 If we were to take a time machine and go back 150 years, 175 years, to sort of the birth of the United States and the birth of Denmark, at least when the constitutions of each country was being drafted. And you'd go back and you'd see, wow, okay, these are two experiments in democracy, two countries, one getting its liberty from the king of England, the other breaking from the rule of the king and creating really a democracy. You might think you'd look, wow, here's the United States and they're saying in their constitution, in the first amendment to the constitution, separation of church and state. They're literally putting, they're writing down, government shall not establish religion. And then if you were to come over to Denmark, what 1849 I want to say, and you would see that, okay, hey, they're making a constitution too. Right there in writing is the establishment of the Danish Fokkerk, the national church. So if we were there at both of these historical moments, we might predict, wow, the United States is really breaking religion away from society. I mean, this is going to be a secular nation. And then you would look in Copenhagen and you'd think, okay, they're creating a theocracy, they're creating a national church, they're making religion established in their society. So we would probably predict the United States is going to become a really irreligious democracy and Denmark will continue to be religious. And here we are today, and we see just the opposite. In fact, directly the opposite. In fact, the United States today is the most religious democracy in the world, arguably, at least in the Western world. And Denmark appears to be the least religious democracy in the world and maybe in the history of the world. This is really interesting stuff. However, you want to measure religion. If you want to measure religion in terms of belief, behavior, church attendance, whatever it is, belief in God, it's very strong in the United States, very weak in Denmark. Church attendance, quite strong in the United States. Denmark has the lowest church attendance of any Christian country in the world. Feelings about Jesus to Americans, Jesus is a big deal. When George W. Bush was running for president, he was asked, who's the most important philosopher for you? And he said Jesus Christ. And that boosted his popularity. I think in Denmark, most Danes think of Jesus as, well, a nice man from a long ago and that's about it. Heaven and hell, life after death, the Bible, very strong differences between the United States and Denmark. And not only in terms of individual belief and participation, but even the degree to which religion permeates society. So, I mean, in the United States, religion is everywhere at all levels. It's in our government. It's in our school boards. It's, we start baseball games sometimes with prayers, right? Basketball games, I mean, from sports to government, religions thoroughly intermeshed with our society. I find it's the opposite here in Denmark. Danes do not want religion in their politics. They don't want religion to be part of their daily life. If anything, religion should be a personal, private matter that really is not to be in the public square. Of course, no doubt, there is this national church. And a majority of Danes, as you know, are members of the Fokker Kirch. But I have found in my research that that membership is almost cultural. It's symbolic. It's historical. It's about identity. It's about a lot of things, but it isn't about faith in God, begging Jesus to forgive me of my sins or even going to church. So, it's what Hans Rauhn-Eunstern called a distant church. Danes like the church. They want it to be there. It should be pretty and nice, but nobody goes and no one really thinks much about it. So, you have a very secular society here in Denmark and a very religious society in the United States. Will it stay the same? These are the questions I'm going to try to answer now. Will Denmark sort of remain a very irreligious society where people don't think too much about it, don't want it too much as part of their world? Or will things change? Will religion grow and increase in the years ahead and start to resemble the United States? Because so much of what goes on the United States tends to make its way here to Scandinavia. Not everything. Certainly, we don't have the bike culture, for example, and the wonderful bike lanes that you have here and so many other things, but a lot of things from the media, Disney on Friday nights. I mean, there's from clothing to even the war in Iraq if I can go there. I mean, you know, there's a strong connection here between the U.S. and Denmark. So, what about this issue of religion? Will Denmark start to resemble the United States? In order to answer that, we've got to first explain, well, why is the United States so religious and why is Denmark so secular or non-religious? And because I don't have much time, I can't get into the history. I started there with the drafting of each country's constitution. But I'm going to stick now, and of course these are historical questions. Having you do with how Christianity came to America, to North America, how Christianity came to Denmark, who the first founders of the United States were, and how strongly they were religious, and how religion sort of came and was adopted here, and very different trajectories there. But I'm going to focus on the sociological. So, let's start with why is the United States so religious? First of all, if you look at the U.S., you have the highest rates of poverty of any democracy in the Western world. Child poverty is quite severe. You have the highest rates of violent crime in the Western world. Murder rates, aggravated assault, violent felonies. You have the greatest degree of inequality between the rich and the poor. And it's been growing for 30 years. In other words, we have what we in sociology would call a high level of insecurity for people's daily lives. Poverty is a reality. Homelessness is a reality. Lack of health insurance is a reality. You know, the ability to afford higher