# Does an official religion make a country more or less secular? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 23, 2010, 9:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-an-official-religion-make-a-country-more-or-less-secular/558093 "2010-10-23T09:53:16Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2010, 9:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-an-official-religion-make-a-country-more-or-less-secular/558093/21 "2010-10-25T09:56:24Z")
> [@Ximenean](#): > > My point is that they are not really secular - many of them do in fact officially recognise the Catholic Church in some way. So you can’t just look at a list of supposedly secular countries. Many of them officially recognise any other religious organization so long as it’s bothered get the proper paperwork, too. In Spain a long-standing bone of contention for many gypsies is that their own marriage rites aren’t legally recognized; the standing answer is “do the paperwork to get registered as a religious organization”. Other religious groups, such as the Jehova’s Witnesses, have done the paperwork and they have official recognition as well. The reason the RCC crops up more often is simply one of statistics: there are more catholics in the country, so there are more Catholic weddings, Catholic funerals, Catholic schools (most of which do not require students to be Catholic, study Catholic theology, etc; The Nephew’s 24-children class in a school owned by an order of nuns has kids from 5 different religions)… Spain is much more secular now than it was 35 years ago, when it was officially a Catholic country. It isn’t just a matter of referring to December 3rd as “Navarra Day” instead of “Feast of St Francis Xavier, Patron Saint of Navarra”, or of some big catholic feasts losing their status as national holidays; there are religious leaders meeting with the authorities and having their opinions taken into account whose religions weren’t even present in the country back then, or who were present but got thoroughly ignored when not watched by the police; there are less and less people having the sacraments; quiz shows on TV and radio have stopped asking any kind of religious questions after one too many times of people (specially people under 40) failing “which is the first book in the Bible?” ---
**Author:** ![auRa](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c4cdca/32.png) [@auRa](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/auRa)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2010, 12:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-an-official-religion-make-a-country-more-or-less-secular/558093/22 "2010-10-25T12:03:15Z")
> [@falcotron](#): > > The idea is that having an official faith accelerates the process of the faith becoming meaningless to the people, **prevents the religious from playing the “oppressed Christian/whatever minority” card that’s so popular in America today** , and gives the government better tools to resist extremist religions. Well, nah, our fundamentalist evangelist Christians seem to be doing just fine with the “oppressed Christian” schtick, if you take for example the way they’ve managed to turn the ongoing marriage law reform discussion in Finland into “teh gays are going to make us all marry gays and people roll their eyes at us when we complain about it oh my”. Still, a lot of people seemed very surprised that there were voices like this coming from self-described representatives of the (Evangelical Lutheran) Church. I guess it says a lot about how much people actually pay attention to ecclesiastical matters. 80% of the population belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church, but the biggest newspaper in Finland recently reported that in a survey, only 35% of those people ticked “yes” to “I believe in God as taught by the Ev.Luth.Church”. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2010, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-an-official-religion-make-a-country-more-or-less-secular/558093/23 "2010-10-27T01:14:53Z")
I think the causal line tends to run the other way, some of the time. ---
**Author:** ![Implicit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Implicit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Implicit)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2010, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-an-official-religion-make-a-country-more-or-less-secular/558093/24 "2010-10-27T01:50:05Z")
What if the question was: Does an official language make a country more or less multilingual? Consider the United States, which has no official language, does that mean that the United States isn’t an English speaking country? Seems to me that the influence of religion (or language) can be independent of whether or not it is officially sanctioned. > [@Der\_Trihs](#): > > A state religion can mean either that the state controls the religion, or that the religion controls the state; the end result will be very different depending on which, yet both cases are “state religions”. Indeed. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-an-official-religion-make-a-country-more-or-less-secular/558093.md?page=1)