Chapter 3 - The American Religious Heritage

Lasse Vie Olesen & Casper Madsen

Freedom of religion in the US

Americans are very religious; many people attend weekly church meetings and pray each night before they go to bed. Protestants are the dominating religion, although smaller religions are also visible in the US like Jewish, Muslim and Hindu, among various other religions.

The development of Protestantism

The Christian faith was split up into many other lesser beliefs in the sixteenth century because of many differences in people’s religion. Roman Catholics had the pope as the leader of the religion and they told what wrong and right, and they sold forgiveness from sins against god for a small donation to the church.

The Protestants insisted on that the individual man must stand alone and if people sinned they should go straight to god through prayers instead of through priests who spoke as god’s voice

The Protestants disagreed with each other’s opinion of the belief so they split up to even smaller groups called denominations, e.g. Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran etc.

The desire for religious freedom was generally the strongest factor of why many people emigrated to the US

The Protestant Heritage: Self-Improvement

The Protestants which are told to fix their problems alone by praying have a strong aptitude towards self-help and generally fixing the problems themselves. And they are happily reading self-help books “Getting rich for dummies.” And they believe in that God helps those who help themselves.

Material success, hard work, and Self-Discipline

Material success is seen as a most respected form of self-improvement even though it might seem contradictory with religion and materialism, when religion is sided with spiritual matters. But it has been said that people who are blessed with material success are on the good side of god.

Religious leaders however doesn’t approve of material success without Self-discipline and hard work, which might have contributed to the industrial growth in America.

Volunteerism and humanitarianism

The idea of self-improvement includes more than gaining material wealth, it also gives the idea of helping others. Help yourself by helping others e.g. helping your neighbor repairing the roof or giving donations to charity etc.

America has a large history of wealthy people donating extreme amounts of money to charity. John D. Rockefeller was a famous businessman which donated a really large sum of his personal wealth to fund a university.