How Religious is Europe?

According to data from 13 countries, not very.

Well, there may have been some kind of internet controversy this last week involving France, the Olympics and religion. The French are hosting the Summer Olympic games this year and the opening ceremony is always a huge spectacle that is watched by hundreds of millions of people around the globe.

The ceremony this time lasted four hours and included a number of drag queens playing prominent roles in the festivities. There was a specific scene in which the drag queens were arranged behind a table in a configuration that looked quite a bit like the scene from Leonardo da Vinci's famous The Last Supper. Amid the backlash, the organizers of the event publicly apologized for the display stating, “Clearly there was never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group.”

I tweeted about it - noting that the French are not really religious. Just 8% of them report weekly religious attendance. That then got quote tweeted by the Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox who noted that folks shouldn’t expect to see ‘a mockery of a sacred event’ when his home state hosts the Winter Games in 2034. So, that was fun to be a bit player in the news cycle for a little bit.

But, that got me wondering - is there a more recent dataset of European religion that I haven’t analyzed yet. And the answer is yes! There is one - the European Social Survey (ESS). They just released data from a survey wave that was administered in 2023 and 2024. It’s not all of Europe, just thirteen countries. It doesn’t include France, but it does have a nice representation from Western Europe, Scandinavia, and a few Eastern European countries thrown in there. And it asks a bunch of questions about religion.

Let’s start with religious composition first. I sorted this graph in descending order from most Protestant/Catholic countries to the least.

The Eastern European countries are clearly the most religious from this vantage point. About 70% of Slovaks are Christians. It’s the same share of Croatians and two-thirds of Lithuanians. But, I have to point out the fact that almost all the Christians in Eastern Europe are Catholics - there are almost no Protestants in the sample in Slovakia, Croatia, and Lithuania. But that’s also true in Hungary, Austria, and Slovenia too. Eastern Europe is primarily Catholic.

When you focus on European countries that are further to the West, the composition changes pretty significantly. For instance, there are almost no Finnish Catholics and the same is largely true in Norway, too. There are a handful of countries where there’s a decent mix - in Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, one is just as likely to encounter a Protestant as they were to bump into a Catholic.

Which countries have the largest concentrations of non-religious respondents? The Netherlands is at the top of the heap here - 71% are nones. They are followed by Norway at 63% and the United Kingdom at 57%. There are several clustered right around 50% nones - Switzerland, Germany, and Finland. The United States is about 30% nones and there are a number of countries in this dataset that are close to this - Hungary, Ireland, Austria, are all pretty similar in this regard.

But it’s pretty clear how Eastern Europe is much different than the rest of the continent when it comes to religious composition.

Here’s a fun little follow up to the prior graph - for those who said that they didn’t belong to a religious tradition, they were asked if they had ever belonged to a faith group. So, what that means is we can figure out what portion of these countries have been never religious compared to those who left faith behind.

This graph points to a pretty startling conclusion - in Western Europe, secularization is something that happened during the last fifty or so years. For instance, among the Irish, a majority of people who are currently non-religious indicated that they were religious at one point in their life. It was half of Austrian nones, as well. In other words, in these countries, at least half the nones deconverted in their lifetimes. This is not generational non-religion. It’s a very recent happening.

Now, that’s not the case in Eastern Europe, though. Remember that a lot of those countries have a fairly small share who identify as non-religious (about 30% in many countries). But, here’s what is fascinating - among the nones in those places the vast majority grew up in non-religious households. That’s true in Hungary, Slovakia, Lithuania, Croatia, and Slovenia. I am absolutely in no way a learned man in Eastern European politics and religion but I am going to guess that this is the long tail of communism.

Here’s another look at this data - folks were asked to indicate how religious they were on a scale from zero (not religious at all) to ten (very religious). I thought it would be most helpful to visualize this in a ridgeline plot. The vertical bars in each plot indicate the mean score for every country. I organized this plot in terms of most religious at the top and least religious at the bottom based on the mean.

The mean score for the entire sample was 4.4 out of 10. So, the average European puts themselves below average on this metric. Again, that same pattern emerges - Eastern European countries are clustered around the top of the graph, while countries in the West can be found in the bottom. The mean score for Slovakia was the highest at 6/10 on this scale. Croatia was next at 5.6, followed by Lithuania at 5.2 and Ireland at 5. There was no other country that scored above a five.

There were five countries who put themselves below the mean. Norway was the absolute lowest at 3.2. The United Kingdom was next at 3.4. This was followed by the Netherlands at 3.8, Germany at 3.9, and Hungary at 4.3. Hungary is really intriguing to me when you consider this result against the first graph. Just a third of Hungarians say that they have no religious affiliation, while nearly two-thirds are Protestant or Catholic. But they score very low on religious importance. That tells me that religion for Hungarians is more about cultural identity than personal piety.

Let me simplify this graph just a bit, though. I calculated two things - the share of each country that answered each question with zero (religion is not important at all) and ten (religious is very important). It really brings the picture into a sharper focus.

There are a total of two countries where the ‘very religious’ share is clearly larger than the ‘not religious at all’ percentage - Croatia and Slovakia. That’s been a constant through line here - those two are easily the most religious countries in this dataset.

There are a whole bunch of countries where the ‘not at alls’ are many times larger than the ‘very religious’ bunch. For instance, there are about six times as many not religious Germans as very religious ones. It’s four to one in Hungary and two to one in Ireland. Norway may take the prize as the least religious based on this graph - while 26% of Norwegians say religion is ‘not at all important’, it’s really hard to find a devout person in that country. Just 2% say religion is very important. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands aren’t far behind, though.

What about religious attendance? These categories are certainly not what I’m used to when dealing with surveys in the United States, but I can only work with what I have.

Among the Dutch, about seven in ten report never attending religious services. That is, far and away, the highest percentage of any of these thirteen countries. But what is interesting is that 10% of the Netherlands reports weekly attendance. That’s in line with a bunch of other countries in the data. So, it’s just the never attenders who are way out of spec in the Netherlands.

Speaking of weekly attendance, what is really going to stick with me from this data analysis is how low religious behavior is among Europeans. There are only three countries in this data set where weekly attendance is above 15% - Croatia at 19%, Ireland at 24%, and Slovakia at 41%. The vast majority of countries fall in the 5-10% range. While a lot of countries look fairly religious in the first graph (religious tradition), very few of them score anywhere close to the United States when it comes to religious behavior.

One more graph before I wrap this up - it’s frequency of prayer outside of religious services.

This graph looks very similar to the one above - the usual suspects land up top: Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom. But I do want to point out again how the Dutch have a huge portion of folks who are completely non-religious but they do have a decent percentage who are really devout. Nearly one in five Dutch people report praying every day. That’s higher than most other countries in the dataset. It seems like a very bimodal country (albeit tilted heavily toward the secular pole).

But prayer is just not the prevalent anywhere in Europe. According to the 2022-2023 Cooperative Election Study, about 40% of Americans say that they pray at least once a day. None of the thirteen countries in this dataset hit that benchmark, even the most religious ones like Croatia, Slovakia or Ireland. In the entire sample, about 40% of Europeans report never praying - that’s double the rate of the United States.

This group of graphs is fun because I started off with one conclusion: a lot of Europe seems to be pretty religious based on questions about religious affiliation. While the last set of graphs that focus on religious behavior come to a completely different conclusion - the average American is much more religious than the average European. And that’s even true in a region that seems to be more religious, like Eastern Europe.

Code for this post can be found here.