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NancyLebovitz comments on A few questions on International Rationality - Less Wrong
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Americans being more willing to be weird could explain both rationality as a project and religiosity.
But in what way is being religious considered 'weird' in the US?
Actually, it depends on which religion and where you are. Any new religion (or new variant on a religion, and that happens a lot) is going to be considered weird.
Also, a person's amount of religiousness can easily be considered weird.
Hare Krishna? Shakers? Mormons? Hasidic Jews? America mostly tolerated these religions, but the neighbors still considered them weird.
This is the best answer I've seen so far. At the risk of losing karma, I'll point out nevertheless that America is the land of libertarian individualism like no other, which in my opinion explains everything.
What reason do you have to believe we're more inclined to weirdness?
It was a commonality between rationality as a project and religiosity. I was intending a very weak form of "could explain".
What I actually believe is that Americans have a default of "doing something". Thinking about whether the something makes sense is permitted but optional.
The fact that Americans are almost entirely descended from people who decided to uproot themselves and move to a foreign country where they don't have the same institutions, culture, or friends.
This is pretty not normal.
This assumes a large genetic aspect of being "weird".
Not necessarily, this was recent enough that it could be cultural.
Not unreasonable. Eg personality traits like openness have a decent heritability and are closely related to weirdness.
"Weirdness" is closely related to a high score in the psychological trait openness in the big5.
According to this meta-analysis the correlations between religiosity and openness are somewhat mixed:
"Weirdness" is in the mind of the beholder.
Also, I bet they didn't check the openness level of people who start or join new religions-- such people are pretty rare, but they're the ones who keep the religious landscape lively.
I was assuming you meant something like "willing to go against the dominant norms in one's society" by it, which is close related to Openness.
I'd expect those people joining/starting new religions to be more open, thus the operalization of your hypothesis in terms of big5-Openness. There should probably be studies on smaller religions, such as new age, which might aptly be called new.