Перекличка

538 (fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-trumps-popularity-is-holding-up-by-state/):

A Pew Research Center study analyzed 102 countries and found an inverse correlation between the GDP of a country and the percent of people who said they pray daily. The U.S., however, is a big outlier — the only country with a GDP of over $30,000 per capita where more than half of the adult population reported praying daily

 

NYRB (www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/28/fantasyland-bunk-greatest-show-on-earth/):

Andersen [...] describes his book in its subtitle as “a 500-year history.” He does indeed go back to Luther and Calvin, but they serve only as curtain-raisers for the Pilgrim Fathers and the main theme of his argument: religious fanaticism. Under the illusion that they were God’s chosen people, the Pilgrims set out to prepare the way for the end of the world by establishing a theocratic state in the wilderness. They wiped out the indigenous people (imps of Satan), expelled anyone who thought for herself (Anne Hutchinson), and construed politics as the unconstrained power of the elect (not the elected). Massachusetts was America’s first fantasyland, and “America was founded by a nutty religious cult.”

Having been founded by fanatics, Andersen argues, the United States became the only country in the West to spawn extravagant new religions: millenarian cults derived from the Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century, Mormonism, Christian Science, Scientology, Pentecostalism, and assorted sects whipped up by charismatics speaking in tongues and by evangelists preaching the imminent end of the world as signaled by the omnipresence of Satan.