The atheist sloth ethic (or why Europeans don't believe in work)

From The Telegraph. Apparently, according to posturing rightist historian Niall Ferguson, it's because we're not god-fearing, sensuality-denying, self-flaying, providential Protestants anymore. Sheesh!

Weber believed he had identified a link between the rise of Protestantism and the development of what he called "the spirit of capitalism". I would like to propose a modern version of Weber's theory, namely "The Atheist Sloth Ethic and the Spirit of Collectivism".

The most remarkable thing about the transatlantic divergence in working patterns is that it has coincided almost exactly with a comparable divergence in religiosity. According to a 1999 Gallup survey of religious attitudes, 48 per cent of people living in western Europe almost never go to church; the figure for eastern Europe is just a little lower at 44 per cent.

In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Denmark, less than one in 10 of the population now attends church at least once a month. Only in Catholic Italy and Ireland do more than a third of the population worship on a monthly basis or more often.

By contrast, more than twice as many North Americans as Europeans attend religious services once a week or more. And scarcely any Americans could be characterised as atheists, compared with 15 per cent of Europeans

Really bad correlations here. As well as being god-fearing, isn't the US also a consumerist inferno, with everything from Britney to Sex in the City on display? (And didn't Daniel Bell recognise the incoherence of this in seventies - the rigour of production being eroded by the abandon of consumption? Isn't hard work in the US more about fear of falling into the most threadbare of social safety nets?) And rather than the opposition between atheism and religion, what about the shared trans-atlantic rise in more diffuse senses of spirituality? New Age sensibilities also cause workers to question whether they should devote themselves to a brand culture anchored to a distant bottom line. (Does Ferguson really think there are no anxieties about this in America? Has he never read Fast Company? Or heard about the 'cultural creatives'? Or noted Juliet Schor?).

A piss-poor thesis - and it was the first time he ventilated it as well.