It is practically axiomatic among many educated elites today that in North America and Europe, religion doesn’t matter. It is a proposition well worth considering. Of course, such an assertion will seem preposterous to most Americans, 85 percent of whom affirm the religion of Christianity. It will seem especially bizarre to Americans after the events of September 11, 2001, in which religion seemed to matter very much indeed. Yet a scan of evidence available to sociologists and historians suggests that religion generally is indeed at a low ebb in North America and Europe, and ebbing further. As the events of September 11 made clear, however, religion does matter very much elsewhere in the world, and the world is now here. Ignoring religion at home may make sense according to much of the available data, but other information indicates that national leaders—and anyone else who cares about our public life—would be foolish to ignore it entirely.

For those who are concerned about the health of traditional religion, and especially Christianity, in Europe and North America (what I will refer to as the North-West), the news has been generally bad for a long while. Four trends in particular have been widely noted:

• the decline of Christianity,



• the rise of New Religious Movements (NRMs),



• the increase of adherents of other world religions, and



• the increasing number of North-Westerners who claim “no religious affiliation” at all.

Christianity in Decline?

The strength of a people’s adherence to Christianity can be measured by two kinds of statistics. The first kind is affiliation: regardless of their theological knowledge, moral rectitude, church attendance, or any other measure of religious authenticity, how many people continue to identify themselves as Christians—or are identified by officials as such?

These numbers actually look strong—very strong—for the North-West. Canada is just behind the American total (85 percent), with 80 percent of its population affirming a Christian identity. In Britain that figure is 83 percent, and Ireland, predictably, is much higher, at 97 percent. Upon crossing the English Channel, the numbers stay up in the Benelux countries: Belgium at 88 percent, Netherlands 80 percent, and Luxembourg 94 percent. Spain and Portugal reflect their intense Christian heritage at approximately 93 percent each. In Scandinavia, the numbers are also high: Denmark at 92 percent, Norway 94 percent, and Finland 93 percent. (Sweden is the anomaly at 68 percent, and this figure likely points to the vexed question of how affiliation is accounted for in each country, rather than to such a strong cultural difference from its Scandinavian neighbors.) The numbers drop significantly when we get to France (71 percent) and Germany (76 percent), but these are still large majorities. Switzerland and Austria remain quite high in Christian identification, at 88 percent and 90 percent, respectively. Among Italians, self-identified Christians account for 82 percent of the population, and in Greece the figure is 95 percent.

In the east, the numbers remain high even in countries once behind the Iron Curtain: Poland is at 97 percent (tying it with Ireland for the top spot), Bulgaria 81 percent, Romania 88 percent, Croatia 95 percent, and Lithuania 88 percent. The conspicuous exceptions are the Czech Republic (63 percent), Estonia (64 percent), Latvia (67 percent), Russia (57 percent), and, of course, Bosnia-Herzegovina (35 percent Christian; 60 percent Muslim) and Albania (39 percent Muslim, 35 percent Christian, and 25 percent nonreligious or atheist).

What is perhaps most striking about these statistics is how few people are left over to fill the remaining categories of NRMs, other world religions, and religious “nones.” In terms of self-identification, the North-West continues to be overwhelmingly Christian. Yet something is obviously wrong with this picture. Christianity certainly appears to the casual observer to be declining or even already moribund in most of Europe and in much of North America. Thus, to assess actual levels of vitality, sociologists also use church attendance statistics, because Christianity—unlike some religions—expects people to participate regularly in corporate worship. (The New Testament itself rarely commands, but rather assumes, church attendance.) Sociologists therefore track church attendance as a key measure of religious seriousness: Do people actually care enough about Christianity to get out of bed and go to church?

These numbers paint a much less positive picture. The United States has maintained a steady level of approximately 40 percent weekly church attendance since World War II. Some European countries—especially those in which religion plays an important role in ethnic identity, and particularly in the face of an external threat—also report relatively high attendance. Poland and Northern Ireland are the most salient examples, each with over 50 percent weekly attendance.

Generally, however, church attendance is low in Europe, with average weekly churchgoing in ten countries at less than a quarter of the population. Italy and Portugal are the highest in Western Europe with perhaps a third attending, while the Netherlands, France, and Scandinavia compete for the lowest (5 percent or less). Germany and Britain are not doing much better, at approximately 10 percent. European churchgoing has declined so drastically, in fact, that some surveyors have begun counting monthly rather than weekly church attendance as an official indication of regular attendance.

