In my family, Sunday coffee was a blood sport. My grandfather, a former Wehrmacht soldier, stood on the political Right. My aunt, a passionate participant in the 1968 student movement, stood on the Left. Almost the only thing they agreed upon was their antipathy to Americans, expressed with identical certainty from opposite ends of the kitchen table. I was ten years old when I started paying attention to this. It was the late 1970s, and I watched political talk shows and Lou Grant—the American newsroom drama set at the fictional Los Angeles Tribune—with equal fascination. I tried to understand why the adults around me enthusiastically consumed American culture even as they denounced the country that produced it.

The standard narrative places the origins of European anti-Americanism somewhere around the Iraq War. The real history is older and stranger. In 1761, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, published his hypothesis that the New World was biologically “degenerate”—everything in America, he claimed, was smaller, weaker, and less vital than in Europe, including the people. Thomas Jefferson was so incensed that he had a stuffed moose shipped to Paris to prove Buffon wrong. The German poet Heinrich Heine, meanwhile, called America “that pig-pen of freedom, inhabited by boors living in equality.”

What interests me about these early critics is not their inaccuracy but their consistency. The specific complaints change every generation—too primitive, too powerful, too capitalist, too confident—but the underlying mechanism does not. You do not spend 276 years obsessing over something you merely dislike. That is the behaviour of someone working through a deeper anxiety.

I identified this pattern through experience. A German engineer drives a Tesla to work, uses Google for research, streams Netflix at night, and delivers a confident lecture about American cultural shallowness over dinner. A German politician tweets outrage about American climate policy from a country that had to reopen coal plants after it shut down its nuclear reactors. The pattern transcends political affiliation: during the Trump years, I watched the German Left discover a passion for criticising America that the German Right had practised for generations. The vocabulary changed—from “American vulgarity” to “threats to the liberal order”—but the emotional register was identical. My grandfather and my aunt said “damn Yanks” with the same conviction, and their political grandchildren have inherited this bipartisan reflex intact.

But there is one aspect that cuts deeper than debates about foreign policy or capitalism, and that is religion. When German observers confront American religiosity, something happens that goes beyond cultural criticism. It triggers genuine bewilderment that often shades into alarm. According to 2022 data, 37 percent of Americans describe religion as “very important” in their lives. In Germany, the figure is thirteen percent. For most European intellectuals, this God gap confirms a simple diagnosis: that America is backward and still awaiting the secularisation that Europe completed decades ago.

It should be noted that the gap is a lot narrower than it has been in recent years. In 2007, 56 percent of Americans described religion as “very important” in their lives. Church attendance and daily prayer have declined in parallel. On its face, this trajectory appears to confirm the European expectation that America is secularising, merely more slowly. But the character of American secularisation differs from Europe’s in ways that matter.

First, the decline appears to have stabilised; Pew’s most recent data show relatively little volatility since 2020 across key indicators. Second, America’s religiously unaffiliated—now roughly 28 percent of adults—are not secular in the German sense. Most still profess belief in God or a higher power; they have rejected institutions more than metaphysics. Third, the civic infrastructure built by American churches over two centuries does not vanish when attendance declines. Traditions of voluntary association, local self-organisation, philanthropy, and lay leadership persist beyond formal membership. The institutional habits outlast the theology.

God of the Yawning Gaps

It’s hard to believe in God when even very bright, thoughtful people can’t come up with good reasons why you should.

QuilletteGraham Daseler

The discrepancy between Europe and the US may have begun as far back as the Reformation. Both Germany and America are children of Protestant theology, but they are children who drew radically different lessons from the same parent. Luther taught submission to temporal authority, as in Romans 13:1: “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities.” The good Lutheran was obedient, orderly, and deeply suspicious of enthusiasm. Faith was a private matter, not a source of public energy. Certain strands of German Protestant political theology tended toward hierarchy, deference to credentialed authority, and a melancholy inwardness that shaped political culture for centuries—with consequences that ranged from impressive institutional discipline to, in its darker moments, a dangerous vulnerability to authoritarian appeals.

Calvin taught something different. Prosperity was a sign of divine favour. Work was a calling. The community of believers was a voluntary association of equals. When Calvinists arrived in America—Puritans, Huguenots, Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed—they brought a theology that was essentially entrepreneurial. American churches became competitive enterprises: they innovate, market, fail, merge, reinvent. European state churches, by contrast, operate like monopolies: they are funded by taxes, governed by bureaucracies, responsive to no one in particular.

The result, over four centuries, was two fundamentally different institutional environments built on the same Reformation foundation. To understand America without understanding this divergence is like trying to understand water without knowing about hydrogen. And this is where European analysis most consistently fails. The misunderstanding is not about theology—it is about institutions. The secret of American religion is not that Americans believe more, but that they organise better.

Go to an American church—any church, from a black Baptist congregation in Atlanta to a Pentecostal megachurch in Texas—and watch what happens outside the sanctuary. People organise. They raise money. They speak in public. They debate governance. They manage budgets, staff, and real estate. They build networks that cross racial, economic, and professional lines. They practise the skills of democratic self-governance every single week, in an environment that is voluntary, competitive, and answerable to its members.

Tocqueville noticed this in 1835, and it remains true today. American churches are not just places of worship; they are arguably the most distributed civic training network in modern history. The skills Americans develop in churches—public speaking, fundraising, community organising, conflict resolution, leadership—transfer directly into business, politics, and civil society. This is the social capital, in Robert Putnam’s terminology, that American religious life generates as a byproduct of its primary mission. Where Europe centralised faith in monumental institutions, America decentralised it into networks of voluntary association. When European intellectuals dismiss American religiosity as irrational, they are dismissing the most powerful engine of voluntary civic life in the modern world—without understanding the institutional incentive structure that makes it work.

There is one more observation that I think deserves consideration, though it will not make me popular on either side of the Atlantic. The Great Awakenings that periodically swept America—in the 1730s, the 1800s, the 1850s, and the 1970s—share a recognisable architecture: a conviction of moral crisis, a call to purification, a division between the enlightened and the benighted, and a promise of transformation through collective commitment to new values.

The progressive movement that has significantly influenced Western institutional culture since roughly 2014 exhibits a strikingly similar structure: moral crisis (systemic injustice), purification ritual (acknowledgment of privilege), insider–outsider boundary (the awakened and the unawakened), and transformative promise (equity, diversity, inclusion). In my religious youth, I was told not to listen to the Rolling Stones because they were “devil worshippers.” Today, speakers are disinvited from universities because their ideas are “harmful.” The vocabulary has changed. The cognitive architecture has not.

This is not a polemical point but an analytical one. If the parallel holds, it suggests that secular Europe has not transcended religious patterns of thought so much as adopted them without the institutional infrastructure—the self-correcting mechanisms, the theological traditions of internal debate—that organised religion has developed over millennia. American religion, for all its excesses, has centuries of experience managing the tension between conviction and tolerance. The newer secular variants have none. The question is whether they will develop such mechanisms, or whether the absence of them will prove costly.

Europe’s most secular major nation is obsessed with the West’s most religious one. The obsession exists not despite the religious difference but because of it. American faith represents an alternative institutional model—decentralised, voluntary, competitive—that generates civic energy in ways European state structures do not. Understanding this model on its own terms, rather than through European assumptions about what secularisation should look like, is not merely an academic exercise. It is a prerequisite for any serious transatlantic relationship.

Americans have many problems. An inability to argue is not one of them. The God gap is not a measure of backwardness. It is a difference in institutional imagination—one that shapes civic energy, social capital, and ultimately political resilience.