Europe Is Not Very Religious — And There’s The Data To Show It
(ANALYSIS) Well, there may have been some kind of internet controversy involving France, the Olympics and religion. The French hosted 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. It just released data from a survey wave that was administered in 2023 and 2024. It’s not all of Europe, just 13 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.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
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.