Buddhism And The State

China and Korea, at least, do not have a tradition of separation of church and state when it comes to Buddhism (which, notably arrived in this region long after Confucianism became a defining and state sponsored ideology). The Buddhist reliance on state support also helps to explain its fall in these places.

Again, as was also the case in so many Buddhist countries, the success of Buddhism relied heavily on its connections to the court. In Korea, the tradition of “state protection Buddhism” was inherited from China. Here, monarchs would build and support monasteries and temples, where monks would perform rituals and chant sutras intended to both secure the well-being of the royal family, in this life and the next, and protect the kingdom from danger, especially foreign invasion.

…As in China, the Korean sangha remained under the control of the state; offerings to monasteries could only be made with the approval of the throne; men could only become monks on “ordination platforms” approved by the throne; and an examination system was established that placed monks in the state bureaucracy. As in other Buddhist lands, monks were not those who had renounced the world but were vassals of the king, with monks sometimes dispatched to China by royal decree. With strong royal patronage, Buddhism continued to thrive through the Koryo period (935-1392), with monasteries being granted their own lands and serfs, accumulating great wealth in the process.

From Donald S. Lopez, Jr., "Buddhism: A Journey through History" (2025).

Education And Church Attendance In The U.S. And In Europe

The relationship between education and church attendance in the U.S. is the opposite of what you would expect in the U.S. according to data in this blog post. 

In the U.S., more education corresponds to more church attendance (New Hampshire, Maine, and Wyoming are exceptions to that trend and a number of states seem to be bimodal with the least and most educated people both attending church at higher rates), while in Europe (except for the formerly Communist Lithuania and Slovakia) more education corresponds to less church attendance (although the least religious countries like Finland, France, Germany,  Hungary and Iceland, are quite flat and the education-church attendance relationship basically breaks down).

I don't think that this means that more educated people in the U.S. are more religious, however.  

Rather, I think that it means that more educated people who are religious are much more diligent in attending church regularly as their religion dictates (in part because they have more time to devote to church attendance), than less educated people who are religious but not very diligent. As one comment to the post notes, free time to spend on anything but working, eating, sleeping, and the basic needs of your household is increasingly a luxury good.

There is solid evidence (for example from Pew) that more educated American are less religious in terms of belief and the importance of religion in their lives (although the magnitude of this difference isn't as big as one might intuitively expect), but this isn't necessarily inconsistent with higher religious attendance by more educated people, if more educated people who are religious attend church more regularly than less educated people who are religious.

Also, there is evidence that students and college graduates of more elite institutions are much more secular than college graduates of less elite institutions.

To the extent that Pew and the U.S. survey cited in the blog post are at odds, however, Pew is more credible and has a long track record of accurate data in this area. 

Also, it is worth noting that a variety of measures have shown that reported church attendance in the U.S. is much higher than the levels of actual church attendance. See, e.g., here and here. So, survey data on church attendance may not be the most accurate measure of actual behavior. 

I also don't give much credit to an anecdotal evidence based book pointing to a religious revival among Gen Z people in the U.K., which does more to capture the changing flavor of religiosity among the minority of young people there who are religious, than capture of growing rate of religious affiliation among British youth. 

I also suspect that there is a generational factor. The trend towards more secularism in Europe is 30-40 years older than it is in the U.S. So, older educated Europeans are much more secular than older educated Americans, an effect which may swamp differences in rates of secularization among younger people by level of education. Further, education levels rose sooner in the U.S. than they did in Europe, so in Europe, education level is a better proxy for age than in the U.S.

It is also worth noting that the European data breaks out far more detail among non-college graduates and among non-high school graduates. In part, this reflects larger numbers of immigrants to Europe with very low levels of formal education, and immigrants, in general, tend to be more religious (because religion thrives when it defends a threatened culture). Apart from people who didn't graduate from high school, the European data is quite flat.

U.S. Data

European Data

How Should The U.S. Military Be Organized?

