Individualism again: studies suggest it's an American thing.

A new Newsweek/Beliefnet poll is garnering a lot of attention for its finding that 68% of US evangelical/born-again Christians affirm the idea that "good people" of other faiths can gain salvation, despite evangelicalism's frequent emphasis on the necessity of accepting Christ as savior. 91% of US Catholics agree. Now I'd say any sign that Christianity might be opening itself up to pluralism is good news, but Beliefnet's Steven Waldman's proposes an interesting explanation:

"Americans have become so focused on a very personal style of worship—forging a direct relationship with God—that spiritual experience has begun to supplant dogma. Other results from the poll indicate that the appeal of religion is more spiritual than cultural.Thirty-nine percent said the main reason they practiced their religion is to “forge a personal relationship with God” while only 3% said it was to be part of a community. This would help explain why many people report having a regular prayer life but not attending church. Seventy-nine percent said they pray at least once a week compared to 45% who said they went to worship services during that time.

I'd love to believe that the affirmation of individual religious experience may indeed help challenge the abuses of centralized religious authority, and help people get beyond narrow dogmas like Christian exclusivism. But I think Waldman overstates his case. To me, the poll doesn't indicate that religion's appeal is more spiritual than cultural, but instead reflects a shift in the content of the broader culture, towards spiritual consumerism; a person's spirituality is defined by which products she chooses to consume. Maybe it's The Purpose Driven Life, or it might be the Dalai Lama's latest. The shelves at any Barnes & Noble are flooded with books & CDs allowing you to choose your individual spiritual path, and sales are skyrocketing. The process of choosing a congregation is now less about fidelity to a denomination or community , and more about "shopping" for a place that has the "features" you want, as if it were a kitchen appliance.

I suppose, in a way, this is potentially empowering for some people. Want an ecofeminist spiritual path? You can find it, as long the culture industry thinks there's a market for it. What gets lost in all this is the supportive interpersonal connections, the direct exchange of ideas unmediated by the corporate filter, the dialogue between people of different backgrounds and ideologies. It's also harder for religion to engage in the kind of prophetic discourse that shakes people up and pushes them beyond their own individual desires. That stuff is impossible to market.

Another study: this one I discovered via Boing Boing. It tracked eye motions of subjects shown photographs, and concluded that people raised in Asia took in more detail in the background and more information about the relationship between the foreground and background objects than did people raised i America, who focused largely on foreground objects. The researchers claim that this is the result of a more cooperative culture in Asia that is driven by higher population density and historical communal modes of production (shared irrigation systems for rice paddies), while western culture is more individualized.

Nisbett illustrated this with a test asking Japanese and Americans to look at pictures of underwater scenes and report what they saw.

The Americans would go straight for the brightest or most rapidly moving object, he said, such as three trout swimming. The Japanese were more likely to say they saw a stream, the water was green, there were rocks on the bottom and then mention the fish.(read the rest)

As Nisbett says, it seems we literally are seeing the world differently.