(ANALYSIS) I’ve got some pretty fun data to work with today — it’s got a great name: “The Many-Analysts Religion Project,” and it asks a battery of religion questions from folks in 25 countries around the world. Although it was fielded in 2019, it was just added to the Association of Religion Data Archives (the ARDA) in the last couple of weeks.

After exploring the codebook and noticing the range of unique questions on religious practice, I knew I had to dig deeper. There’s a solid mix of countries — places like Turkey, Israel, Morocco, India, China, Canada, Brazil and the United States. And the survey asks a bunch of nuanced questions about religion beyond the typical measures of religious attendance.

Let me start with this fun one — it asks people how they would describe themselves: atheist, not religious or a religious person. I especially like the fact that the survey makes a clear distinction between being atheist vs nonreligious. In their recent book, “Secular Surge,” Campbell, Layman and Green drive home the distinction between those groups.

Atheists and agnostics are considered secular folks; they don’t have a religious worldview. It’s been replaced with a framework based on logic, reason, and science. On the other hand, nonreligious people have shed the religious perspective but have not replaced it with anything else. Here’s how respondents in all 25 countries answered that question. 

In terms of the largest concentration of atheists, there are two top contenders — China and Spain. Nearly half of the sample from each country chose the atheist option. Then, there are a number of countries that have an atheist population that is at least one-third of the sample, including Turkey, the U.K. and Japan. In the United States, about 15% of folks said that they were atheists — that’s in the same general neighborhood as countries like Brazil, Australia and Morocco. 

What country is the most religious in this survey? Undoubtedly, it’s India. Just 3% of Indians describe themselves as atheist. In contrast, 83% say that they are religious. That’s more than 20 points higher than the next country in line — Romania at 51%.

In this data, there are only a handful of countries where the share who identify as religious is at least 50%. That list includes the aforementioned Romania and India, along with Morocco and Australia. There are a few in the 40s, though — Ireland, the United States, Brazil and Croatia. 

While understanding religious identity is important, analyzing behavior gives a fuller picture of religious life. Let’s explore questions on prayer frequency and religious attendance. I calculated the mean for each metric for all 25 countries and then put together a scatter plot of those values.

Of course there are a lot of countries that are concentrated in the bottom left corner of the graph — they score low on both metrics of religious behavior. There are a lot of European countries here — the U.K., Spain, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.

From these two measures, they honestly look pretty indistinguishable. There are a few countries on the continent that are more religious, though. Lithuania scores noticeably higher on both questions, but Romania is easily the most religiously active country on the continent. 

The two big outliers are Morocco and India. They are the only countries out of 25 that score at least .4/1 on the religious attendance index and .6/1 on the prayer frequency metric. What I was also struck by is how few outliers appear in this data.

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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 X at @ryanburge.