The country's austere Protestantism helps to explain this, but so may a culture of industrial might.
ECONOMIST: A changing relationship between a nation and its clocks
However, those numbers have been on the decline, while Protestantism and evangelicalism are on the rise.
Unlike many other forms of faith, Protestantism has no mystical rite to absolve sin.
Mutual funds are available that adhere to the Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Mennonite and evangelical branches of Protestantism.
And partly in reaction to the excesses of the counter-culture, there was a revival of socially conservative Protestantism.
ECONOMIST: How mass affluence shapes American politics and culture
For American Protestantism, Mormonism was the other: you defined yourself against those nuts.
South Koreans (both in their homeland and as migrants to America) often convert from Buddhism to Protestantism as they rise economically.
Protestantism in itself was no bar to European commonality, as any number of German states, not to speak of the Netherlands, bore witness.
The Orthodox Church regarded both Catholicism and Protestantism as heresies and imbued its adherents with a sense of alienation from, and hostility to, the West.
CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Post-Mortem on the Russian Elections: What 'Centrists'?
All this may reflect the fact that some kinds of Protestantism (like many strains of Islam) sit easily with a disciplined, reflective way of life.
Billy Graham's autobiography is a reminder that evangelical Protestantism is a far older and deeper current in American life that the politicised Christianity of the Moral Majority.
But the connection between Protestantism and industrial development remains a controversial subject, and the Iberian peninsula's late arrival at the capitalist party is one of the arguments that supports the contention.
He was born just before the start of the 16th century, a turbulent age which embraced the origins of Protestantism, the decline of Venice and the rise of the Spanish empire.
Originalism, which has no purchase anywhere but here, has a natural affinity with some varieties of Protestantism, and the United States differs from all other Western democracies in the far greater proportion of its citizens who believe in the literal truth of the Bible.
The history of design, he says, can be seen as the search for a visual expression of sincerity, a claim he supports by taking the reader from the simplicity demanded by Protestantism (in rebellion against Baroque Catholicism) to the rise of abstraction in art.
What is interesting is how the Craze seems to have followed the fault-lines of the Reformation: Catholic countries which had little major threat from Protestantism, such as Italy and Spain, saw very little witch-hunting while those in the front-line of the religious struggles of the time, like Germany and France, saw the most.
应用推荐