Background

The U.S. military is primarily divided into five services: the Army, the Air Force (which was split off from the Army after World War II), the Space Force (which was split off from the Air Force during Trump's first term), the Navy, and the Marines (which are a separate military service within the Department of the Navy). 

Each of these services has (or will have once it is set up, in the case of the Space Force) a reserve component that consists mostly of recently retired active duty service members who train on a part-time basis and can be called up to serve if there is a shortage of active duty personnel.

In addition to the federally operated reserves for each service, each U.S. state has an Army National Guard and an Air Force National Guard, staffed mostly by part-time citizen soldiers (the normal obligation is one weekend a month and one week a year, when not called up for an emergency). Normally, these forces report to the state governor and are called up for disaster relief and to deal with potential "insurrections" and civil unrest, for example, to enforce court orders that local civilian law enforcement is disregarding in an organized resistance. The national guard can also be called up to serve by the President as basically temporary active duty military service members when needed.

In addition, a sixth service, the Coast Guard, which used to be part of the Department of Transportation and is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, is a civilian law enforcement and first responder organization in peace time, can be placed under the command of the Navy in wartime and is organized in a paramilitary fashion.

There are also several independent agencies, some within the Department of Defense, and some outside it, that have national security duties. These include the NSA (which handles electronic surveillance and code breaking), the NRO (which handles spy satellites), the CIA (which gathers and analyzes covert and open source intelligence for both foreign policy and military purposes and also conducts covert military-style operations), DARPA (which does bleeding edge research and development for the military that isn't immediately actionable in a specific procurement project), the Selective Service system (which keeps the infrastructure in place to conscript new soldiers if Congress decides to do so), and more.

Observations

One of the problems with the status quo is that coordination between military services has to be arranged at a very high level of the Department of Defense bureaucracy, which creates bureaucratic friction in arranging joint exercises that use the resources of multiple services acting together in the same military operation, and discourages individual services from prioritizing the support that they provide to other military services in their resource allocation and procurement and military equipment systems development.

For example, the Air Force is supposed to be in charge of providing air support and logistics support to the Army, but it tends to deprioritize these missions in favor of air to air fighters designed to secure air superiority and long range bombers. The Army meanwhile, since it is allowed to have helicopters, pushes helicopters into transport and close air support missions even when fixed wing aircraft would have been better suited to those missions, because it wants to control the air power upon which its units rely.

Similarly, the Navy is responsible for delivering Army soldiers to war on transport ships and for providing fire support for Army and Marine soldiers from sea. But it has tended to neglect these missions (and more generally littoral operations) in favor of building up its blue sea surface and submarine fleet. Unlike the Army, however, the Navy and Marine Corps have been allowed to have fixed wing aircraft under their own command and control, and have, as a result, keep their use of helicopters mostly restricted to missions where they are actually preferable to fixed wing aircraft.

The U.S. military has tended to treat the national guard is just a second layer of reserve military force rather than seeing it as its own division of the military with its own distinct purpose that calls for different kinds of training, military equipment, and tactics.

The current structure also creates an incentive for each of the military services to focus its force design on engaging with the most capable "peer" and "near peer" military adversaries that require the most advanced and powerful military weapons and vehicles without regard to cost-effectiveness, because these kinds of conflicts amount of existential threats in which money is no object.

As a result, the U.S. military is ill designed to engage military adversaries less capable than "near peers" in a way that isn't expensive overkill. It can win this engagements, but at a price that makes fighting them so unsustainable that it puts pressure on leaders to abandon them. 

Among the sub-near peer adversaries and missions that the U.S. military is ill suited to engage in a cost effectively are counter-insurgency missions where the insurgents have limited access to military grade weapons other than small arms, anti-piracy missions, interdiction and anti-smuggling missions, peace keeping, intercepting a handful of rogue aircraft (short of an invasion with large numbers of military aircraft) in U.S. airspace, and humanitarian relief missions following disasters. Yet, a significant share of the missions that the U.S. military has historically been called upon to perform fit in these categories.

