Overall, the U.S. has a higher rate of active participation in religion than Europe. At the same time, it’s also clear that this varies greatly by locale, with the strongest ‘epicenters’ of religiosity being found in the Southeast, and in the rural Midwest. Aside from those areas, Utah would be another epicenter, and in general the smaller the town, the more religion you’re likely to see.
So is there anything like that in Europe? Are there provinces or regions of, say, France or Germany where more people tend to be religious than elsewhere? One used to hear that Bavaria was strongly Roman Catholic, for example.
I can’t speak for other countries, but it sure is the case for Sweden. Churchgoing is at an all time low, but there are regional pockets where quite a few people keep going. Mostly Pentecostal and Covenant communities, which are strong in certain towns. Some pockets of a brand of christianity, similar to the Amish, survive in rural areas, and then we have some congregations of US style born again devotees.
The regional differences of this distribution seem to be mostly tied in with historical reasons and some charismatic church leaders. I imagine the situation being similar in most other European countries.
Of course, this doesn’t take into account all immigrants who tend to end up in larger urban areas. My town of ~260k has something like 60k Muslims, though far from the majority practise the faith they were born with. A large group of these are from former Yugoslavia. There are enough South Americans to make up a quite active Catholic church.
I am not sure about variations in degree of religious activity, but in the UK there are areas where a greater proportion follow Roman Catholicism than elsewhere. Glasgow and Liverpool spring to mind. I think these are both areas where Irish immigrants have settled in the past. Parts of Wales and the remoter parts of Scotland also have strongly protestant religious traditions.
Statistics and anecdotes are both going to be hard to find, and hard to trust.
I’ve no idea whether there’s a bigger proportion of people regularly attending churches in cities than in rural areas. It will depend how you measure it (what’s regular? what’s rural?)
Certainly denominational distinctions can be made. The obvious Catholic influence in Liverpool, Manchester etc. can easily be identified. Far less in m’home, given its history of both puritanism and non-conformism.
My warning would be that it’s impossible to look at religion in places such as Liverpool or Glasgow in isolation, without looking at wider social situations. There’s immense social divides, which you certainly will not be able to overcome or ignore by yourself.
Yes. For instance, Brittany tends to be significantly more religious than other french regions.
However, from what I gather from reading this board, the difference doesn’t seem to be even remotely as blatant than in the USA. there will be more people actually going to the mass on sunday, more catholic schools, but it doesn’t result in a noticeable cultural difference (or more exactly doesn’t anymore, up to the 50’s or so, the strugle between the “reds” and the “whites” was still alive and well in some areas).
…something I forgot in my previous answer: religion, and in particular regular church attendance, is a minority interest. Most people (i.e. well into the 90%s) have no interest whatsoever in the church.
And emphasising what GorillaMan said, I just checked som statistics, and the average number of attendants to all church services within the Swedish Lutheran Church is 56.
Statistics are slippery stuff, but it roughly means there is one church service for each citizen each year. A problem here is too many churches and not enough people.
I keep reading - probably in The Economist - that Europeans Christians are not very observant. Especially the French.
If Europeans are not observant Christians, then who were all those people who traveled to Rome to pay homage to Pope John Paul? There were so many people in Rome that the crowds could be seen in satellites photographs. There were millions of people who traveled to Rome. Maybe none of them were French.
Most Europeans are not religious, but there are more than 300 million of them.
Huge numbers of Poles went to Rome, but a much higher percentage of Poles are religious compared to the European average, and nearly 100% of them are at least nominally Catholic. Poland is one of the most strongly Catholic countries in Europe, though attendance and strenght of religious affiliations are declining in the post cold war period. And of course JPII was Polish.
Poland and Ireland are probably them most strongly Catholic and most strongly religious countries in Europe. Spain and Portugal have a long history of devout Catholicism, though church attendance is declining there, too.
There was an interesting article in the Boston Globe last Sunday about how church attendance has steeply declined in Ireland in the last 20-30 years.
It mentioned that this year for the first time in literally centuries the archdiocese of Dublin doesn’t have a single priest graduating from the seminary.
Where Germany is concerned Catholicism is culturally dominant in large parts of Bavaria (some parts of the state are traditionally Protestant, though), and this is connected with somewhat higher church attendance and a tendency to social conservatism. (Generalising wildly, Catholicism and small Protestant churches are the social conservatives in Germany while the mainstream Protestant churches are socially liberal). There are also hot spots of Protestant piousness, e.g. of Pietism - e.g. here in Tübingen a lot of people have a fish symbol on their car. These pietist, socially conservative activists are often referred to as the Piet Cong here. The opposite extremes can be found in the former East Germany where church members are in the minority in some regions. Generally the smaller the town the higher the church attendance (and, usually, the greater the denominational uniformity - small villages tend to be dominated by the denomination the ruler chose in the 16th century while in cities this has tended to even out by intra-German migrations.
