Across the Pond

I have lived in L.A. more than ten years and still things amaze me which others who were raised in the U.S. take for granted. The way religion, politics, public life, and pop culture meld is one such area. I was recently reminded of this when I came upon pictures of Jeremy Scott's Enjoy God fashion line in the LA Times Magazine and again as I was browsing some photos I had taken in Hawaii in April. "Amen". License plates in a burger restaurant...   ...and van with banners (both in Lahaina, Hawaii)  Where I come from, in Austria, faith and religion are omnipresent too - but in a different way. In my home state, Tirol, Catholic shrines and crucifixes line country lanes; chapels stand at crossroads out in the fields; and many a church is tucked away in a hamlet up on a mountain. These structures are part of the alpine landscape and they have been for hundreds of years - though their meaning is lost to many. (The days when children were taught to make the sign o...

In L.A. there is a place of worship on every corner: Baptists, Jewish communities, Mormons, Muslims, Catholics, Episcopalians, Pentecostals, Jehovah's Witnesses compete for members, attention, and, of course, money. Not a week goes by in which we don't get mail from some more or less known congregation: the Hrock church's flyer assures me that I "don't need to be afraid"; the First Baptist Church Pasadena invites us to a community breakfast; the La Canada Presbyterian Church talks about learning what joy means. According to the Wikipedia entry on Los Angeles the city is home to the second largest population of Jews in the U.S. (with 621.000 Jews in the metropolitan area and 490.000 in L.A. proper), and the large number of immigrants from Asia make it the city with the greatest variety of Buddhists worldwide. My own cultural background is monoreligious and I find this diversity refreshing. Hardly surprising for an Austrian of my age, I was baptized Roman C...

The difference between politics in the USA and in Europe is often as small (or big) as one three letter word: God. In Sunday's debate on health care Rep. Dale Kildee (D - Michigan) mentioned the afterlife. "I'm not going to jeopardize my eternal salvation", he said, assuring listeners that federal money would not be used to pay for abortions and that he could vote for the bill. To many Europeans such words, especially in the context of a parliamentary debate, sound bizarre. Is this because most European countries have clear rules for the separation of church and state? Or is it because the secularization of the Old World has reached a point where people dare not even think along religious lines? Take Austria, a country rooted in Catholicism: In left leaning circles atheism is defended with a vehemence reminiscent of the fundamentalism of the Christian right in the United States. It will be interesting to see if and how things change over the next decades, as Mus...