Structural, legal and ethical secularism are quite different things. The US is relatively good when it comes to structural and legal secularism, in some aspects better than many European nations are. But when it comes to ethical secularism, things are the other way around. People use their religious views to base their political views on them. Of course it also happens here, but to a much lesser degree. I was in France for almost all of the last presidential campaign and until I checked just now, I had no idea if Macron is part of any organized religion.
I'm talking trends here. Even if in the US the attendance to religious services is falling ... in the US almost half the population seem to go once a month to once a week and about a quarter who never attend services, while in the parts of Europe I know it's about half the people who never go, and ten percent to a quarter who attend monthly to weekly. And there are rules. You don't shove people your religion in their face. You don't talk about your own as a teacher at school *unless* you're the designated teacher for one of the main confessions, and even then your job is 80% ethics and 20% confessional.
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@TheChief Since when was the GDR a theocracy?
Structural, legal and ethical secularism are quite different things. The US is relatively good when it comes to structural and legal secularism, in some aspects better than many European nations are. But when it comes to ethical secularism, things are the other way around. People use their religious views to base their political views on them. Of course it also happens here, but to a much lesser degree. I was in France for almost all of the last presidential campaign and until I checked just now, I had no idea if Macron is part of any organized religion.
I'm talking trends here. Even if in the US the attendance to religious services is falling ... in the US almost half the population seem to go once a month to once a week and about a quarter who never attend services, while in the parts of Europe I know it's about half the people who never go, and ten percent to a quarter who attend monthly to weekly. And there are rules. You don't shove people your religion in their face. You don't talk about your own as a teacher at school *unless* you're the designated teacher for one of the main confessions, and even then your job is 80% ethics and 20% confessional.