On Thursday, 15 March 2018 11:07:31 AM AEDT Trent W. Buck via luv-talk wrote:
Russell Coker via luv-talk wrote:
As a correction, the article says and implies nothing whatsoever about 'most Americans', and you cannot reasonably draw conclusions about the majority of 325 million Americans from it -- for the simple reason that it's about _evangelicals_. Who are a subculture.
People who identify as "evangelicals" are a very large subculture. Using the word "subculture" in this context seems misleading as it seems to imply that they are small and lack influence.
If you want to sound less like a crank, cite actual numbers. For example:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelical_christian#cite_ref-How_Many_Evang elicals_Are_There_5-0 The United States has the largest concentration of evangelicals in the world. Based mostly in the Bible Belt, US evangelicals are a quarter of the nation's population and politically important.^[4]
25% of Americans is patently not "most Americans" (but nor is it insignificant).
Yes, it's not like stamp collectors. If all the stamp collectors in the US had a particular political belief then it wouldn't affect public policy unless they had a very targeted agenda and the money and organisation skills of the NRA. While some of the theories about memes are a bit extreme, the general concepts hold water. If 25% of the population consistently makes some claim then people who hear that will tend to think that it has some merit. 25% is enough that almost everyone in the US will have a friend of a friend who's an evangelical and most people will have a friend or relative who is.
If you want to pick on a particular nation-state for being religious, all you gotta do is pull up this handy graph, and work your way up from the bottom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart–Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world
The second lowest entry in the English speaking section of that graph is the US. The only worse one is Ireland. In Australia we don't watch much Irish TV, U2 is the only Irish pop group I can think of (I'm sure there are others but I could name a dozen American groups), of the companies involved in running the Internet most of them are connected to the US and the only connections to Ireland are through tax avoidance schemes. When politicians want to cut medicare I don't blame Ireland, but I think that the US deserves some of the blame. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/