Americans Are Definitely Not As Fun As We Think We Are, Say Polls

Do you still believe in old-fashioned ideas like God, self-determination, and being faithful to your partner? If so, you're probably an American, according to a new compilation of poll data from Pew that's basically a series of Jeff Foxworthy jokes but for transatlantic differences.

Americans, researchers have found in several surveys conducted in the past five years, are more likely than Europeans to believe that they, not outside forces, determine their fates. We're also way more religious than Europeans, more likely to disapprove of premarital sex, more likely to be OK with offensive speech, and more in favor of privileging personal liberties over a strong government that helps those in need. The stereotypes are true, in other words: Compared to Europe, we are naïve, bumbling hicks who are socially conservative to a fault, willing to believe pretty much every life lesson handed down by Michael Bay movies, and not really that much fun to be around.

Europeans, by contrast, are metropolitan, pragmatic, and hardened by the absurdities of life. Less than 40 percent of Germans, Poles, and Greeks think that success in life is pretty much outside of their control; not surprisingly given that attitude, less than half of continental Europeans think that it's very important to work hard to get ahead, compared to 73 percent of Americans. "Let the ignorant Yankees spout their ant-and-grasshopper consumer-capitalist BS," Europeans say to one another, probably, except in whatever language they speak. "We know that terrible things—war, revolution, a city-destroying flood—can wipe out one's achievements at any moment. Also there is no God. Who wants some more wine?"

Opinions across European nations vary, of course, with the UK being closer to the US than continental countries are, as you'd expect. Also as you'd expect, France is the best example of all these trends. Only 25 percent of the French think hard work is very important, only 14 percent of them think religion is very important, and 53 percent of them think having an affair is totally chill.

By contrast, 84 percent of Americans strongly disapprove of affairs, and 30 percent of us think that even premarital sex is a no-no, compared to 6 percent of French people, most of whom probably have guilt-free sex surrounded by baguettes, striped shirts, and berets. Americans' tendency to attach morality to orgasms is probably linked to our belief in God, with 53 percent of us saying religion is very important in our lives. That puts our religiosity on par with countries like Turkey and Venezuela and separates us from every other wealthy Western country in the world.

This is ammunition for all those assumptions that sociologist Max Weber's "Protestant work ethic" is alive and well in the US even as it dies out in Europe. "Europeans take longer holidays and retire earlier; and many more European workers are either unemployed or on strike," the right-wing British economist Niall Ferguson wrote back in 2003. "The decline of work in Northern Europe has occurred more or less simultaneously with the decline of Protestantism." Ferguson's point was that the US economy was strong, and Europe's was falling apart, but trading in all that stuff about piety and thrift for two weeks of paid vacation a year actually… seems like a pretty good deal? Is our gritty individualism stopping us from cashing in on benefits that many Europeans take for granted?

The most depressing thing about these numbers is they show how little Americans care about supporting their fellow citizens: Almost 60 percent of us would rather have the freedom to pursue our life goals without state interference than a strong government that helps ensure no one is in need. The charitable way to look at this is that the Americans who were surveyed don't think that that kind of assistance actually lifts people out of poverty; the less kind perspective is that we would rather watch someone starve to death than limit our own ability to become rich. Coupled with the belief that people can control their destiny, it sort of seems like Americans blame the poor for being poor—which, again, is the kind of lazy assumption that seems like it would be wrong, but I guess isn't.

Packaged together, these sorts of statistics don't make Americans look great. We apparently hate sex, think hard work will actually be rewarded, and don't particularly think that a government has a duty to care for its neediest citizens. All in all, the average American resembles those archetypal racist relatives everyone supposedly runs into at Thanksgiving; the average European is basically Camus boning your mom.

If there's a data point that makes Americans look better than our cynical comrades across the pond, it's that we're more likely to tolerate offensive speech than Europeans. We may be puritanical when it comes to sex and cling tightly to our idols, but we are perfectly happy—or at least not unduly perturbed—when someone stands in the middle of town yelling about how we're just a bunch of hypocritical, racist, uptight assholes. We're like, "Well, bless your heart, you are perfectly within your rights to do that." Reading about the differences between us and Europe is enough to make a certain kind of young American want to write "FUCK THIS PLACE" on the side of a building while booking a ticket to Berlin, but there's a sort of comfort in knowing that, in America, at least you can tell America to go fuck itself free of consequence.