Measuring Secularity in Europe
Is there any reliable way to assess the process of secularisation? If secularity is the result of this process is there any way to meassure the current state of secularity in Europe?
Discussions on the advance of secularism often make selective use of opinion survey data. Most surveys are limited to one country and even then comparison between surveys is notoriously difficult for technical reasons. Thankfully one survey conducted across Europe at intervals throughout the last thirty years may provide us with the tools we need to measure secularity in Europe.
The European Values Study (EVS) describes itself as “the most comprehensive research project on human values in Europe”. Conducted on four occasions during the last thirty years (1981, 1990, 1999 and 2008) the study has sought to understand how Europeans think about life, family, work, religion, sex, politics and society. The use of the same questionnaire in every country and the repetition of the survey at approximately ten year intervals make it an invaluable tool for measuring changes in values. Unfortunately not all the results from the 2008 survey are available and these include Croatia, Italy and the UK. Nevertheless, the 130 questions in the survey provide a goldmine of information for sociologists and the specifically religious questions give us some reliable measures for secularity.
For the purposes of this article we have isolated the EVS data from 20 major European countries and have focused on the responses to five questions:
Do you believe in God?
How important is religion in your life?
Independently of whether you go to church or not, would you say you are religious, not religious or a convinced atheist?
Apart from weddings, funerals and christenings, how often do you attend religious services?
How much confidence do you have in the church?
Do you believe in God?
This most basic of questions has been asked in all four waves of the EVS . Taking the data from the eight countries which have participated in all four waves of the study and for whom the 2008 data is available, the number of Europeans who respond affirmatively to this question has declined from 70% to 62%. A closer inspection of the data, however, shows that this trend is far from universal.
In Germany the percentage has dropped much more notably from 72% to 43% in the last thirty years. But perhaps more surprisingly are those countries which have seen a significant increase in belief in God. In 1990 only 35% of respondents in Bulgaria and Russia said that they believed in God. By 2008 this had risen to 68% of Bulgarians and 89% of Russians. Today in Europe belief in God is most prevalent in Romania (95%), Poland (94%), Greece (91%), Albania (90%) and Russia (89%). The Czech Republic stands out as the most unbelieving at 30%.
Percentage of respondents who believe in God
How important is religion in your life?
Whilst a clear majority of Europeans continue to believe in God only 15-20% would consider themselves to be “very religious”. The Europeans who most consider themselves to be “very religious” are the Romanians (57%), and the Greeks (46%), and in both cases have become more so since the last survey in 1999. Those who consider religion to be least important include the Danes (9%), the Germans (8%) and the Czechs (6%).
Are you religious, non-religious or atheist?
Respondents were asked if they considered themselves to be “religious”, “not religious” or self-consciously “atheist”. It may not be a surprise to find 87% of the Greeks and 84% of the Poles confessing they are religious. What is more surprising is to find 83% of Albanians do so, up from 65% in 1999, the sharpest rise in any European country. Today, only 3% of Albanians declare themselves to be atheists, an astonishing figure given the country’s recent history. The countries with the most self-declared atheists are France (17%), Czech Rep, (15%), Germany (14%), Belgium (11%) and Spain (10%).
How often do you attend religious services?
Another indication of secularisation in Europe can be seen in trends in attendance at religious services over the last 20 years. For the group of countries who have participated in all four waves of the study and whose data is available, the percentage of respondents who attend a religious service at least once a week has dropped from 30% in 1980 to 14% in 2008. Russians, Greeks and particularly Romanians are attending services more regularly than before, but this contrasts with those countries that have seen a dramatic fall in attendance: Germany (down from 22% in 1990 to 6% in 2008), Belgium (down from 30% in 1990 to 10% in 2008) and Spain (down from 41% in 1990 to 18% in 2008). But the most notable fall of all has occurred in Ireland, where weekly attendance exceeded 80% in both the 1980 and 1990 surveys but then suffered a dramatic decline to stand at only 44% in 2008).
Percentage of respondents who attend a religious service at least once a week
Do you have confidence in the church?
The final measure we have chosen relates to the confidence that Europeans have in the church over this period. The aforementioned group of countries whose data is available for all four waves give us a good indicator of the trends. In 1980, 23% of respondents said they had a “great deal of confidence in the church”. By 2008 this figure had fallen to 11%. Once again Greece, Russia and particularly Romania seemed to buck the trend with rises in confidence over the last 20 years but two Catholic countries have suffered a crisis of confidence with their levels falling markedly. In 1980 52% of all Irish people said they had a great deal of confidence in the church. By 2008 this had collapsed to 21%. Likewise for the Poles who suffered a drop in confidence from 46% in 1990 to 23% in 2008. It would seem sensible to suggest that this may be related to the scandals of sexual abuse by priests in these countries.
Percentage of respondents with a “great deal of confidence” in the church
The NOVA Index of Secularity
Taking these five measures from the 2008 EVS we have attempted to combine the data into a single table which might serve as an index of secularism in Europe. We have called it “The NOVA Index of European Secularity”. The scale has no absolute meaning but does reflect the relative levels of secularity as manifest in that countries’ responses to the EVS. For the three countries whose data has not yet been published for the 2008 wave we have taken the 1999 EVS data and generated an estimate using the mean variance over that period.
Nova Index of Secularity
(Based on the results of the 2008 European Values Study. * The values for the UK, Croatia and Italy are estimates based on the results of the 1999 EVS and making an adjustment for the average rate of secularisation across the dataset since then.)
We see that this puts the Czech Republic at the top of the secularity league table, closely followed by Germany, France and the UK. The most religious countries are Romania, Poland and Greece.
All the data from this research can be consulted online via the European Values Study website: www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu. In the coming weeks the tables and graphs will be uploaded to our website and blog for your further consideration.
Jim Memory