Majority of Europeans Believe in God despite Declining Church Membership

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[ November 02, 2005, 16:48: Message edited by: Taluntain ]

 

Strange. I know very few people who are actually religious, and I mean VERY few. Religion has no place in todays world IMO.

 

Actually, I think it is indeed the case with Europe. If you read carefully the research, you will realise it does not account for a real importance of Christianity for Europeans, but rather they believe in a particular and generic concept of God. It seems to me they are too weak to depart from the Church, fully, so they still clinge to "believing" in God. Like when you want to detach yourself from something, but just cant.
I disagree, however, that religion has no place in todays World. Gladly most people in Russia and Poland disagree too.

 

Many people, I beleive, when faced with a question 'What faith do you beleive in?' or something similar in a national census, will put down something, even if they do not truely beleive in it. Habbit, I guess would be the word. What is interesting though, is those who strongly believe in their religion (how you would measure that is a hard question. Those who would die for it? Kill others for it?) and those who believe because they feel they should.

In New Zealand, we've got a very similar situation. JUST over 50% of our population claim to believe in one sort of religion or another (2001). But this is steadily declining. 1901 under 10% claimed to follow no religion.

 

I can almost agree with Svyatoslav about this one ( ), although I'd explain it a little differently. I think BA's on the mark about the attitudes of many (certainly in Anglo countries, particularly the youth) but not that it has "no place" in the modern world. Organised religion, perhaps - after all, it's far easier for demogogues to hijack an existing structure than to build one up - but religion in sum and total? No.

The non-theistic outnumber the Christian in Australia (at least, in my experience), but there are still many who hold fast to the notions of a benevolent higher power and the basic principle of being nice to each other. I wouldn't necessarily call it weakness to move away from Church services while still believing in the concept of the Christian God and observing Christian holy days. Admittedly, I am biased, being in that category myself; I rationalise it by believing that God would probably prefer me to be out doing nice stuff for people and enjoying His creation rather than singing hymns as a substitute for living as closely to His principles as possible.

I am utterly unsurprised by the high figure in Poland; the late John Paul II was an inspirational figure (despite criticisms that could be levelled at him). I can't speak for anyone in Europe about their faiths, though... where's Chev when we need him?

 

I think that this may reflect that lack of credibility of religion. With so many out there, all claiming to speak for God, but with differing practices, people have a harder time telling which one is right. For those that believe that they have the right answer, the only answer they can give is spiritual, and I've been stomped a number of times trying to explain that one...

 

I don't know that many people that believe in God, but for the sake of politics, people will still label themselves Catholic or Protestant here.
I guess in the Republic of Ireland, they are slightly more religious, as you can see statues of Jesus and Mary being sold next to 'lads' magazines.

 

My parents labelled themselves as Anglican in their census, and me too before I was old enough to do it myself, because that's how we were all baptised. None of us are actually religious though. And it's the same across the country. In a source I read, over 50% said they were religious in some way, yet only about 7% attend a religious building.

 

The Dutch don't live in good harmony with the Vatican, since a few priests here had the nerve to criticize some of the decisions made there. That is not the reason why numbers are among the lowest in Europe though. I just think we don't consider religeon that important anymore that it should dominate our entire lifestyle. When asked about this, most people simply reply with "god is in my mind, that should be enough", which makes perfectly good sense to me.

 

It depends highly on the region. Back at home (coastal town) really religious people are hard to find, especially among the young. Here in Kortrijk they are more traditional and religious.

The hypocrisy of the church has put many people off religion altogether.

A curious thing though: Most people here just seem to assume that everyone has given up on god (guilty ), but when one digs a little deeper a fair deal of people admit to believing in a higher entity which they label God after a little hesitation. The Christian/Catholic tradition is deeper ingrained in our culture than we realise I suppose.

Perhaps this could be a sign of a possible revival. /me pokes chev.

 

Those results make sense to me. Organized religion losing foothold, personal faith staying.

I'm a bit surprised by the high percentages though. I would wager that some of those that said yes haven't given it an awful lot of thought, living their lives rather earthly, but thinking it more likely that there's *something* out there rather than absolutely nothing.

