I have a pet theory that Europeans attend services less often than Americans do -- even after adjusting for religious belief, affiliation, etc. -- because Europe for the most part lacks religious competition, and as a result their services are just more boring to the common man.
Intellectuals tend to be fascinated by the manifest antiquity of the Orthodox or TLM liturgy, but for the common man, they're so, so boring and so, so old. Intellectuals HATE the praise band aesthetic, and they're ambivalent at best towards the impassioned Baptist preacher, but both of those things put butts in the seats. And even churches in the US that don't have either of those things have to find a way to compete with churches that do, or perish.
Another theory (which could explain the east vs. west thing, and possibly Hungary) is that western Europeans have a history of the church being associated with and subserviant to the state. This would carry a lot of baggage.
In North America, most of our church history is fairly devout rather than cynical, in part because of the "separation of church and state" which was designed to protect the church from being corrupted by the state. Like anything, this policy has downsides but it seems to have mostly achieved its goal.
In the Roman Empire, church growth stopped its rapid rise only a few decades after Constantine made it the official religion. There are multiple reasons one could point to for this, but "connection with government made it lame" seems like a viable one.
I mostly agree with both you all's theories. As someone who spent my first 35 of my life living in Switzerland, I've often joked that people have a relationship to their church in the same way as to their local fire station: they're happy it's there, but hope they'll never need it. My theory is that in the context of a state church, religious freedom consisted of an inner distancing from the official religion - meaning 1. attending services begrudgingly (as long as that was socially required), 2. staying home (when this became the option), and finally 3. over the last two decades, step away from membership altogether, while in the U.S. religious freedom soon became associated with a choice between "flavors" of religious assemblies.
On East vs. West, I'd say a few things are going on:
1. Protestant vs. Catholic - State Protestant churches are the absolute worst form of church, and in many cases their leadership was already almost totally spiritually bankrupt by the Victorian Era (listen to the way Kierkegaard describes the Danish state church, for example). While the Roman Catholic Church has always had some corrupt clergy, it has also always had very sincere and pious clergy, along with periodic internal reform movements. It isn't as badly deformed by being state-backed as Protestantism is.
2. Prosperity - The US is an exception, but globally, wealth tends to have a negative effect on religiosity. Ireland was much more religious when it was poorer, but now that it's fully Western European in terms of income, it also looks Western European in terms of religiosity.
3. Communism - Communism tended to "freeze" social trends in place to some degree. Also the church's status as the one tolerated institution not controlled by the government instantly gave it credibility.
4. Migration of Pious Protestants - This is more speculative and another pet theory of mine, but a lot of the Western European Protestant migrants to the Americas were selected for piety, having sincere religious disagreements with the local, relatively corrupt authorities, and they passed this down among their descendants, leaving Protestant Europe less pious and America more pious. Catholic migrants were mainly motivated by economics and thus weren't noticeably more pious than their countrymen. The colony of Maryland is the prominent exception, but its numbers were small, and it ended up with a Protestant majority in short order.
You must have read Rodney Stark. This is similar to one of his big ideas - that religion prospers most when there is competition, and the lack of competition (and resulting complacency among the leaders and clergy) under Catholicism for so long prevented Christianity from ever really permeating deeply into the peasantry. Which helps explain all the folk religion that remained for so long.
No, I haven't, perhaps I should, but I suspect my father did, and we used to discuss the topic of Europe's civilizational exhaustion a lot growing up in the 1990s, from a lot of different angles. Since then, I've just been making my own observations and picking up bits here and there.
My understanding is the question of "how religious were the medieval peasants?" is still an open and debated one, as it's poorly documented. And there's probably no single answer when you're asking for a snapshot answer to describe the religious culture of a continent over the course of a millennium.
While I'm sure the medieval church was complacent, I also wonder how much capacity the church had to send learned men to teach doctrine in rural, illiterate villages. Could religious competition even make sense in such a context? Christianity was able to achieve grassroots success in the highly urbanized Roman Empire, which DID have religious competition, but I think it would have struggled to spread as fast in any society that looked more like Feudal Europe.
On the other hand, I recall a finding that villages located close to monasteries were more religious, and this effect lasted into modern times. So having educated religious men nearby certainly helped -- maybe they should have wandered more and cloistered less.
Another great post, especially for someone who lives here in the UK. I wonder what correlations can sensibly be made with rates of deconstruction in different western European nations? For example, it feels like the drop off in the Church of England has been much more precipitous than adherence to Catholicism.
