How Secular Is Europe Compared To The United States?
(ANALYSIS) I don’t write a lot of posts about Europe. It’s just not an area of the world I know a lot about — in fact, I have never even visited the continent.
The other reason I usually stick with the United States is that it’s just an outlier compared to other developed countries on Earth. It’s got this very odd combination of very high gross domestic product and a very large share of people who say that religion is important to their lives.
That’s pretty atypical compared to most of the rest of the word. The norm is poor and religious or wealthy and secular. For more about that, I recommend reading Chapter 2 of “The Nones,” which has an expanded section about the nuances of secularization theory.
The purpose of this post is to give readers some data visualizations at just how the religiosity of Europe compares to the United States. The best data I can find about what’s going on across the pond is the European Social Survey. It’s a great resource, but it’s only been around for about 20 years, so it can’t be used for really long-term trends. For comparison, the General Social Survey in the United States has been collecting data since 1972.
Let’s start by looking at the religious service attendance of 29 countries in Europe. I am including every country that shows up in the ESS, but some are just missing for reasons that I couldn’t quickly figure out when skimming the codebook.
There are obviously some pretty significant variations in religious attendance across the continent. The first thing that jumped out to me was just how irreligious the Scandanavian countries are compared to the rest of Europe. Less than 1 in 20 Swedes or Norwegians attend religious services once a week. When social scientists refer to a country as secular, this what they are talking about. Religion is just not a consideration for most people in this part of Europe.
Countries like Germany, Belgium and France are not far behind, either. Somewhere between 5% and 10% of the population are regular attenders. Attendance is a bit higher on the Iberian Peninsula and in Austria, Slovenia and Croatia, at 10-25%. Where is religion the highest? Ireland, Italy, Poland and Slovakia. In each country, at least a quarter of the population reports weekly attendance or more.
How do countries in Europe compare to individual states in the U.S., however? That’s where things get very interesting, and some of the comparisons are pretty notable.
Poland has a higher level of religious attendance than any state in the United States, at 44% attending weekly. The closest state is Utah, where 41% attend weekly. Slovakia is as religious as Arkansas. Then there’s a big gap of just states in the U.S.
The closest comparisons for Ireland, Italy and Portugal are Virginia, Maryland and Illinois. In each case, about a quarter are weekly attenders. But at the end of the day, Europe is much less religious. There are 20 countries in Europe that have lower attendance rates than any state in the United States.
Overall, about a quarter of Americans indicate on surveys that they attend religious services weekly. That’s 11 percentage points higher than their European counterparts. There are only two states in the United States where attendance is lower than the European average: Maine at 13% and New Hampshire at 12%.
The countries in Europe that are more likely to attend religious services than the American average are Poland, Slovakia, Cyprus, Ireland and Italy. The rest have attendance rates that are much lower than the overall American attendance mark.
I can add one other variable to this mix, though. Pew compiled data on a bunch of countries around the world regarding the share who say that religion is very important to their lives. The Cooperative Election Study also asks that question for the United States. I made a scatterplot of the religious attendance variable and the religious importance variable. The size of the points represents the overall population of each country/state as well.
It should come as no surprise that a lot of European countries are on the bottom left of the graph, which represents low attendance and low importance, while American states are in the top right with high attendance and high importance.
I think this is a great case study into why visualizing data can be really valuable in understanding relationships, though. For the United States, the correlation between these two variables is very strong, and there aren’t that many outliers, really. Maybe Utah and Mississippi are off the trend line a bit too much. But that’s really it.
There are several European countries that are just huge statistical outliers. For instance, weekly attendance in Poland is 44%. If they were on the trend line, then close to 60% of Poles should say that religion is very important. Instead, it’s just 30%. There are other countries that see that same basic pattern for outlier status: Slovakia, Ireland, and Italy most notably. Their religious importance share is just too low compared to their attendance metrics.
Then, Croatia and Serbia are above the trend line in the opposite direction. Both those countries seem to value the idea of religion much more than they value actual religious attendance.
I must profess my own lack of knowledge about why these countries are outliers in both directions. I am not an expert in anything beyond American religion, but I hope this little data exercise can provide a spark of inspiration for a researcher who is interested in comparative religion. There is certainly a lot to learn by comparing the oddness of American religion to that religious composition of other countries.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanburge. Subscribe to his “Graphs about Religion” column on Substack, where this post first appeared.