage.
* I think in nations like UK, Australia and New Zealand it is also true regular church going folks have more childern, but they make up 5-10% of the population, we in those country might be seeing our futures when religious folks via their high birth rates get to around 30-40% of the population.
