From the BBC: This thing, by Justin Webb, is kind of interesting. It's a BBC Washington correspondent's thoughts on the hyper-religiosity of Americans, especially when compared to the British and other Europeans. I love this part, concerning the American media coverage of the Elizabeth Smart thing:

During the last week a child who'd been missing for nine months has been found safe and well - the event was described routinely on the news media as a miracle. One broadcast had a caption reading "the power of prayer". In fact the child had been abducted and her abductor was recognised and captured. In rational old Britain the media circus following the finding of the child would have been focused on ways of preventing this happening again - on police errors in the investigation. Here, metaphorically, sometimes literally, they just sink to their knees.

He also mentions that "...86% of Americans, we are told by the pollsters, believe in heaven." This makes me a little happy. No, not the statistic, which, I'm afraid, is totally accurate. It's gladdening because it correlates well with the City University of New York American Religious Identification Survey findings, in which more than 14 percent of respondents answered "No Religion" to the question "What is your religion, if any?" It's a pretty comprehensive study, and seems much more accurate and trustworthy than any of the random, non-named studies cited by idiots who claim, variously, that 92 or 95 or 98 percent of Americans believe in a god. I've never been shown a well-done study that finds these figures. It is true that religious identification and belief in a god are two different things, but god-belief seems too intangible a quality to ever measure with any accuracy. Like presidential approval, I'd venture that it would fluctuate wildly from day to day and hour to hour. Religious identification, on the other hand, is much more reliably defined and quantified. And it's a much more specific and easily understood figure that can more readily be cited to politicians and policy makers. The CUNY study also reveals an interesting tidbit about Utah: only 57 percent of respondents in Utah identified themselves as Mormon/LDS. This differs wildly from the 70 percent that we've always been told. And it rather nicely reveals the major discrepancies between the LDS church's bookkeeping methods and the reality of the individual citizens of Utah. It also raises an interesting question: what if we did a worldwide survey of the people the LDS church considers to be members? If 19 percent of administratively-listed Mormons in Utah either don't consider themselves LDS or forgot that they were baptized into the religion, what would the percentage be in other countries? Considering that the LDS church will still list a person as a member, even when he or she has taken great pains to have his or her name removed from church records, I would guess it'd be pretty high.