Canada offers a peculiar case of recent, intense secularization in this respect. As late as the 1940s, considerably more Canadians than Americans attended church regularly; a national average of more than 60 percent was reported in 1946. In a little more than a single generation, however, Canadian church attendance has plunged to European levels, with a national average now just above 20 percent—a drop from about two-in-three to two-in-ten in only half a century. The Netherlands is perhaps the only other country to have secularized so quickly, also during this period after World War II. Social scientists and historians have not come close to consensus as to just why both countries moved from “observant” to “nominal” Christianity so quickly.

NRMs, OWRs, and “Nones”

New Religious Movements might be expected to fill the “religion gap” for disaffected ex-Christians. NRMs have been darlings of sociologists since their widespread emergence in America in the late 1960s—Hare Krishna, Transcendental Meditation, Scientology, and the Unification Church perhaps being the most conspicuous, with Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses having a century’s head start. Yet for all the scholarly attention and media limelight they have enjoyed, the NRMs simply do not constitute much of a presence. As the French sociologist Yves Lambert concludes, “no new world religion or spirituality has spread on a wide scale.”

Likewise, other world religions have made few converts in the North-West. Since September 11, Americans have awakened to the presence of Islam in the world and at home, a matter until then largely ignored by most Americans except when Louis Farrakhan—the leader of the unorthodox Nation of Islam—made news. However, the opening up of immigration after World War II to many more non-Europeans, both in North America and in Western Europe (in the latter case an economic necessity because the Iron Curtain prevented access to the labor pool of Eastern Europe until the 1990s), certainly increased the numbers of adherents of the world’s other great religions residing in the North-West. Nonetheless, the number of Muslims in America was almost certainly overestimated in the wake of September 11 as some sought to show that Muslims “belonged” according to the traditional American criterion, market share. Even though the widely reported figure of six million is probably off by a factor of two (three to four million is much more likely), the more important point is that if one totals up the likely headcount of adherents of all non-Christian religions (including NRMs), it still amounts to only 6 percent of the American population, with a similar ratio in Canada.

In Europe the figures are surprisingly similar. Frankfurt, we are told, now counts more than a quarter of its population as foreigners. France supposedly is overrun with immigrants from its former North African colonies. Yet the best available statistics show that the total number of adherents of non-Christian religions in these countries remains relatively low: even the high-immigration countries (and post-imperial powers) still have rather small non-Christian contingents. In Britain and the Netherlands, the figure is 6 percent, in Germany it is 7 percent, and in France 9 percent.

The most important religious rival to Christianity in the North-West, in fact, is indifference to, or rejection of, any organized religion. The rise of the religiously unaffiliated, sometimes referred to by sociologists as religious “nones,” is perhaps the most telling story of the decline of Christianity and the rise of new forms of spirituality and worldview. The United States has perhaps the smallest proportion of such people, but that number is still 9 percent. Canada reports 11 percent. In some European countries, the figures are higher yet: in Britain 12 percent, France 16 percent, Germany 17 percent, Sweden 18 percent, and Russia 28 percent. In most other countries, however, the figures are lower than in North America.

Taken together, then, the statistics of religious affiliation and church attendance reveal a largely nominal, not particularly vital, Christianity in most of Europe and North America. These statistics have been confirmed by a large number of polls sounding out what North Americans and Europeans actually know about the faith: the levels of ignorance and heterodoxy are very high. In Western Europe, for example, approximately as many people—one third of the population—consider God to be a spirit or vital force as consider Him to be a personal God. And even among those reasonably knowledgeable and devout, there has been a clear rise in the acceptance of relativism and pluralism, the resistance to all claims of exclusive and universal truth.

