Thank you, Lilly Endowment, for allowing many of Ryan Burge’s post to be public. His analysis provides meaningful insights on important trends in religion.
Ryan, thank you (and the Lilly Endowment) for this post, but I think it would be illuminating in the future if you could include the US on these sorts of charts for quick comparison.
I've always found the lower religiosity of countries like Australia and Canada to be fascinating, since they would seem to be the closest cultural peers to the US, as fellow Anglo settler societies. My theory is that because religious migrants played a much larger role in early American history, this effect has reverberated through the centuries. In addition, for perhaps somewhat US-specific reasons, a less centralized and more competitive religious environment emerged in the US (see "The Democratization of American Christianity", by Hatch), resulting in Christianity here displaying greater adaptability to modernity and to the circumstances of the New World than in the other Anglo settler societies.
I would be cautious about cross-cultural readings of those categories, especially non-Abrahamic responses in the broader Sinosphere, for which I would recommend (if you, Ryan, have not already read it, which you probably have) Pew's 2024
The only East Asian country I have any meaningful experience with is Japan: I have never lived there, and at best I spoke the language like a precocious first grader, but I have spent a reasonable amount of time working there - on the other hand, my exposure was almost entirely in relatively large cities: I think I only ever spent one day where I never saw another person of European phenotype; I strongly imagine the more rural or lesser tier cities are more religiously conservative.
Still, I'd take the reported 33% of Japanese for whom religion is somewhat or very important as not necessarily commensurable with people in majority Abrahamic or Hindu cultures answering the same question.
I'd be fascinated to see you extend your graphs for Taiwan, where the plateauing of growth in Christian identification at rather lower levels than South Korea has always struck me as worthy of somebody's sociology of religion master's or doctoral thesis (obviously there's a huge amount of very different history there, notably strong Methodist support for Korean cultural development and independence during Korea's meta-colonial period).
hi Ryan. For an Australian these data are both stunning and not surprising. I wonder if you can break down responses by sex/gender? There is evidence from Australian studies that women are turning away from institutional religion at rates much faster than men. A second point worth noting in the Australian context is that nearly one-third of school-aged Australians attend a religious educational institution. Many of these educational institutions are operated by conservative leaning religious bodies, with the Catholic church the largest (educating about 20-25% of young people). So it's interesting that religion remains so "meaning-less" to young and parent-aged Australians given this educational context. In addition, a large proportion of Australians interact every day with religiously-affiliated public services in health, welfare and aged care. Australia has among the highest level of religiously-affiliated, government-funded public service sectors of any comparable nation. One last point: it seems consistent with your data that in Australia the number of weddings and funerals being performed by or in churches has steeply declined in recent years.
I'm a 68 year old Australian, and the data looks plausible to me. Australia was never a very religious place, but until the 1970s religion still played a significant public role. Most things were closed on Sundays, and there was a sharp political and cultural division between Catholics and Protestants. That disappeared quite rapidly with the arrival of some modernising state and federal governments. By 1980, religion was mostly unimportant, something that shows up in the data/
Still, most people maintained a nominal adherence to the church of their childhood, which has gradually eroded over time.
Arguably Singapore isn't comparable to other countries. It's basically one city and its metro area. Sort of like treating the District of Columbia as a state.
Thank you for the insights provided here. Do you have any data from African and South American countries? As immigration from these continents to North America and parts of Europe continues to increase, I'm curious about the impact on religious belief and participation.
Thank you, Lilly Endowment, for allowing many of Ryan Burge’s post to be public. His analysis provides meaningful insights on important trends in religion.
Ryan, thank you (and the Lilly Endowment) for this post, but I think it would be illuminating in the future if you could include the US on these sorts of charts for quick comparison.
I've always found the lower religiosity of countries like Australia and Canada to be fascinating, since they would seem to be the closest cultural peers to the US, as fellow Anglo settler societies. My theory is that because religious migrants played a much larger role in early American history, this effect has reverberated through the centuries. In addition, for perhaps somewhat US-specific reasons, a less centralized and more competitive religious environment emerged in the US (see "The Democratization of American Christianity", by Hatch), resulting in Christianity here displaying greater adaptability to modernity and to the circumstances of the New World than in the other Anglo settler societies.
I would be cautious about cross-cultural readings of those categories, especially non-Abrahamic responses in the broader Sinosphere, for which I would recommend (if you, Ryan, have not already read it, which you probably have) Pew's 2024
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2024/06/17/religion-and-spirituality-in-east-asian-societies/
The only East Asian country I have any meaningful experience with is Japan: I have never lived there, and at best I spoke the language like a precocious first grader, but I have spent a reasonable amount of time working there - on the other hand, my exposure was almost entirely in relatively large cities: I think I only ever spent one day where I never saw another person of European phenotype; I strongly imagine the more rural or lesser tier cities are more religiously conservative.
Still, I'd take the reported 33% of Japanese for whom religion is somewhat or very important as not necessarily commensurable with people in majority Abrahamic or Hindu cultures answering the same question.
I'd be fascinated to see you extend your graphs for Taiwan, where the plateauing of growth in Christian identification at rather lower levels than South Korea has always struck me as worthy of somebody's sociology of religion master's or doctoral thesis (obviously there's a huge amount of very different history there, notably strong Methodist support for Korean cultural development and independence during Korea's meta-colonial period).
According to the 2021 national census in Poland 71.3% of people declared themselves Catholics
hi Ryan. For an Australian these data are both stunning and not surprising. I wonder if you can break down responses by sex/gender? There is evidence from Australian studies that women are turning away from institutional religion at rates much faster than men. A second point worth noting in the Australian context is that nearly one-third of school-aged Australians attend a religious educational institution. Many of these educational institutions are operated by conservative leaning religious bodies, with the Catholic church the largest (educating about 20-25% of young people). So it's interesting that religion remains so "meaning-less" to young and parent-aged Australians given this educational context. In addition, a large proportion of Australians interact every day with religiously-affiliated public services in health, welfare and aged care. Australia has among the highest level of religiously-affiliated, government-funded public service sectors of any comparable nation. One last point: it seems consistent with your data that in Australia the number of weddings and funerals being performed by or in churches has steeply declined in recent years.
I'm a 68 year old Australian, and the data looks plausible to me. Australia was never a very religious place, but until the 1970s religion still played a significant public role. Most things were closed on Sundays, and there was a sharp political and cultural division between Catholics and Protestants. That disappeared quite rapidly with the arrival of some modernising state and federal governments. By 1980, religion was mostly unimportant, something that shows up in the data/
Still, most people maintained a nominal adherence to the church of their childhood, which has gradually eroded over time.
Arguably Singapore isn't comparable to other countries. It's basically one city and its metro area. Sort of like treating the District of Columbia as a state.
Thank you for the insights provided here. Do you have any data from African and South American countries? As immigration from these continents to North America and parts of Europe continues to increase, I'm curious about the impact on religious belief and participation.