This is a classic article that could be used as an exercise in an intro to Poly Sci class on measuring religions. It gives data on the three B's and has a variety of outcomes on those three B's without being overly sectarian or relying on a lot of the language that we've made more colloquial (Holy days vs seldom).
Your suspicion sort of makes sense -- the area was Christianized by the Teutonic Knights, roughly a century before they became Protestant and founded Prussia. But the territory was reclaimed by Poland-Lithuania in the meantime.
Meanwhile Sweden had a major presence in the Baltics for about 100 years, a smaller presence for longer than that, but yes, evidently not long enough to plant Lutheranism there, especially as after the 16th century, rulers had less influence on the religion of the populace.
Sweden ruled Finland for far longer than that, with a lot of migration, such that elites in the two countries were considerably intermingled, and the Lutheran religion traveled along with them.
Christianity in Eastern Europe is paradoxically strengthened by the woke insanity seen in Western media. Open depravity forced people living in a lukewarm version of Christianity to take a stand, which they did.
Even in the Czech Republic, where atheism is mainstream, when retail chain Lidl erased a cross in an advertising image of an old Greek building originally with a cross on top, people noticed it, and it caused a big public outrage, and they were forced to apologize.
Also, tolerance for "sexual diversity" propaganda has sharply dropped in recent years.
Is this really true? From all the data I've seen, the young people in Eastern Europe (outside Russia) admire Western Europe and are converging towards its liberal social views. Above all, in Poland. Though having an aging population means that it will take a while before the views of the young become dominant.
Your point makes sense in Russia, where it seems hostility towards the West for geopolitical/nationalistic reasons and hostility towards the West for cultural reasons (i.e. Woke) are increasingly intermingled. Though it doesn't seem this makes people go to church or proclaim the gospel, but it can make people *identify* with the church.
If we are talking about Gen Z, then you are right. They were born after the fall of communism (a godless regime, of course, but culturally conservative), and they never experienced the relatively still normal 80s.
They don't have experience with normal life, and that means they can't compare. All they know is liberal propaganda, which is openly hostile to any form of Christianity and calls it medieval.
This Gen Z is truly lost, and when they become the majority, then all is lost.
Disappointing there wasn’t more data about the Muslim faith, it has been slowing growing in Europe over the past few decades and is expected to grow in the future as well. I particularly like how you added the question about how religious people consider themselves though. A very key part of understanding religion in Europe.
For example, looking at the data one may see that Denmark has an official state religion, and as a percentage have a higher proportion of christians than the US. But anyone who has experienced both countries knows that Denmark is far more secular.
I think many in the United States who don’t have this outside context see much of politics as “non-believers” vs “Christianity”, when I think it’s more about just how intense a significant portion of American Christians are about their religious beliefs and how they permeate all areas of their lives.
Way outside the timescale of this discussion, or probably even Ryan's career, but it'll be extremely interesting to see if 2nd and 3rd generation Muslims in places like the UK deconstruct their faiths over the same timescale that has happened with Christians.
They're more like Catholics and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe who were assimilated into the Protestant and Restorationist faiths of the Anglo World
I’d be interested to see where the US would show up on these graphs as a barometer - not sure if there are US surveys that have asked the same questions, though.
Really interesting. Would have been great to know what percentage of Europeans are Muslim. Bosnia Herzegovina, which borders Croatia, is not mentioned here. It is mostly Muslim.
Bosnia has a plurality of Muslims at 42%, which is the same percentage of self identified Mormons or Latter Day Saints in Utah. Politically it is not one country with Republika Srpska or the Orthodox Serbs, the Federation of Muslims and Croatia (Muslim, Catholic), and Brčko Distrikt.
I have a pet theory that Europeans attend services less often than Americans do -- even after adjusting for religious belief, affiliation, etc. -- because Europe for the most part lacks religious competition, and as a result their services are just more boring to the common man.
Intellectuals tend to be fascinated by the manifest antiquity of the Orthodox or TLM liturgy, but for the common man, they're so, so boring and so, so old. Intellectuals HATE the praise band aesthetic, and they're ambivalent at best towards the impassioned Baptist preacher, but both of those things put butts in the seats. And even churches in the US that don't have either of those things have to find a way to compete with churches that do, or perish.
