(and let’s try to keep this out of GD territory, and save the theism vs atheism debate for another day)
52% of Chinese are “unsure”? I was surprised it’s that high – 50 years of communism didn’t exactly stamp out religion and spirituality, it appears.
10% of Russians are polytheistic?
I was very surprised that South Africa is a bit more religious than the US. Don’t know why I’m surprised…just never thought of South Africa wrt religion.
Surprised that France has a higher atheism rate than Sweden, Germany and the UK. I assume (incorrectly, as it turns out) that historically Catholic countries had higher rates of belief. This may be true more or less, but France is the exception.
This. But I still get surprised at the high level of theism in the country, given the Soviet legacy. Or perhaps it’s because of it…you try and take something away, and it simply leads people’s contrarian ways to want it more?
They didn’t maintain Stalin-level ruthlessness long enough to convert people by the sword very well. You need generations of systematic ruthless persecution, ferreting out the hidden unbelievers in the One True Way over and over again. Like the way Christianity imposed itself, stamping out its older rivals over centuries; Soviet Communism didn’t last nearly as long, and eased up a lot as time went on. You need to keep it up long enough that old beliefs are forgotten, not just suppressed at gunpoint.
no, it has to do with dominant ideology. When atheism was dominant, people were atheist. Now dominant ideology switched to Orthodoxy, so people are at least nominally Orthodox. Plus lots of people converted to zealous Protestantism, and some of them reincorporated back into more zealous pockets of Orthodoxy.
If anything should be surprising it is the resilience of old times religion over here in America long after the dominant media promoted ideology switched to variants of New Age mixed with State worship. Recall the surprise of Obama at finding out that, gosh, people “cling to guns or religion”. They sure don’t cling to the hope and change message, if that’s what he thought to be normal behavior.
In my experience Afrikaners (Dutch settlers) have some the most fundamentalistic version of Christianity, part of the Apartheid can be traced back to the Dutch Reformed Church. And a lot of the forerunners against apartheid came from the (black) churches,Bishop Tutu
