Salon: Delusional, prudish, selfish, violent: This is how Americans compare to the rest of the world

It’s fairly common knowledge that Europeans, overall, are less religious than Americans. U.S. presidential speeches always end with a perfunctory “God bless America,” our athletes thank a god who apparently prefers rigging sports competitions to curing cancer, and there are odes to the lord on our money (America’s Real Highest Power™). A Pew survey released last year found that almost 75 percent of Americans across denominations say religion is at least “somewhat” important to them, with 53 percent calling it “very” important. That’s higher than in every European country polled, a list topped by Poland, where just 28 percent—close to half America’s total—answered in kind. France, in what we’ll see is pretty consistent, came in dead last in Europe, while Japan and China, to borrow a conservative phrase, are even more “godless.” [...]

No indicator exists in a vacuum, so it makes sense that America’s religiosity impacts its sexual mores—or its purported ones, anyway. In a 2013 survey, 30 percent of Americans said sex before marriage is “morally unacceptable.” Pretty much every country that placed a lower importance on religion found premarital sex less of an abomination, although Russia’s in a dead heat with us on this one. France, where just 6 percent held this opinion, tied for last place with Germany. [...]

Rags-to-riches stories do happen, but they happen less in the U.S. than in many other countries. A 2012 Economic Policy Institute study found there’s far less class mobility in America than in other wealthy European countries, as well as Canada, Japan and Australia. Business Insider cites a Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco study that concluded a lot us of are essentially walled in by the class barriers that surrounded us at birth. Researchers note that “45 percent of American adults who are in the bottom 20 percent in income were born to parents who were also in the bottom 20 percent; nearly half, 45 percent, of adults in the top 20 percent had parents who were also in the top 20 percent. Most Americans who were born in the middle 60 percent had parents who were also born in the middle 60 percent.”

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