The difference between the social, cultural and intellectual heritage of the European continent and that of America has gained a special significance in today’s world.

However common their slogans are, there are those discreetly advocating the thesis that there is or will be a Clash of Civilizations between the East and West, or between Western democracy and Islam. Even though they prefer to use the generalization “Western world,” actually the “East” can not be mentioned as a single entity. Many things are lost on Turkish intellectuals and readers when they fail to distinguish that Western society is a constantly boiling heterogeneity made up of dozens of different colors and factors that while conflicting, are yet harmonious and mixed.

One of the basic differences between Europe and America lies around the topics of “religion” and “religiosity.” For many Europeans, especially the European intelligentsia, religion and religiosity are individual choices. In this case, they are assumed not to make an imprint on public spaces or seep into the state structure or ideology. Expressing it another way, religion is a personal preference completely outside the public realm. Especially when we look at Northern European writers and intellectuals, we see they have taken this assertion a few steps further: Religiosity is a modern trait. That is, it points to a body of meanings and rules that has no place in the post-modern world. Even if they don’t say this openly, many European intellectuals think that religiosity was spread in a time of modernity, but that it has seen better days to a large extent. There are two important results emerging from this approach. First, European intellectuals have a difficult time understanding immigrant groups who live in Europe, some of whom can be very religious. Just as some of these groups may belong to Muslim immigrants, the devout Catholic Polish immigrants need to be included as well. Secondly, the same European intellectuals have not only difficulty understanding the growing religiosity in their own societies, but they find it very hard to understand America as well. In comparison to Europe, America possesses a much more religious social fabric, and, most importantly, their religion is continually visible in the public sphere.

Consequently, there are two separate cultural streams flowing parallel in the Western world; occasionally in conflict and sometimes distant. On the one hand, there is Europe with its settled secular culture and state structure. While on the other, there is America with its increasingly robust Christian fundamentalist religious dialectic.

This week a “religiosity and superstitions” research report published in the British press received strong reaction. This university research, which examined why and how people gave importance to superstitions for centuries, was actually, in one sense, “an effort to rationalize the irrational.” Among the findings, functions were listed like, “born from the need to give order to chaos, lightens the individual’s feeling of loneliness, and provides easy formulas to man in difficult times.” I’m not going to debate the research findings. hat interests me is how much the research was affected by the pragmatic, positivist British tradition and how great a difference there is between this method and the method in America.

America and Europe hold two completely different approaches to the subjects of religion and religiosity, this contradiction will become even more obvious in the near future.

09.13.2006