Culture in the Blender

This morning, I read my American boyfriend some parts of Jeremy Rifkin’s book The European Dream. I read the sections pertaining to the American Dream and the religosity of the United States. The extent of religosity and its ties to the American Dream in the United States was made clear to me for the first time in Rifkin’s book. (“They [Americans] believe that the American way is God’s way” (Rifkin, 2005, p. 19); “Nearly half of all Americans (48 percent), for example, believe that the United States has special protection from God.” (Rifkin, 2005, p 19); “Nearly half of the American people say that it is necessary to believe in God to have good values” (Rifkin, 2005, p 19); “Sixty-eight persent of the public believe in the devil.” (Rifkin, 2005, p 20); “… 40% percent of the American people believe that the world will end with an Armageddon battle between Jesus and the Antichrist.” (Rifkin, 2005, p 20)) It turns out that my American boyfriend recognized every statistic given in the book from his own experience. The section on the American Dream I recognized myself, other than the specificity Rifkin claims for the American Dream (“The first thing to understand about the American Dream is that from the very beginning it was meant to be exclusive to America. It was never meant to be a dream shared with or exported to the rest of the world. Its power rested in its particularism, not in its universalism. One can only pursue the American Dream on American soil.” (Rifkin, 2005, p. 17)) and the aspect of being a “chosen people” (Rifkin, 2005, p.18). My boyfriend recognized both of those aspects as well.

Perhaps my lack of understanding of the religosity and the particularism of the American Dream are due to my being a third culture kid. I imagine that one could pursue the American Dream anywhere, just not calling it the American Dream, simply a dream of a more prosperous life. Perhaps the feeling that Americans have that one pursues this dream at home is one I share, it’s just that home isn’t just the United States for me, and so logically it follows (for me) that if a dream of prosperity is pursued at home, it can be pursued anywhere.

The Americans I know evidently are not representative on this matter. Perhaps that’s not surprising, since people that want to befriend me are generally not typical in some way or other of their country in the first place. When it comes to the religosity, I recognize myself thinking as an European, especially perhaps as a Nordic person. (“While six out of ten Americans say that thir religion is ‘very’ important in their lives, in European countries religion is barely a factor in people’s day-to-day lives. (…) Many Europeans no longer believe in God. While 82% of Americans say that God is very important to them, approximately half of all Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes say that God does not matter to them.”) I probably have difficulty really understanding the religiosity in the United States in part because my parents are European Christians, who do not mix religion and politics and who have no problems with others having different religious views. I am an atheist, but that doesn’t prevent us from having interesting discussions about religion.

My experience with America from my childhood did not include American Christianity to any extent that I remember. Therefore, my third culture logic is as follows: Religion has been responsible for so many of our moments of shame in history, like the Inquisition, and been used as a political tool, like kings confiscating the gold of the Church for fund a war, that we must make amends and make sure we will never repeat the mistakes we have made in the past. (This also applies to the Holocaust, ten times stronger, but that’s not the topic here.) This is a modern insight into our own history, along with our realization of the importance of universal human rights. We modern people now know that our ideas of the past were horrible and violated the rights of countless human beings, both inside and outside Europe. That’s why we have consicously left religion out of civil society and politics. You can be religious if you wish, but that does not belong anywhere but your own head, in private moments. If you bring religion into politics or anywhere else in public life, you are retracing the path that brought disgrace to our history. Since this is an insight of modernity, and since both Americans and Europeans are modern and Self (to me), Westerners collectively have left religion behind in public life. Unfortunately for me, that’s not true. My sense of “we” spans both Europe and America, but the two are in fact different and the “we” I feel is a figment of the third culture.

While I was reading out the statistics on Americans and religosity, I was laughing at some of the statements, like that many Americans believe in the literal existence of the devil. It seems so incredulous to me in part because I was taught by the Catholic Church in Sweden that the devil does not in fact exist, but is rather a literary character used to make a point, and that hell also doesn’t exist as a place but is a ltierary metaphor for life without God. Since the Catholic Church is hardly progressive and is supposed to be universal, I never imagined that Christianity in America could be so different. Believing such things is positively medival to me, which strongly conflicts with my feeling that the US is a modern country. My boyfriend said that he was a little hurt by my laughing. His reason was very interesting. He said that although he knew I was right, he felt hurt because he would like it to be true. Expanding on that thought, he took one aspect of the American Dream – the notion that America is destined for greatness by God – and replaced that with the emphasis on the individual and working hard. To replace his wish that God existed and was watching over the US, he chose to believe that the US is and will stay great because of the hard work of its people. He also agreed with Rifkin’s – and my – opinion that in some ways the US is stuck in the past when it comes to nationalism. Then again, like I already said, anyone who wants to be my friend – and perhaps especially my boyfriend – is likely to be at least somewhat cosmopolitan.

I do wonder how many Americans feel like my boyfriend. Rifkin asks, “What happens to the American sense of being special, of being a chosen people, in a world where exclusivity is steadily making way to inclusivity? Does God really care less about the whole of his [sic] earthly creation than he does about the North American part? Europeans might find such a conjecture funny, but, believe me, many Americans remain wedded to the notion of our special status as God’s chosen ones. If we were to give up that belief, or even entertain doubt about its veracity, our sense of confidence in ourselves and the American Dream might experience irreparable harm.” Could others replace the idea of being chosen with the idea of making themselves special through hard work, preserving the core of the American dream in a way more compatible with a global world?

Time will tell.

References: Rifkin, J. (2005) The European Dream.New York, NY: Penguin Group