Darwin’s work on evolution has been around for about 160 years, but religious denial of the theory is a fairly recent–and American–development. As is our slippage in science proficiency. I found this piece on the subject to be a bit scattered, but still with some interesting tidbits.

For instance, maybe the fact that more Europeans believe in evolution because they’re not as religious as Americans. Well, according to one study, no.

“Many studies have found Americans are not more religious in practice than people in other nations. We just lie to pollsters as to what we’re doing on Sundays. Philip Brenner at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research did a paper looking at ‘500 studies over four decades, involving nearly a million respondents.’

The findings were summed up by Slate’s Shankar Vedantam, “Brenner found that the United States and Canada were outliers — not in religious attendance, but in overreporting religious attendance. Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans.”

So really we attend church as much as other countries – even European countries. Americans, and apparently Canadians, just lie about it in astonishingly un-Christ-like numbers.”