American Gods is not my favorite book, but I disagree with that goodreads review, actually. The issue isn't that America doesn't worship smaller gods, it's that American culture isn't rooted in any kind of old-world tradition. It's one of those things about America being a very young country made up almost entirely of immigrants - we don't have our own cultural legacy of what's sacred, we just have what people have brought with them from their own cultures. It's the lack of tradition more than the lack of religion, IMO, because it's obviously ridiculous to say that Americans are not religious - but it does make sense to me to say that that kind of ritual and tradition doesn't have a long enough history in America to be a real part of the fabric of the country. If that makes any sense.
Ah, that's a perfect explanation actually, thank you! Yes yes yes to all of it.
we don't have our own cultural legacy of what's sacred, we just have what people have brought with them from their own cultures.
... and actually, idk if I'm carpetbagging here but it seems to me that you can't talk about that without talking about America's overt history of whitewashing immigrant tradition, whether it's forcing Swedish-speaking peoples in the middle of Pennsylvania (I think?) to switch to church services in English or missionaries asking new Chinese immigrants to come to church and switch from wearing qipao to Western dresses, etc. I guess the point I'm trying to make lends itself to another frustration the commenter tried to make (though not perfectly): it's not so much that technology and money and the media have taken over; technology and money and power have always had so much currency in American society whether in the 17th century or the 21st. The salient point is really about who these inanimate things are being wielded by, and
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we don't have our own cultural legacy of what's sacred, we just have what people have brought with them from their own cultures.
... and actually, idk if I'm carpetbagging here but it seems to me that you can't talk about that without talking about America's overt history of whitewashing immigrant tradition, whether it's forcing Swedish-speaking peoples in the middle of Pennsylvania (I think?) to switch to church services in English or missionaries asking new Chinese immigrants to come to church and switch from wearing qipao to Western dresses, etc. I guess the point I'm trying to make lends itself to another frustration the commenter tried to make (though not perfectly): it's not so much that technology and money and the media have taken over; technology and money and power have always had so much currency in American society whether in the 17th century or the 21st. The salient point is really about who these inanimate things are being wielded by, and ( ... )
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