Proposal

* The Army National Guard, Air Force National Guard, and Coast Guard should be recognized as a separate military service that is focused upon homeland defense and emergency response, and should be called up into active duty service abroad only when the capabilities developed for those roles are needed.

Thus, the Army National Guard should be weighted more heavily towards air defense and drone defense, should have specialized equipment tailored to emergency response in low to moderate threat environments, and should largely divest itself of tanks and artillery. The Air Force National Guard shouldn't have bomber aircraft that have no appropriate mission within the U.S., should have cost effective non-stealth, fast but sub-sonic, lightly armed fighters to intercept rogue aircraft, and should increase its investment in search and rescue and transport and fire fighting aircraft. The Coast Guard should have resources for defending the U.S. from a coastal invasion (including diesel-electric coastal submarines), and the Army and Air Force National Guards in border states should have resources calibrated to land invasions from Canada and Mexico.

The final tier of the missile defense "golden dome" system that has been proposed designed to intercept income missiles and drones once they have gotten close to U.S. territory should also be a national guard function.

The Army Corps of Engineers might also be fruitfully relocated to this service.

* The U.S. nuclear weapons force intended as a deterrent force, made up of U.S. ballistic missile submarines, U.S. nuclear weapon carrying aircraft, and ground based nuclear weapons, should be part of a separate "strategic defense service", which is also responsible for intercepting incoming long range missile attacks near the point of launch and in mid-flight.

The remainder of the U.S. military should be divided into two services. 

* One military service would be devoted to addressing military confrontations with "peer" and "near peer" countries like China and Russia and Iran and North Korea with advanced, expensive, military grade weapons, including surface combatant ships, attack submarines, advanced fighter and bomber aircraft, and heavy army weapons. 

This would allow better coordination of resources that is discouraged by inter-service rivalries and lack of communication, such as balancing anti-ship and anti-submarine warfare missions between fixed wing aircraft historically in the Air Force (which are currently under utilized for that mission), surface combatants, submarines, and intermediate and long range missiles deployed by ground forces in the Army and Marines. It would also elevate the importance of missions to transport troops and their supplies. 

* The other military service would be devoted to proportionately and efficiently addressing sub-near peer military conflicts like counterinsurgency missions, peace keeping, anti-piracy missions, anti-smuggling operations abroad interdicting merchant grade ships trying to bust embargoes and international sanctions, embassy defense, evacuations of U.S. nationals and allies from areas were warfare has broken out in which the U.S. is not a party, and wars with countries that lack advanced military capabilities (like many countries in Latin America and Africa). This force would have a very different set of aircraft, ships, military ground vehicles, force design, and training.

* There would also be a paramilitary service, perhaps officially housed in the Department of State rather than the Department of Defense, that would be in charge of international relief missions that might have units specialized in disaster response, search and rescue, oil spill response, providing relief aid, setting up emergency shelters, deploying mobile field hospitals, and so on.

Team Death

In the "they didn't teach us this in law school" department:

One of the things my job requires on a regular basis is talking with clients about death and grievous disabilities and injuries. This is something that makes most people uncomfortable and is very unfamiliar for people who aren't "Team Death" professionals (a group that includes estate planning and probate lawyers, funeral home directors, cemetery officials, clergy, grief counselors, hospice nurses, corners, bank trust department officers, life insurance sales people, financial planners, actuaries, Social Security bureaucrats, many florists, many kinds of doctors, and many CPAs).

It takes many years to find ways to do that which communicates to people what they need to hear and understand, without being too socially uncomfortable. Ordinary etiquette discourages discussing these possibilities at all. It can be depressing and many of us superstitiously just don't want to "tempt fate."

It is almost a whole philosophy and way of thinking, starting with recognizing that death will eventually happen to everyone, that most people experience serious disabilities and injuries at some point in their lives, and that life frequently presents people with surprising tragedies and unexpected triumphs of survival. Someone who seems fine and healthy today can die tomorrow, while someone who seemed to have only a few months to live can sometimes hold on for another decade or more.