What statistics cannot show, but what hundreds of social-scientific, historical, and literary studies confirm, is that Christianity has not for some time played a determinative role in North-Western public life. True, the disintegration of Yugoslavia took place according to ethnic identities that involved religious differences. And before that, churches served as rallying points in East Germany, Poland, Russia, and other Eastern Bloc countries as the Iron Curtain fell and Communism was overturned. Today, Northern Ireland continues to smolder as the last cinder of the early modern Wars of (Christian) Religion in Europe. Yet there are no major political parties with significant Christian content or style anywhere in the North-West, including the so-called Christian-Democratic parties of Europe. Substantial references to the Bible or Christian tradition almost never appear in the rhetoric of present-day public leaders in the region. The entertainment media on the two continents are notoriously inhospitable to traditional Christianity. Educational systems continue to involve religion in some places (England, for example, has mandatory religion classes in the public schools) and even draw on churches for assistance (nuns in habit teach in the public systems of Switzerland). Yet in not one country is the general tone of intellectual life set by explicitly Christian terms.

Some analysts see the reduction in the influence of Christian institutions as only the first wave of secularization, to be followed by the entire evacuation from public life of all explicitly Christian symbols and values. Such secularization has indeed proceeded apace throughout the North-West, however much Christian piety may still burn warmly in the private lives of many citizens of Warsaw, Lisbon, and Dallas.

This “secularization thesis,” however, has been widely discredited of late. The prediction—still proclaimed as gospel only a generation ago—that modernity would sweep aside all religion in the name of reason and especially of science, has proven to be simplistic. Religion has instead responded to modernity in four ways. Decline has indeed been one reaction, but the church has also responded through adaptation, conservative reaction, and individualization and fragmentation (in which individuals feel free to pick and choose among elements offered by various religions to construct a faith for themselves). Religion clearly hasn’t disappeared—perhaps especially in the most modern country on earth, the United States. Instead, it has taken new forms.

Keeping the Faith

In some respects, the news is even worse for traditional religious believers than it appears in the foregoing sketch. In some regions of the North-West, church attendance figures are significantly lower than the national average. Northern England, for example, reports church attendance figures closer to one in twenty than the national average of approximately one in ten. The Canadian province of Quebec, which only a generation ago was dominated by the Roman Catholic Church, has seen its weekly church attendance plummet from more than 80 percent to less than 10 percent since the “Quiet Revolution” (a sort of cultural French Revolution without violence) of the 1960s. And in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, church attendance is likewise in the single digits.

Furthermore, it appears that the reported American attendance might be almost double the actual rate of churchgoing. Beginning in the 1990s, a series of sociological studies has shown that many more Americans tell pollsters that they attend church regularly than can be found in church when teams actually count. (Ironically, some congregations in both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church have been shown to undercount their attendance, in order to be liable for smaller financial obligations to their denominational headquarters.)

Perhaps the most ominous statistics regarding prospects for Christianity in the North-West are those that report a significant generation gap, or at least gradient, in religious observance. Young people in every country across Europe and in North America are significantly less interested in, and even aware of, traditional Christian beliefs and practices than their parents and grandparents.

Interestingly, Christian numbers have been bolstered in the North-West somewhat by the immigration that many thought would only add to the number of adherents of non-Christian faiths. Nonetheless, for all the current vitality of immigrant churches, it remains to be seen how well the next generation will be retained for the faith as the trauma of immigration fades and the lure of alternative North-Western lifestyles increases. Even the vaunted growth of Pentecostalism may well have peaked on the two continents. Recent studies suggest that Pentecostalism is no longer growing much in North America outside Latino populations, and the most recent figures for Britain show an actual decline in the last decade.

There are also data to suggest that these trends are not as straightforward as they might appear. For instance, church attendance in Canada and the United States was significantly lower in the early nineteenth century than it is today. Both countries then underwent a significant increase of Christian fervor that influenced them for a century. England experienced a similar revival a century before, with the rise of Methodism. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that secularization is inexorable. Indeed, some preliminary studies show a small but perhaps significant increase of more conservative values, including traditional Christian ones, among the youth population of North America. Christians themselves, of course, believe in a God who transcends earthly limitations, including sociological ones. And even those prognosticators who don’t try to take the Holy Spirit into account can remember that although Europe and North America now look religiously weak, few cultural trends continue in a straight line indefinitely.

