Christian affiliation has declined in Western Europe The lower Christian shares in Western Europe reflect how the region’s religious landscape has been changing within the lifetimes of survey respondents. While large majorities across the continent say they were baptized Christian, and most European countries still have solid Christian majorities, the survey responses indicate a significant decline in Christian affiliation throughout Western Europe. By contrast, this trend has not been seen in Central and Eastern Europe, where Christian shares of the population have mostly been stable or even increasing. Indeed, in a part of the region where communist regimes once repressed religious worship, Christian affiliation has shown a resurgence in some countries since the fall of the USSR in 1991.
6 In every Western European nation surveyed – including the heavily Catholic countries of Ireland, Italy and Portugal – six-in-ten or more adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. But in the East, views are more varied. To be sure, some Central and Eastern European countries, such as the Czech Republic, Estonia and Bulgaria, overwhelmingly favor legal abortion. But in several others, including Poland, Russia and Ukraine, the balance of opinion tilts in the other direction, with respondents more likely to say that abortion should be mostly or entirely illegal. Survey results suggest that Europe’s regional divide over same-sex marriage could persist into the future: Across most of Central and Eastern Europe, young adults oppose legalizing gay marriage by only somewhat narrower margins than do their elders.
In Ukraine, for example, more people say they are Christian now (93%) than say they were raised Christian (81%); the same is true in Russia, Belarus and Armenia. In most other parts of Central and Eastern Europe, Christian shares of the population have been relatively stable by this measure. Meanwhile, far fewer Western Europeans say they are currently Christian than say they were raised Christian. In Belgium, for example, 55% of respondents currently identify as Christian, compared with 83% saying they were raised Christian.
And Protestantism is the dominant Christian tradition in much of Northern Europe, particularly Scandinavia. There are substantial populations belonging to non-Christian religions – particularly Islam – in many European countries. In Bosnia, roughly half of the population is Muslim, while Russia and Bulgaria have sizable Muslim minority populations. But in most other countries surveyed, Muslims and Jews make up relatively small shares of the population, and surveys often are not able to reliably measure their precise size.
In addition, all the Western European countries surveyed have sizable populations of religiously unaffiliated people – those who identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular, ” collectively sometimes called “nones. ” “Nones” make up at least 15% of the population in every Western European country surveyed, and they are particularly numerous in the Netherlands (48%), Norway (43%) and Sweden (42%). On balance, there are smaller shares of “nones” – and larger shares of Christians – in Central and Eastern Europe, though a plurality of Estonians (45%) are unaffiliated, and the Czech Republic is the only country surveyed on the entire continent where “nones” form a majority (72%).
None of the Central and Eastern European countries surveyed allow same-sex marriages. In some cases, these views are almost universally held. Fully nine-in-ten Russians, for instance, oppose legal same-sex marriage, while similarly lopsided majorities in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally. Even though abortion generally is legal in both Central/Eastern and Western Europe, there are regional differences in views on this topic, too.
Consequently, those in this younger generation in Central and Eastern Europe are much less likely than their peers in Western Europe to express openness to having Muslims or Jews in their families. For example, 36% of Polish adults under 35 say they would be willing to accept Muslims in their family, far below the two-thirds of young French adults who say they would be willing to have Muslims in their family – mirroring the overall publics in those countries. These are among the findings of Pew Research Center surveys conducted across Central and Eastern Europe in 2015 and 2016 and Western Europe in 2017.
But historical schisms underlie this common religious identity: Each of the three major Christian traditions – Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy – predominates in a certain part of the continent. Orthodoxy is the dominant faith in the East, including in Greece, Russia, the former Soviet republics of Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine and Belarus, and other former Eastern bloc countries such as Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. Catholic-majority countries are prevalent in the central and southwestern parts of Europe, cutting a swath from Lithuania through Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, and then extending westward across Croatia, Austria, Italy and France to the Iberian Peninsula.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has articulated one strain of opposition to the EU’s conception of European values, declaring in July 2018 that “Central Europe … has a special culture. It is different from Western Europe. ” Every European country, he said, “has the right to defend its Christian culture, and the right to reject the ideology of multiculturalism, ” as well as the right to “reject immigration” and to “defend the traditional family model. ” Earlier in the year, in an address to the Hungarian parliament, he criticized the EU stance on migration: “In Brussels now, thousands of paid activists, bureaucrats and politicians work in the direction that migration should be considered a human right.
UEFA Euro 2024 qualifying draw summary: groups, schedule But today, for most people living in the former Eastern bloc, neighbors in the East to say they never pray (e.g., 62% in Denmark
Eastern and Western Europeans Differ on Importance of Group G: Hungary, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Lithuainia. Group H: Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, Luxembourg, N. Ireland, San