Religion
The majority of residents are Roman Catholic, but there are Jewish and Protestants as well (mostly in Argentina and Chile). Religions include Islam, Anglican, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhism and Dao. Jewish communities have thrived in Argentina and Uruguay. A large proportion of the Argentine Jewish community emigrated to Israel in the aftermath of the Argentine economic crisis at the beginning of the 21st century.
While the Southern Cone has been conservative in some aspects of religion, it has had a tradition of social reform. Uruguay, where agnosticism and atheism is common, has a strong church and state separation policy. It is one of the most secular countries in the Americas. Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, in that order, are the least religious countries in South America. According to a Gallup poll, 51% of Uruguayans, 56% of Argentines, and 60% of Chileans think of religion as something important in their lives, contrasting with the higher values given by the residents of countries such as Brazil (87%), Bolivia (89%) and Paraguay (92%). The following percentages of residents in Uruguay (69%), Argentina (58%) and Chile (52%) think their countries are good places for gay or lesbian people to live. By contrast, lower percentages in the following countries agree with this: Bolivia (24%), Ecuador (31%) and Peru (32%).
Read more about this topic: Southern Cone
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“The religion of England is part of good-breeding. When you see on the continent the well-dressed Englishman come into his ambassador’s chapel and put his face for silent prayer into his smooth-brushed hat, you cannot help feeling how much national pride prays with him, and the religion of a gentleman.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the world-old, world-wide religio of amulets and holy places and priestcraft. Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes. Catholicism is accused of being too much like all the other religions; Protestantism of being insufficiently like a religion at all. Hence Plato, with his transcendent Forms, is the doctor of Protestants; Aristotle, with his immanent Forms, the doctor of Catholics.”
—C.S. (Clive Staples)
“I read ... an article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children to be skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)