Another theory (which could explain the east vs. west thing, and possibly Hungary) is that western Europeans have a history of the church being associated with and subserviant to the state. This would carry a lot of baggage.
In North America, most of our church history is fairly devout rather than cynical, in part because of the "separation of church and state" which was designed to protect the church from being corrupted by the state. Like anything, this policy has downsides but it seems to have mostly achieved its goal.
In the Roman Empire, church growth stopped its rapid rise only a few decades after Constantine made it the official religion. There are multiple reasons one could point to for this, but "connection with government made it lame" seems like a viable one.
I suppose that might loop back to your theory.
I mostly agree with both you all's theories. As someone who spent my first 35 of my life living in Switzerland, I've often joked that people have a relationship to their church in the same way as to their local fire station: they're happy it's there, but hope they'll never need it. My theory is that in the context of a state church, religious freedom consisted of an inner distancing from the official religion - meaning 1. attending services begrudgingly (as long as that was socially required), 2. staying home (when this became the option), and finally 3. over the last two decades, step away from membership altogether, while in the U.S. religious freedom soon became associated with a choice between "flavors" of religious assemblies.
On East vs. West, I'd say a few things are going on:
1. Protestant vs. Catholic - State Protestant churches are the absolute worst form of church, and in many cases their leadership was already almost totally spiritually bankrupt by the Victorian Era (listen to the way Kierkegaard describes the Danish state church, for example). While the Roman Catholic Church has always had some corrupt clergy, it has also always had very sincere and pious clergy, along with periodic internal reform movements. It isn't as badly deformed by being state-backed as Protestantism is.
2. Prosperity - The US is an exception, but globally, wealth tends to have a negative effect on religiosity. Ireland was much more religious when it was poorer, but now that it's fully Western European in terms of income, it also looks Western European in terms of religiosity.
3. Communism - Communism tended to "freeze" social trends in place to some degree. Also the church's status as the one tolerated institution not controlled by the government instantly gave it credibility.
4. Migration of Pious Protestants - This is more speculative and another pet theory of mine, but a lot of the Western European Protestant migrants to the Americas were selected for piety, having sincere religious disagreements with the local, relatively corrupt authorities, and they passed this down among their descendants, leaving Protestant Europe less pious and America more pious. Catholic migrants were mainly motivated by economics and thus weren't noticeably more pious than their countrymen. The colony of Maryland is the prominent exception, but its numbers were small, and it ended up with a Protestant majority in short order.
Communism opened up eastern European countries for smaller challenger Restorationist faiths such as LDS, JWs, etc. but everything else I agree with
You must have read Rodney Stark. This is similar to one of his big ideas - that religion prospers most when there is competition, and the lack of competition (and resulting complacency among the leaders and clergy) under Catholicism for so long prevented Christianity from ever really permeating deeply into the peasantry. Which helps explain all the folk religion that remained for so long.
No, I haven't, perhaps I should, but I suspect my father did, and we used to discuss the topic of Europe's civilizational exhaustion a lot growing up in the 1990s, from a lot of different angles. Since then, I've just been making my own observations and picking up bits here and there.
My understanding is the question of "how religious were the medieval peasants?" is still an open and debated one, as it's poorly documented. And there's probably no single answer when you're asking for a snapshot answer to describe the religious culture of a continent over the course of a millennium.
While I'm sure the medieval church was complacent, I also wonder how much capacity the church had to send learned men to teach doctrine in rural, illiterate villages. Could religious competition even make sense in such a context? Christianity was able to achieve grassroots success in the highly urbanized Roman Empire, which DID have religious competition, but I think it would have struggled to spread as fast in any society that looked more like Feudal Europe.
On the other hand, I recall a finding that villages located close to monasteries were more religious, and this effect lasted into modern times. So having educated religious men nearby certainly helped -- maybe they should have wandered more and cloistered less.
Another great post, especially for someone who lives here in the UK. I wonder what correlations can sensibly be made with rates of deconstruction in different western European nations? For example, it feels like the drop off in the Church of England has been much more precipitous than adherence to Catholicism.
Croatians and Serbs believe religion is important but doesn't show up to church regularly.
This is a classic article that could be used as an exercise in an intro to Poly Sci class on measuring religions. It gives data on the three B's and has a variety of outcomes on those three B's without being overly sectarian or relying on a lot of the language that we've made more colloquial (Holy days vs seldom).