education is not so easy for a lot of people. And there's a lot of crime. So, life for a lot of Americans is what we call precarious. It's a little insecure. Not for millions of Americans, they're doing just fine in their hummers and their mansions. But that's one percent. A lot of people are not doing so well. What does this have to do with religion? Well, we know it's a common observation that when life is hard, people tend to turn to religion for security, for comfort, personal psychological comfort, but also social support. I mean, if you don't have a job and you don't know how you're going to pay your rent, it's nice to be part of a church congregation that might help you out in those times. And it's nice to have somebody to pray to when you've got nothing else going on. So, we know that when life is not so secure, you tend to have higher rates of religiosity. And that's a correlation we see all over the world. Second reason the United States is so religious actually seems to now have to do with that separation of church and state that I talked about that's in our Constitution. Why? Well, what it meant was when you saw that First Amendment saying the government shall not establish religion, that meant we don't have a national church of America. Taxes can't support churches. Taxes can't support the salaries of priests or pastors. If you want to have a church, you have to support it yourself. You've got to pay your own bills, pay your own electricity, pay your own salary, which means you have to get out there and compete in a sort of religious marketplace. Not only do we have this separation of church and state, which means religions really do have to function like businesses to use a metaphor, but we've got a high degree of many different types of religions, what we call religious pluralism. So, you have no state church, every religious group has to support itself, and you've got a lot of different religions out there, a zillion different kinds of Christianities, different kinds of Islam, different kinds of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, Mormonism, you name it. And they're all out there having to kind of support themselves and get members, which means they market themselves aggressively. They market themselves just like any other business would market itself. They see what the competition's doing and they think, how can we get more customers or people to our church? Now, that's just the way it works, whether you think that's good or bad, that's just the reality. And churches know that as well. They wouldn't disagree. What else do you have in the United States? Not only do you have this religious pluralism and competition among religions, but you have a high degree of racial and ethnic diversity. We've got a lot of different ethnic groups, a lot of different racial groups, people from all over the world. What we find is that when you have that kind of a situation in a society, people turn to religion sometimes for a sense of belonging to be with people like them. Again, it seems to be a natural phenomena. You want to be around people that speak the same language, have the same customs, have the same traditions, or come from the same country. And religion often functions in that way. Certainly for African Americans, religion has been the one area where they have found community. We also have an emphasis on individualism in the United States, very much so. I mean, this is what America is known for. You look out for number one. You're the best. You got to work hard and you got to make it. It's all about you. Well, that's good sometimes, but for a lot of people, it can be tough going it alone. And religion can provide a sense of community that is often needed in a society that so emphasizes the individual. And I often find I think a lot of Americans are part of religious groups because we're social beings and that individualism only can work so far and in so many circumstances. And sometimes we need other people. I think those are the main reasons sociologically why we might see such strong religion in the United States. So now we can flip around and say, well, why is Denmark seemingly so irreligious on almost every measure we have? Danes are at the bottom of religiosity. What's going on? Well, we can kind of flip this around. What do we have here? The lowest rates of poverty in the world. And maybe again, I like this phrase a lot, but maybe even in the history of the world. I mean, what has been achieved in the Nordic countries is amazing. 150 years ago, 200 years ago, people were starving and freezing in the streets. You had a lot of little match girls and not anymore. Not anymore. Yes, there are poor people here, but fewer than anywhere else in the world. Life, in fact, in Denmark is the opposite of insecure. There is free healthcare, free education, job training, unemployment benefits, maternity leave, paternity leave. You have a welfare state and the hallmark of the welfare state, whether you like it or not, is a very secure life for just about everyone. There's a steadiness here. There's a sense of support and there's a sense that I find things can never get too bad as I find in the United States. I mean, here in Denmark, it's no fun to lose your job. It's no fun to get a divorce and so on and so forth, but there is a welfare net that catches people, which that net is very thin in the US, but here it's very strong, the strongest in the world. So life is more secure, which may mean people just don't need that comfort of religion, either the psychological personal or the social and economic support. Second of all, it's the opposite. You don't have separation of church and state. You have a Danish national folk church, which is supported by your taxes and is run by the government in a way. I mean, there's people in parliament who have to oversee your religious branch of the country. What this has meant is that the Danish Lutheran Church, to use the business analogy, pretty much has a monopoly on the religious marketplace. It's supported by the government and there's not much competition. There's