.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's actually a long-running theme in Mad Men - it is subtle in the earlier seasons but then becomes less so - which contrasts Don's religious feelings and sentiments (which are incoherent but intense, reflecting something of Depression-era evangelical revivalism in the places he grew up in) with those of the highly secularised milieu which he now inhabits and appears, on first glance, to reflect entirely himself.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

On the wider issue here I do wonder if there's something to Andrew's observation about the existence in the United States of a parallel 'Christian' (by which we actually mean Evangelical) media, watched by people who mostly do not watch mainstream media and never watched by anyone outside the target demographic. It's easy to see how the existence of such a thing - and for such a long time as well - could have a 'pillarising' and polarising effect. This is a significant contrast with broadcasting culture in most European and other 'Western' countries where the tendency has traditionally been to try to cover all bases, particularly from the various large public broadcasters.* It might also explain some the odd tendency in so much of mainstream American cultural output to conflate organised Christianity as anything other than a basically alien antagonist with Catholicism.

_{*Except, of course, for 'pillarised' societies in the post-war and Cold War decades - Italy, the Netherlands and so on.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's fairly obviously a 'corrected' error, yes. There actually was a substantial Norwegian community in Bay Ridge in the 1960s, so giving Peggy Norwegian heritage was clearly not a random decision. At a guess they then decided that she should be Catholic as all (non-Jewish) White Ethnics in South Brooklyn at the time were, right? And that by the time they realised the error it was too late to backtrack entirely. Of course nothing could be done about the other error: if she's Norwegian it should be Olsen not Olson (which would be Swedish), but I suppose that one could be put down to the garbling of non-Anglophone surnames by officialdom that was so common once. And some Olsens did change their name to Olson, including this forum's Problematic Fave Floyd B. Olson.