American Exceptionalism Subsides
The American-Western European Values Gap
In America, religion is considered important.
However, this religiosity is more about individual salvation than helping those in need.
From this individualistic worldview, Americans believe individuals control their own lives.
This individualism is extended to national isolationism where we believe in only helping our own country.
This individualism goes beyond moral principles and touches on a sense of selfish entitlement to interfere with others, even though we show little desire to actually help them.
American’s love individualism in all forms and have faith that individuals can solve their own problems (a convenient rationalization for a country that causes so much misery around the world and allows so much misery to continue in its own borders). Despite this individualism, actual data shows individual Americans have one of the lowest rates of social mobility in the developed world.
Marmalade 
Thank you for the data, Ben. While I knew this sort of intuitively, but its nice to have numbers.
Yeah, I knew this intuitively. I’m always looking at data like this, but this particular set of data seemed to bring it together in a very clear way. I didn’t think I even needed to say much. The data speaks for itself. I just wanted to connect it together in a way that clarifies the meaning.
From a superficial perspective, it makes no sense that Americans can simultaneously be religiously pious and obsessed with individualism, imperialist and isolationist. Putting it together, though, the data forms into a coherent even if hypocritical sense of national identity.