been very few serious contenders in the religious marketplace here. Okay, a few Catholics here, there's been some Jews in the past, but for most of the last 200 years, there's just basically been the Danish church. It's the only show in town, more or less. Yes, you have some free churches here, but they've never been more than one or two percent of the population, so it's sort of the only show in town. It's run by the government, supported by the people. It's an established church. What this means is, to use the business analogy, the Danish church hasn't had to market itself too much. Think about it. If you're a pastor, a priest of some church outside of Olhus, you're getting paid by the government, you're living in the priest's house. It's usually nice. The ones I've been to are very nice. And if you have 500 people in your church on a Saturday or five little old ladies, you get the same paycheck. The lawn will still be cut. The walls will still be painted. You don't have to fight too much to get customers. And I think it's possible that the Danish church has gotten a little lazy in the last 100 years. It hasn't had to fight for its survival. So that may have meant that religion's just a little bit boring in Denmark, where in the United States, it's exciting. You can get free coffee at church, free donuts, internet access. They'll do whatever it takes. Flat screen TVs, great bands, great singers, charismatic speakers, whatever they need to do. Denmark doesn't have that vitality in its religious marketplace. Next, until very recently, you couldn't speak of racial or ethnic diversity in Denmark. It was very homogenous. That's changed now. We'll get to that. But so the sense of belonging came from other ways, from being Danish, from speaking the Danish language, from having your heritage and your roots in this, what has become a very little country since the last 300 years. And so the need to find belonging in religion isn't the same as it is in America here in Denmark. I think people feel a sense of belonging as part of their Danishness, and they don't need to find it at church. And finally, I think you also have the opposite. Rather than an emphasis on individualism in Danish culture, I think you have an emphasis on the group, social solidarity. I see it, my kids are in Danish schools. I see how there's so much emphasis on being part of the group, getting along with everyone, being part of what everybody else is doing. When I ask young Danes why they got conformated, why they went through confirmation, if they didn't believe in God or Jesus, they always say to me, that's just what everybody was doing. That's just what we do. And that seems to be more of the Danish mentality. So again, that need for community or belonging that Americans might find at church, Danes find in the emphasis on social solidarity in their culture. So the predictions, that's my exciting conclusion. Will it stay this way? Will Denmark continue to be an irreligious secular society where religions just kept on the sidelines and is it just a very personal matter? Or might religions start to increase and start to resemble more like the United States? Obviously nobody knows, but these are my predictions. If Denmark starts to resemble the United States in all these other sociological ways, I would predict that also religion may rise. So what do I mean by that? Well, if the welfare state starts to crumble and if there's an increase of inequality in Denmark, if the rich start getting much richer and the poor start getting much poorer and that goal starts to widen and the welfare state starts to weaken, I think you'll see a rise in religion for the reasons we've talked about. If the church does break from the government and there is a break and it's no longer together like this, I think the national church is going to start to feel the pressure and it's going to start to realize, oh, shit, we can't relax anymore. We've got to maybe get a little bit more interesting and it may start to draw more people in. And if with the increase of immigrants, we start to see real diversity in Denmark, ethnic diversity, racial diversity, national diversity, again, I think you'll start to find people turning towards religion as a way to find community with people like them. Globalization, if it really starts to threaten the Danish way of life or at least what has been the Danish way of life for the last 100 years and life becomes a little more difficult and little more unclear, then I think we may see an uptick in religion. So again, all those factors actually may produce a little bit of a religious revival like in America. However, I'm not so sure. It's also possible that Danes will become even more secular as the world becomes more religious. I think that's, and I say that for a couple of reasons. First of all, in the last 20 years, we're seeing a decline in church weddings, a decline in confirmations, and a decline in baptisms. These are going down in the last 20 years. And after the Danish cartoon, Mohammed cartoon crisis, it's now been four or five years. Danes have not become more Christian. They've become more secular, more democratic. In fact, a recent international poll found that of all countries asked, Danes were the ones most likely to say that religion causes more harm than good in the world, that it causes more problems than not. Danes were at number one there. I think that's a reaction to the cartoon crisis. And I think Danes are reacting to the presence of Muslims in their society, not by saying, oh, we need to be more Christian, but rather we need to be more democratic, more secular. We need to emphasize values of freedom of speech and so on and so forth. So it's possible that this secularity may just be part of the Danish character, part of the Danish mentality. Maybe Danes just aren't that religiously musical. Maybe they never have been. And perhaps they will solve whatever problems that come their way by being rational and discussing and debating and not praying. But so what is the future? Well, as an American, I have to say, God only knows.