{"id":71696,"date":"2018-05-29T11:43:33","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T16:43:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/2018\/05\/29\/being-christian-in-western-europe\/"},"modified":"2024-06-12T16:59:58","modified_gmt":"2024-06-12T20:59:58","slug":"being-christian-in-western-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alpha.pewresearch.org\/pewresearch-org\/religion\/2018\/05\/29\/being-christian-in-western-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"Being Christian in Western Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

The majority of Europe\u2019s Christians are non-practicing, but they differ from religiously unaffiliated people in their views on God, attitudes toward Muslims and immigrants, and opinions about religion\u2019s role in society<\/h2>\n\n\n
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Western Europe, where Protestant Christianity originated and Catholicism has been based for most of its history, has become one of the world\u2019s most secular regions. Although the vast majority of adults say they were baptized, today many do not describe themselves as Christians. Some say they gradually drifted away from religion, stopped believing in religious teachings, or were alienated by scandals or church positions on social issues, according to a major new Pew Research Center survey of religious beliefs and practices in Western Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet most adults surveyed still do<\/em> consider themselves Christians, even if they seldom go to church. Indeed, the survey shows that non-practicing Christians (defined, for the purposes of this report, as people who identify as Christians, but attend church services no more than a few times per year) make up the biggest share of the population across the region. In every country except Italy, they are more numerous than church-attending Christians (those who go to religious services at least once a month). In the United Kingdom, for example, there are roughly three times as many non-practicing Christians (55%) as there are church-attending Christians (18%) defined this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Non-practicing Christians also outnumber the religiously unaffiliated population (people who identify as atheist, agnostic or \u201cnothing in particular,\u201d sometimes called the \u201cnones\u201d) in most of the countries surveyed.[1. To measure religious identity, the Pew Research Center survey asks: \u201cWhat is your present religion, if any? Are you Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else or nothing in particular?\u201d The wording of this question may result in more respondents giving a religious affiliation (saying they are Christian or Muslim, for example) than previous surveys in some countries, particularly if those surveys used what researchers call a \u201ctwo-step\u201d approach to religious identification. For example, the European Social Survey (ESS)<\/a> asks: \u201cDo you consider yourself as belonging to any particular religion or denomination?\u201d Only respondents who say \u201cyes\u201d to this first question are presented with a list of religions to choose from. The two-step approach tends to find smaller shares of people who say they are Christians (or belong to some other religious group) \u2013 and larger shares of people with no religion \u2013 than are found by surveys that use a one-step approach to religious identification, as Pew Research Center does. Both approaches are valid, though the results may differ. See the below sidebar<\/a> for more discussion of question wording and an analysis of ESS data on religious identity.] And, even after a recent surge in immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, there are many more non-practicing Christians in Western Europe than people of all other religions combined (Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These figures raise some obvious questions: What is the meaning of Christian identity in Western Europe today? And how different are non-practicing Christians from religiously unaffiliated Europeans \u2013 many of whom also come from Christian backgrounds?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Pew Research Center study \u2013 which involved more than 24,000 telephone  interviews with randomly selected adults, including nearly 12,000 non-practicing Christians \u2013 finds that Christian identity remains a meaningful marker in Western Europe, even among those who seldom go to church. It is not<\/em> just a \u201cnominal\u201d identity devoid of practical importance. On the contrary, the religious, political and cultural views of non-practicing Christians often differ from those of church-attending Christians and<\/em> religiously unaffiliated adults. For example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n