Given the rise of immigration from nations in which Christianity is in fact blooming, the North-West is receiving an infusion of fresh religious vigor that may well begin to revitalize the struggling Anglo churches that once sent armies of missionaries around the world. Pennsylvania State University professor Philip Jenkins reports that half of all churchgoers in London are black, with the largest church serving primarily black Christians filling an auditorium twice the capacity of Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Outside the churches, spiritual interest remains evident in the North-West, even as it sometimes takes unusual forms such as the rise of New Age interests in alternative medicine, parascientific investigations of human potential, astrology, and the like. These interests have even taken root among many nominal Christians, so that, for example, a significant number now claim to believe simultaneously in reincarnation and resurrection. It may be that the traditional churches are offering something that fewer people want, no matter how attractively the churches package it, but few people doubt that there are better ways for most European and North American churches to offer what they do have to a spiritually interested population. (See sidebar, “Is Europe Irreligious?”.)

Meanwhile, religion continues to play a more important part in some sectors of public life than might be suspected in light of the statistics regarding affiliation and attendance. The list of recent European and North American political controversies fuelled in part by religious concerns is long: abortion, euthanasia, and other bioethical issues; the legal status of homosexual unions, child pornography, AIDS, and other matters of sexuality and family; the presence or absence of religious symbols in public institutions and ceremonies; the teaching of religion, science, and sexual values in the public schools; and tax support for religious groups, including churches and charities. These disputes are no less important for being familiar. Christians also are increasingly concerned about human rights around the globe, and particularly the persecution of their fellow believers after the worst century of Christian martyrdom in history. These concerns may well interfere, for example, with the plans of those who want to do business with oppressive regimes.

Religion might seem unimportant to many people, but there remain pockets of deep religious concern in North America and Europe that can still substantially assist or thwart the plans of public figures. Sociologists on both sides of the Atlantic, notably the American Robert Wuthnow and the Englishman Robin Gill, have shown that regular churchgoing correlates highly with civic involvement, charitable giving, volunteering, and other publicly crucial behaviors. The level of regular churchgoing is therefore a matter of civic, not merely ecclesiastical, concern.

New Age, New Challenges

The events of September 11 have reminded us that religion can take aim at the fundamental values and institutions of North-West society. Politicians, pundits, and philosophers have been wrestling with the implications of immigration policies and the cultural orthodoxy of multiculturalism for a generation, and recent events have made those questions even more acute. Throughout the past century, European and North American societies found it impossible to absorb large influxes of people from heterogeneous cultures without either replacing the immigrants’ values with Euro-American ones or provoking a nativist backlash. Thus, it is likely that North-Western societies will also find it impossible, using the currently regnant multicultural model, to make room for more of these individuals and their varied communities in a way that promotes the common good.

This dilemma raises even more serious questions, such as whether religious tests should be part of immigration proceedings, to discern whether an applicant’s outlook includes inherent opposition to the Euro-American culture. It will also be necessary to figure out whether to welcome, in a spirit of pluralism, all communities, including even those that are opposed to the current Euro-American doctrine of multiculturalism. Even to raise such questions would have been wildly unacceptable in polite circles not long ago—just before September 11, in fact. But now it is impossible to ignore them.

Finally, it is obvious that religion is very important in the world outside Europe and America. Public leaders in the North-West who assume that everyone else thinks as they do will be ill-equipped to engage those who see political matters through religious lenses, whether in foreign policy or in domestic challenges, just as the CIA failed to anticipate the Iranian Revolution of the 1970s and the FBI failed to understand the Branch Davidians at Waco. The struggles ahead won’t be simply “Jihad vs. McWorld,” as author and University of Maryland professor Benjamin Barber puts it, but might well be “Jihad vs. McWorld vs. Crusade vs. Hinduism vs. Maoism vs. Shintoism” in a truly worldwide struggle between massive, strongly motivated blocs.

Religion doesn’t seem to matter most of the time in Europe and North America. Many in public life therefore understandably ignore it. But as these reflections suggest, religion does matter, not only privately, but publicly. It does matter—and it will.

Is Europe Irreligious?

When Pope John Paul II arrived in Toronto in late July for the World Youth Day Congress, he was arriving in a continent that is still significantly religious—and leaving a continent that seems to have abandoned religion for agnosticism and material affluence.

It is almost one hundred years since Hilaire Belloc pronounced of Catholicism, “Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” It seems a great deal longer. In Belloc’s day, Europe was the center of the Christian world from which, in the previous three hundred years, missionaries had ventured forth to convert the heathen. Today the Christian world is increasingly the Third World where the new Christians tilt dramatically towards evangelical and traditional forms of belief.

