Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

most American three-year-olds believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, for instance, while most nine-year-olds do not. Indeed, until they’re about ten, children naturally think everything that exists or happens has a purpose, designed and arranged by somebody or something to fulfill particular roles—hippos to be on display at the zoo, clouds to make rain, Mommy to be nice. Then they get older and are supposed to learn the various truths, counterintuitive and disappointing though they may be. However, if the adults around them still cling to childlike beliefs, as so many do in America concerning religion, children don’t necessarily grow out of the beliefs. A study by a University of Michigan psychologist found that between ages eight and ten, nearly everyone has a creationist explanation for how life emerges; biological evolution doesn’t yet make sense. But by age twelve in the United States, her study found, it’s pretty much only children in fundamentalist Christian households who still believe that animals and people were created supernaturally and simultaneously. Young children, in the phrase of one eminent child psychologist at Boston University, are “intuitive theists” who naturally tend to believe that some kind of God must be running the whole show. A major argument of this book is that Americans are not just exceptionally religious but that our dominant religion has become exceptionally literal and fantastical—childlike—during the last fifty years in particular. ...