Abstract
Background
The thesis of religious decline, central to secularization theory, has become massively contested among social-scientific students of religion. Its critics observe not so much decline, but rather change in the religious landscape of Western Europe, in effect pointing out that the decline of Christianity’s traditional institutional, doctrinal and ritual dimensions should not be mistaken for a decline of religion tout court.
Purpose
In this research note, we address this ongoing debate among sociologists of religion by studying whether traditional Christian religiosity has declined in Western Europe over the past four decades, and whether the same applies to religiosity more broadly conceived.
Methods
To examine these trends over time, we analyze data from the European Values Study (1981–2017) for nineteen Western-European countries. More specifically, we carry out multi-level linear- and multi-level logistic regression analyses.
Results
We demonstrate that both traditional Christian religiosity and religiosity more broadly conceived have declined, with the former declining at a much higher pace than the latter. We also find that those who continue to be religious and/or spiritual deviate increasingly from the traditional Christian model. Thus, when one does encounter religiosity, it is much more likely to be non-traditional religiosity than was true in the past.
Conclusions and Implications
We conclude that religion has declined, whether one understands it narrowly as traditional Christian religiosity, or more broadly. Even though new forms of religiosity and spirituality cannot compensate for the loss in traditional Christian religiosity, they do make up an increasing portion of the overall declining religious pie. Finally, we reflect on the limitations of the data from the European Values Study (1981–2017) and make an urgent call for better survey data, especially by including more suitable questions with which to measure types of religiosity and/or spirituality that deviate from the traditional Christian model.
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Change history
02 April 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-022-00483-4
Notes
Note that this rendition of Davie’s ‘believing without belonging’ thesis is distinct from its ‘standard’ interpretation, according to which people continue to hold on to traditional Christian beliefs without attending church services (i.e. a de-institutionalization of Christianity). See Tromp, Pless and Houtman (2020) and Cortois and Tromp (2021) for a decomposition of Davie’s argument into two different theses.
By focusing on these two research questions, we simultaneously address the imbalance in the scientific study of religion, as observed by Marion Burkimsher, that “considerably more effort has been put into trying to explain the trends than in critically assessing what the trends actually are” (2014, 433, emphasis in original).
The question on homosexuality was not asked in Malta (1981) and Italy (2008), and the one on abortion not in Denmark (1990). This is not a major issue because a respondent does not need valid scores on all five items in order to receive a scale score.
This question was not asked in Great Britain 1999, giving respondents in that particular country-wave combination less of an opportunity to be ‘religious in a general and non-specific sense’. For that reason, we also ran the analyses without Great Britain 1999. This does not change anything substantially to our findings, hence the results are robust.
Note that self-identifying as ‘spiritual but not religious’ is just one of the many alternative ways of being religious and/or spiritual nowadays in the West.
Examples of questions that were not available in all of the five EVS waves are how important is religion in your life?; how often do you pray to God outside of religious services?; and do you take some moments of prayer, meditation or contemplation? The question of how much confidence do you have in the church was available in all of the five waves, but was deemed less valid than frequency of church attendance to measure endorsement of traditional Christian religion’s organizational form. An alternative for asking whether one believes in God would have been the question how important God is in your life? The latter is available in all five waves, too, and could possibly serve as a suitable substitute for the former question. Other questions address involvement in a humanitarian or charitable organization and feeling concerned about the living conditions of human kind, elderly people, unemployed people, immigrants, sick and disabled people, but it is of course a matter of debate whether care and concern for others are exclusively Christian, indeed whether they are typical for Christians at all. Identical problems, arguably even more so, exist for questions about the justifiability of unlawfully claiming state benefits, cheating on tax, accepting a bribe, and avoiding paying a transport fare, and intolerance to having people of a different race as neighbors.
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Tromp, P., Pless, A. & Houtman, D. A Smaller Pie with a Different Taste: The Evolution of the Western-European Religious Landscape (European Values Study, 1981–2017). Rev Relig Res 64, 127–144 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-021-00479-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-021-00479-6