Christian conversions from other religions, mainly Islam, are proceeding rapidly in Africa and southeast Asia. In Latin America evangelical conversions within Christianity are transforming bad Catholics into good Protestants. As a result Christian missionary traffic has gone into reverse gear. Catholic churches in Europe rely on priests from the Philippines and India, and African bishops attend Anglican convocations to reprove their Western counterparts for liberal theology and sexual libertinism. It was a sign of this new world that the traditionalist candidate for the Archbishopric of Canterbury, defeated recently by a saintly but liberal academic theologian, hailed from Pakistan.

Missionaries are certainly needed in Western Europe. Regular church attendance there has sunk to single digits—7 percent for most Christian denominations in Britain, even lower in France and Germany. By comparison with this gloomy picture, North America still looks moderately devout. About 40 percent of Americans and 20 percent of Canadians say they go to church regularly—and probably at least half of them are telling the truth.

If Europe is a post-Christian society, then North America is still a moderately observant one. But both exist in a world where Asia, Africa, and Latin America are passionately devout.

But things may not be what they seem. Europe may simply be further along the road of modernist “disenchantment” with religion than either the United States or Canada. From the 1930s to the 1950s, European churchgoing imperceptibly became a matter of social respectability rather than a desire to worship God. From the 1960s, when everyone suddenly realized that his neighbor would prefer to sleep in on Sunday as well, church attendance progressively collapsed. Over time society became increasingly secular in law, custom, social atmosphere—and eventually in religion too.

And this is producing a religious paradox worthy of G. K. Chesterton. Paul M. Zulehner, dean of the theology department at Vienna Catholic University, sees what is happening in Europe not as irreligion but as a frustrated religious impulse: “We are observing a boom in religious yearning and at the same time a shrinking process of the churches.” Why so? Because, says Zulehner, “the churches have secularized themselves.”

How true is this? The shrinking of the secularized churches is obvious enough. In Western Europe it is often hard to distinguish the local church from a social service agency; Bishops reserve their prophetic fire to denounce cuts in public spending rather than private sins; and church buildings are turned into office blocks. But where is the boom in religious yearning?

My colleague, United Press International religion editor Uwe Siemon-Netto—a rare former foreign correspondent with two theology degrees—points to such events as the sale in France of over 100,000 copies of a new translation of the Bible within a month of publication, the packed theaters for performances by the Comedie Francaise of a new translation of the Psalms, the crowds in Germany attending consolatory religious services after September 11 of 2001, the rising numbers in opinion polls (since the 1960s) who describe themselves as religious believers, and the large congregations at non-mainstream evangelical services in churches often established by Third World immigrants.

It may be that Weberian “disenchantment” is merely a phase that the prosperous go through before arriving at a sense of religious awe at the mysteries of Creation. And not only the prosperous. Some Latin Americans left the Catholic Church because it had forgotten that the poor had souls as well as bodies and devoted too much of its teaching to their material concerns as part of its “preference for the poor.”

North America may be at the early “social respectability” point on this learning curve. The signs of a decay of belief are certainly there: religious attendance declines in those areas where no one knows his neighbor; polls show that a vulgar form of moral relativism is the orthodoxy of educated young people; and in the pedophilia scandal Catholic bishops plainly placed more trust in Freud than in God.

What may save North America from this looming agnosticism is the decentralized character of its religious institutions. The United States in particular has always had a free market in religion. So, as older mainstream churches fall to the secularizing temptation, the result may not be the anomie and despair of post-Christian Europe but the rise of charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical, and other “spiritual” movements, even inside the Catholic Church. The “age of secularization” would then be a very brief one in North America compared to Europe’s thirty years.

Here the Pope may exert a vital personal influence. Even to many who dislike his theological conservatism, he appears above all else a man of deep and radiating spiritual goodness. That spiritual appeal has penetrated the hearts of the Third World poor in earlier tours. It has won over countless young people like those at Toronto. Will it now enlighten and uplift the dehydrated souls of post-Christian intellectuals and exhausted consumers in the post-Christian West? If so, it will be his strangest and perhaps deepest triumph.

— John O’Sullivan

John O'Sullivan is editor-in-chief of United Press International. This article first appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and is reprinted with the author’s permission.