I always thought of Lithuania and the other Baltics as mostly Lutheran like Sweden and Finland. Obviously I thought wrong!
Latvia and Estonia are historically Lutheran countries, but Lithuania is historically Catholic.
I guess I'm wrong there -- and that apparently is a product of the Swedish influence and control.
Yes, that's a product of the Swedish influence.
Your suspicion sort of makes sense -- the area was Christianized by the Teutonic Knights, roughly a century before they became Protestant and founded Prussia. But the territory was reclaimed by Poland-Lithuania in the meantime.
Meanwhile Sweden had a major presence in the Baltics for about 100 years, a smaller presence for longer than that, but yes, evidently not long enough to plant Lutheranism there, especially as after the 16th century, rulers had less influence on the religion of the populace.
Sweden ruled Finland for far longer than that, with a lot of migration, such that elites in the two countries were considerably intermingled, and the Lutheran religion traveled along with them.
Christianity in Eastern Europe is paradoxically strengthened by the woke insanity seen in Western media. Open depravity forced people living in a lukewarm version of Christianity to take a stand, which they did.
Even in the Czech Republic, where atheism is mainstream, when retail chain Lidl erased a cross in an advertising image of an old Greek building originally with a cross on top, people noticed it, and it caused a big public outrage, and they were forced to apologize.
Also, tolerance for "sexual diversity" propaganda has sharply dropped in recent years.
Is this really true? From all the data I've seen, the young people in Eastern Europe (outside Russia) admire Western Europe and are converging towards its liberal social views. Above all, in Poland. Though having an aging population means that it will take a while before the views of the young become dominant.
Your point makes sense in Russia, where it seems hostility towards the West for geopolitical/nationalistic reasons and hostility towards the West for cultural reasons (i.e. Woke) are increasingly intermingled. Though it doesn't seem this makes people go to church or proclaim the gospel, but it can make people *identify* with the church.
If we are talking about Gen Z, then you are right. They were born after the fall of communism (a godless regime, of course, but culturally conservative), and they never experienced the relatively still normal 80s.
They don't have experience with normal life, and that means they can't compare. All they know is liberal propaganda, which is openly hostile to any form of Christianity and calls it medieval.
This Gen Z is truly lost, and when they become the majority, then all is lost.
Disappointing there wasn’t more data about the Muslim faith, it has been slowing growing in Europe over the past few decades and is expected to grow in the future as well. I particularly like how you added the question about how religious people consider themselves though. A very key part of understanding religion in Europe.
For example, looking at the data one may see that Denmark has an official state religion, and as a percentage have a higher proportion of christians than the US. But anyone who has experienced both countries knows that Denmark is far more secular.
I think many in the United States who don’t have this outside context see much of politics as “non-believers” vs “Christianity”, when I think it’s more about just how intense a significant portion of American Christians are about their religious beliefs and how they permeate all areas of their lives.
Way outside the timescale of this discussion, or probably even Ryan's career, but it'll be extremely interesting to see if 2nd and 3rd generation Muslims in places like the UK deconstruct their faiths over the same timescale that has happened with Christians.
They're more like Catholics and Jews from Eastern and Southern Europe who were assimilated into the Protestant and Restorationist faiths of the Anglo World
There's a book called Whiteshift I'd recommend on that
I’d be interested to see where the US would show up on these graphs as a barometer - not sure if there are US surveys that have asked the same questions, though.
Really interesting. Would have been great to know what percentage of Europeans are Muslim. Bosnia Herzegovina, which borders Croatia, is not mentioned here. It is mostly Muslim.
Switzerland 5%
United Kingdom 4.4%
Austria 3.5%
Norway 3%
Slovenia 3%
Netherlands 2.8%
Germany 2.5%
Croatia 1.4%
Ireland 1.3%
Finland .5%
Lithuania 0%
These are all the countries listed in the dataset.
Bosnia has a plurality of Muslims at 42%, which is the same percentage of self identified Mormons or Latter Day Saints in Utah. Politically it is not one country with Republika Srpska or the Orthodox Serbs, the Federation of Muslims and Croatia (Muslim, Catholic), and Brčko Distrikt.
"There are only two countries in this data set where weekly attendance is above 15% - Croatia at 19% and Ireland at 24%."
You missed one of the other "usual suspects" - Slovakia at a whopping 41%!
Just made that change, Ben. Thanks!
I would have loved to see that 19% in Croatia when. I lived there