Octavio: Hundreds.
Dr. Werz: 6,161 as of last year. So if somebody really feels they want to argue this a protestant group that you can describe as a social group or a culture group in any meaningful sense it’s just not true. Doesn’t make sense. So the fascinating thing is that these, all these churches traditionally have established their own social and cultural institutions creating a diversity of traditions within the country but under the umbrella of a very secular political constitution. And it’s interesting that Alexis [Detovil] when he came to the United States 150 years ago, he looked at this different denominations and he called them schools of democracy. And that was very interesting coming from France in a post revolutionary pre-imperial environment; he looked at religion in the United States which from a French respective is astonishing because religion at least Catholic institutions were the major target of the revolution only a few decades before, he looked at this institutions as schools of democracy. And I think he has understood something because that tradition establishes a pluralistic substance in American society that basically set frame that we’re dealing with diversity and differences. And this is important to understand why even today religion is, or faith is thriving in the United Sates but it’s nothing enter [Duluvian] or thousands or hundreds of years old. It’s a very modern phenomena which is corresponding with the secular political traditions in this country. And I think this fascinating because faith in the United States as is ethnic belonging or ethnic identifications is embedded into that, within that secular field of being an American and being something else. To have an added value and that traditionally in Europe would not go together. In Germany it wouldn’t, there was in a town minority which were Jews. They were declared often times in German history as being incompatible with German culture. There are similar discussions that are going on in Turkey or have been going on ever since the communist revolution. Questions was are monitories can they minorities and can they be to accept at the same time? More often or not the answer was no. that’s changing regularly.
And it’s interesting to see that from a European perspective that that achievement in the United States, that actually religion or faith was something that was contributing to democracy and emancipation is entirely new experience. It didn’t work that way in Europe so again [Toklar] comes to the United States and one of his first observations and I need to read this quote because it’s so fantastic he says, ‘The religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States, it’s a religious atmosphere. It’s surprising for him. In France I had seen the spirits of religion and of freedom almost always marching into opposite directions. In America I found them intimately linked together in joined reign over the same land.’ And that’s a fascinating observation that he makes because it’s not what he describes but [Toklar] is clever. He’s formulation says everything, the same land. So the soil, the American soil is emancipated in the sense that the American soil allows you to be American and Jewish. American and Muslim. American and Protestants. It is not, the soil is not defining you in a cultural manner but it is a free space in the very literal but also in the metaphorical sense. And this is amazing because you can be American and Jewish and Christian and Muslim or even and atheist although that was less popular back then and that means the spiritual and the material dimensions of society so to say heaven and earth are divorced from each other. And that is interesting because only under that condition of the division or the divorce of heaven and earth America can be the land of religion and the most secular nation at the same time.
And the Europe that is very different because as you know there was a third year war going on exactly along the lines of religious distinctions. And the problem is that war could not be solved but through the [IB] peace in 1648 which did not free the soil but the solution was the opposite solution. It established the [confederalisation] of states. Soil and religion had to be identical. Where you lived would define who you were in religion cultural terms. [IB] the old formula, who’s land his religion. Which means that land and religion backslash culture enter a symbiotic relationship. And that means the soil looses it’s universally. And that means by definition if there’s somebody on that soil who is not compatible with that over arching religious or cultural majority, you produce minorities that potentially eternal. Because they can not be integrated, they can’t have roots in the soil so to speak if you want use an organic metaphor. And I think this is fascinating because in 1648 this is basically where a 300 year tradition of exporting minorities from Europe to the United States starts. There is a direct cause and affect in terms of Trans Atlantic relations but people that do not fit and for other reasons but also people that do not fit in that culturalizing notion of a confessional state they live Europe and come to the united state. And if you want to be nasty you can even argue that stale mate between Protestants is a Catholicism in Europe is really only being dissolved through fascism and Nazism in the name of the extension of all minorities.