 

I hate organized religion as it is today, filled with puritans and lemmings, but I have a very strong personal faith, so I understand these results entirely.

 

Maybe you know few such people but I know a lot. And they believe strongly and are happy with it.

 

The Church has made mistakes but the hypocrisy of the Church is often a matter of seeing the whole through the perspective of a single priest or group of priests or people who declare themselves as Catholics and do various things that are in no way in accordance with the faith. Every group has its black sheep and the Church isn't an exception here, especially as it was made for sinners. Hypocrisy is when a priest who molests children preaches long-winded sermons about chastity or when he loses the tithe to the vicar of the neighbouring parish in cards and then preaches against vices. But not when the Church preaches that some things are bad and will always be bad, even though some members or even clerics insist on doing them.

Yes, yes, I'm working on you.

 

I think that the statistics are only half there. It says that Churches are losing influence among it's followers, yet it doesnt' give hard numbers citing this. OK, 7 out of 10 people believe in God, but what percentage of them actually go to Church? If you've never gone to any church in your adult life, then it's hard to say that the Church is losing influence with you, because they never had any to begin with.

I think the U.S. is much closer to the likes of Poland, Portugal, and Russia, than the less religious countries. The vast majority of people I know believe in God (although the number is probably less than 97%). There are other probabilities at play also. For example, for the few people I know who do not believe in God, most of them are young. I do not know if that is a sign of things to come, but it seems that the younger you are the less likely you are to believe in God.

Here's another possibility, although it is just speculation on my part. We live in a world where people move all the time. As a result, countries are far less homogeneous than they were even 50 years ago, never mind 100 years ago. This is equally true in the U.S. as it is in Europe. As a result you get people moving into areas where they are of a different religion than most of the people who are native to that area. The result is that over time, a smaller percentage of the total population subscribes to a particular religion.

I'll use London as an example. If you took a poll 100 years ago asking about people's religion in London, almost all would say that they were Protestant, and more specifically Anglican. People in the area who were of different religions made up a insignficant percentage of the population. Take that same poll now, and you'd get a statistically significant number of people answering Muslim. That doesn't mean that people are switching from Christianity to Islam in London over the last 100 years, nor does it show a greater or less influence of said religions. The difference is that there are more Muslims who have immigrated to London over the years.

I think the reason that we see this happening more in Western countries is because that's where more people tend to move. For example, I think there are a hell of a lot more people moving from Africa to either North America or Europe, than there are people moving from North America or Europe to Africa. I'm not saying people aren't less religious now than they were 100 years ago - this is almost certainly true. But I wonder if these statistics are not influenced by 1) a single particular religion not dominating a community and 2) people are more comfortable now saying that they do not believe in God, whereas 100 years ago they would have been ostracized.

 

Last statistics I saw before claimed that 91% people in Poland believed in God, while 41% went to church on Sunday. In heaven believed 90%, which is less than believed in God. About 60% believed in hell, if not less. This suggests that even though up to 90% may declare themselves as Catholics, no more than 40% are practicing ones and no more than 60% have orthodox beliefs. IIRC, some 30% also believed in reincarnation, which suggests that at least 20% believed both in God and reincarnation.

Nowadays it's reincarnation, Eastern religions, New Age etc, while in the past times, it was remnants of tribal pagan religions or gnostic heresies, katharism and the like. Look, besides, how many Catholics observe the moral tenets. Some Protestant churches have already loosened up and started believing the Bible to be wrong on certain things, despite the claim that they are Christians out of the Bible and Catholicism is a man made cult. I'm not talking about occasional lapses (it's a church of sinners, after all) but "disagreeing with established doctrine", choosing what to believe and what not.

[ November 03, 2005, 15:17: Message edited by: chevalier ]

 

Actually reincarnation was a staple of most gnostic belief systems and is fundamental to Manichaeism; the most widely influential gnostic religion. Manicaheism, which was founded in Persia was self-consciously syncretist, including various biblical figures, Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. The doctrines of both the Cathars and their Bulgarian predecessors the Bogomils were influenced by Manichaeism. An East-West interchange of ideas has always existed, it has simply been rediscovered.

 

Yeah, that's correct, but reincarnation is way more popular in Europe now than it was before.