One of the things about President Bush, and about America, that seems to bother Europeans most is their unabashed religiosity.

Europeans feel that references to God should be reserved for church occasions, not scattered through the purely laical business of the US as if God were a kind of senior partner in the enterprise of the nation.

They are embarrassed by the evangelical quality of religion in the US, I think, and particularly by the evangelical character of the religion US politicians seem to profess.

It is, they believe, a sign of stunted intellectual growth?a symbol of the lack of sophistication that they believe makes the US unfit for a role in world leadership.

It is a curious thing that the US, having sprung from Britain?s side, as it were, and having started on a more or less equal footing in the business of religiosity, should now be so markedly different from its parent.

But if you have the impression that it is the US that has changed and become more religious over the years, you?d be wrong.

It is Britain, and by extension, Europe, that has become markedly less religious than once was the case.

Marc Arkin, professor of law at Fordham University, recently wrote in The New Criterion that over 80 per cent of Americans say they believe in God, as distinct from only 62 per cent of the French and 52 per cent of Swedes.

About two-thirds of Americans claim to belong to a particular church. Forty per cent say they go to church once a week.

Three times as many people in the United States believe in the virgin birth as in evolution, he says.

These figures come from a survey. Whether they reflect reality or not is irrelevant.

The point is that the vast majority of Americans want to be seen as religious and think it unacceptable to be viewed otherwise, even by an anonymous poll taker.

This is hardly surprising, since 58 per cent of Americans, as opposed to only 13 per cent of the French and 25 per cent of the British, think it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral.

?At the end of the 19th Century, there were comparable levels of religiosity in Britain and the US,? according to Christie Davies, author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain.

?The British lived in a culture in which the assumptions of Protestant Christianity were taken for granted.

?Throughout the population there was a somewhat vague general acceptance of central Christian beliefs, a strong respect for sacred things, a liking for church-based rituals to mark the turning points in life (and particularly its ending), a moral code of helping others that was rooted in Christian ethics, and a liking for and ability to sing hymns, both of which had been learned in Sunday School. Even football crowds sang Abide with Me or Bread of Heaven; today, they sing songs full of thoughtless blasphemies, obscenities, and thought-out sexual and racial abuse to upset their opponents.

?Regular attendance at Sunday School was a standard part of most people?s youth, and it was the place where standards of respectability were inculcated. Britain?s was a society with a remarkably low and falling incidence of violent and acquisitive crime, illegitimacy, and addiction to opiates??

Davies suggests that the turnaround, the death of ?respectability? in Britain, paralleled a decline in attendance at Sunday Schools in Britain.

After the First World War, it declined slowly. After a brief revival in the 1950s, it collapsed totally. The period of those declines, as it happens, perfectly fits the rise of secular liberalism in Britain ? and in Europe, parts of which undoubtedly mirrored Britain?s experience.

It?s tempting to think that what the Churches have been saying, or some of them, at any rate, must be correct: the politics of homosexuality, abortion, and capital punishment have led to a rise in lawlessness.

But it is more complex than that. Behind those issues is one more fundamental ? the belief that an individual?s responsibility for his or her actions can be trumped by other factors ? a deprived upbringing, a lack of education, the lack of a clean environment, prejudice or any one of dozens of other sociological issues.

People these days believe they ought to be allowed to get away with things they once would have been penalised for.

They have a right to behave in ways other than ?respectable?.

There is a sense in Europe, where socialism has strong roots, and where class boundaries are strong, that this blurring of the boundaries between right and wrong is the only ?decent? way to behave towards the poor and the downtrodden, whether they be individuals or societies.

If only people would behave decently, Europe believes, the world would become a decent place.

In the US, too, the role that sociological issues play in an individual?s behaviour has altered the way America deals with its miscreants.

But the US has never allowed itself to believe in them too wholeheartedly, perhaps because the country?s religiosity holds Americans back from blurring the boundaries of right and wrong to the same extent as Europe does.

In addition, the porosity of class boundaries in the United States means that the well-off feel little guilt about their success, and therefore no need to atone for it, as people in Britain and elsewhere in Europe seem to want to, by excusing anti-social behaviour in others.

Americans also seem to have learned the lesson that letting people get away with things more often than not simply invites more of the same.

In the US, there is no confusion about whether the justice system should favour the criminal or the wrong-doer.

The US approach seems to work.

The International Criminal Victim Survey group, which works out of the Department of Justice in the Hague, produces an international statistical measure of ?victimisation?, which is the percentage of people victimised once or more in the previous year by any of eleven crimes covered by the survey.

This prevalence measure, the group says, is a simple but robust indicator of overall proneness to crime. The survey?s results in 2000, the last time it was done, show that the countries surveyed fall into three bands.

Britain was in the top band, that of countries in which more than 24 percent of the population had been victimised by crime.

The US was in the middle band, that of countries in which between 20 and 24 percent of the population had been victims of crime, and was markedly better than Britain in such areas as support for victims of crime and in police performance.

The lesson? Well, it may be a little hokey, but it?s true that morals are like art. They begin with the drawing of a line.

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