Northern states, Canada share values

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Registered: 03-23-2003
Northern states, Canada share values
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Fri, 12-12-2003 - 2:38pm
Just thought that this might be interesting...considering the line of discussion in one particular thread...
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/152194_canadapoll12.html

Northern states, Canada share values

Poll says split is actually within U.S.


Friday, December 12, 2003


By SHAWN MCCARTHY
THE (TORONTO) GLOBE AND MAIL


NEW YORK -- Americans from the northern states often have more values in common with their Canadian neighbors than they do with their cousins from southern states, according to a leading U.S. pollster.


Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center, rejected assertions by many of his colleagues that Canada and the United States are on divergent paths leading to a widening values gap.


"When we look deeper into the data, we find the gap between Americans and Canadians is not a national gap, it's a regional one," Kohut told the Canadian Society of New York this week.


For example, the United States is both more religious and more secular than Canada, with religious intensity on the rise in the South and Southwest and church adherence on the decline in the Northeast and on the West Coast, he said.


Americans from the North, particularly New England, are less religious, more tolerant of homosexuality and less likely to regard a husband as the dominant head of the family than their counterparts in southern states.


On such issues, northerners' views are strikingly close to the norms in adjoining areas of Canada, although Kohut said that in some regions of Canada -- notably Southern Alberta -- moral and social views are more in tune with those of the Southern United States.


A number of analyses have mentioned a growing social divide between the United States and Canada, highlighted by the power of the evangelical right in the White House and the Liberal government's move to decriminalize marijuana and allow same-sex marriages.


Last week, The New York Times carried a front-page story describing a "chasm that has opened up on social issues that go to the heart of fundamental values." But Kohut said that chasm is as pronounced within the two countries as it is across the border. The Pew Center conducted a series of polls last month, testing U.S. attitudes toward homosexuality and other social issues.


On gay rights, there is a "general liberalizing trend" in the United States, he said, adding that regions with large evangelical populations are lagging the more secular areas.


© 1998-2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer


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Registered: 07-25-2003
Wed, 12-17-2003 - 6:37pm

Renee

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Registered: 07-25-2003
Mon, 12-22-2003 - 2:57pm
I think many also equate better educated with less religous, so I was interested to run across this exchange in an interview about Christianity in China:

Lopez: Many of the Christians are elites — scientists, intellectuals. How did that happen?

Aikman: Several of the Chinese students and scholars studying in the U.S. and other foreign countries become Christian. Many of these also returned to China and meet up with colleagues of similar professional attainment who were holding private Christian meetings. Those attending these meetings then began to invite others. Word spread that Christianity "worked," that is, that people who were Christian were genuinely concerned for each other's welfare and that prayers often produced remarkable physical healings from difficult illnesses.

But another factor has been a very open-minded approach by many Chinese intellectuals into such phenomena as the remarkable historical primacy of Western civilization around the world. How could this happen? What were the core principles of Western civilization that enabled it, time and again, to correct itself rather than plunge into cyclical and eventually permanent decline? Many concluded that it was Christian ethics and the dynamism of a faith based on a profound hope in the future and a belief that history was not cyclical, as Buddhism and even Confucianism proclaimed, but linear, and with a specific end goal.

Finally, Christians in the fine and performing arts have shown that there is a way out from the often-nihilistic cycle of modernism and postmodernism. This can be very attractive to artists who would prefer a hope-filled universe in which to develop their creative skills.


http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/aikman200312220001.asp



Renee

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