With its dwindling rates of attendance at religious services and rising numbers of churches shuttered or sold, Western Europe seems to be the region of the world where the outlook for faith is bleakest.
Roman Catholicism’s Pope Francis was the latest to lament this trend, saying only last week that Western society seemed like “a journey ending in a shipwreck, with the survivors trying to build a raft.”
A new survey by the Pew Research Center looks past the headlines that worry the established churches to ask what Western Europeans think about religion. The results, issued Tuesday (May 29), suggest a more nuanced picture.
Despite the region’s widespread secularization, 64 percent of the 24,599 adults Pew surveyed in 15 countries still identify as Christians, even if only 18 percent say they attend church at least once a month.
At 46 percent of the total sample, nonpracticing Christians make up the largest single group in the survey, almost double the 24 percent of religiously unaffiliated — atheists, agnostics and “nones” — that often dominate commentaries about the state of Christianity in its erstwhile stronghold.
These nonpracticing Christians have their own mix of religious and social views, sometimes leaning more toward their churchgoing neighbors and sometimes more toward the unaffiliated. These can have political effects as well, for example in the…
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