European Christians no longer align with Christian
faith, Pew Forum confirms they 'drifted away,' 'were alienated,' or just
'stopped believing' by Bob Unruh, 5/29/18, WND
A new poll by Pew
Research Center indicates European Christians, once the driving force behind
the faith’s expansion worldwide, no longer are.
Christian. Really. At least
in terms of what they believe.
They may call themselves
Christian, but Pew describes them as “non-practicing” and found that they
“drifted away,” “were alienated” or just “stopped believing.” They only rarely
walk in the doors of a church.
The survey found for example, that while 83 percent
of Belgians say they were “raised Christian,” only 55 percent now identify as
such.
Norway’s figures plunged
from 79 percent “raised Christian” to only 51 percent now. In the Netherlands,
from 67 percent to 41 percent, Spain, 92 percent to 66 percent, Sweden, 74
percent to 52 percent. In the United Kingdom, 79 percent to 73 percent.
The survey comes as
millions of Muslims migrate from the Middle East and Africa to Europe.
“Western Europe, where
Protestant Christianity originated and Catholicism has been based for most of
its history, has become one of the world’s most secular regions,” the survey
said. “Although the vast majority of adults say they were baptized, today many
do not describe themselves as Christians.
“Some say they gradually
drifted away from religion, stopped believing in religious teachings, or were
alienated by scandals or church positions on social issues.”
Moreover, most of those who
call themselves “Christian” don’t align with Christian faith or teaching. “While
the religious, political and cultural views of non-practicing Christians in
Western Europe are frequently distinct from those of church-attending
Christians and religiously unaffiliated adults (‘nones’), on some issues
non-practicing Christians resemble churchgoing Christians, and on others they
largely align with ‘nones.’
“Religious beliefs and
attitudes toward religious institutions are two areas of broad similarity
between non-practicing Christians and church-attending Christians. Most
non-practicing Christians say they believe in God or some higher power, and
many think that churches and other religious organizations make positive
contributions to society. In these respects, their perspective is similar to
that of churchgoing Christians,” the survey said.
“On the other hand,
abortion, gay marriage and the role of religion in government are three areas
where the attitudes of non-practicing Christians broadly resemble those of
religiously unaffiliated people (‘nones’). Solid majorities of both
non-practicing Christians and ‘nones’ say they think that abortion should be
legal in all or most cases and that gays and lesbians should be allowed to
marry legally. In addition, most non-practicing Christians, along with the vast
majority of ‘nones,’ say religion should be kept out of government policies.”
The report said: “Many in
all three groups reject negative statements about immigrants and religious
minorities. But non-practicing Christians and church-attending Christians are
generally more likely than ‘nones’ to favor lower levels of immigration, to
express negative views toward immigrants from the Middle East and sub-Saharan
Africa, and to agree with negative statements about Muslims and Jews such as,
‘In their hearts, Muslims want to impose their religious law on everyone else’
in their country or ‘Jews always pursue their own interests and not the
interest of the country they live in.'”
Pew Research
said: “Overall, the study shows a strong association between
Christian identity and nationalist
attitudes, as well as views of religious minorities and immigration,
and a weaker association between religious commitment and
these views. This finding holds regardless of whether religious commitment
among Christians is measured through church attendance alone, or using a scale
that combines attendance with three other measures: belief in God, frequency of
prayer and importance of religion in a person’s life.”
The survey found 91
percent were baptized and 81 percent raised Christian. But only 71 percent even
call themselves Christian, and only 22 percent, not even a third of those who
call themselves Christian, attend services even monthly.
The “non-practicing”
Christians are the largest faith block across the continent.
In Austria, 52 percent are
“non-practicing” but call themselves Christian, and only 28 percent call
themselves Christian and actually go to church monthly or more.
In Finland, it’s 68 percent
who are “non-practicing” and 9 percent who actually attend church.
For Denmark, it’s 55 and 10,
for Italy 40 and 40, for Portugal 48 and 35, for the U.K. 55 and 18.
“Non-practicing Christians
also outnumber the religiously unaffiliated population (people who identify as
atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular,’ sometimes called the ‘nones’) in
most of the countries surveyed. And, even after a recent surge in immigration
from the Middle East and North Africa, there are many more non-practicing
Christians in Western Europe than people of all other religions combined
(Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, etc.),” the survey said.
“Many non-practicing
Christians say they do not believe in God ‘as described in the Bible,'” the
poll said. Instead, they believe “in some other higher power or spiritual
force.”
Pew reported education
levels also played a role in the differences, as “highly educated Europeans are
generally more accepting of immigrants and religious minorities, and
religiously unaffiliated adults tend to have more years of schooling than
non-practicing Christians. But even after statistical techniques are used to
control for differences in education, age, gender and political
ideology, the survey shows that churchgoing Christians, non-practicing
Christians and unaffiliated Europeans express different religious, cultural and
social attitudes.”
The poll, conducted on
mobile and landline telephones with 24,000 adults from April to August
2017 in 12 languages, looked at a wide range of perspectives on faith.
Across 15 nations surveyed,
Pew said, 27 percent believe in God as the Bible describes Him, 38 percent just
say there’s a “higher power,” and 26 refuse to believe at all. Even among
“church-attending Christians,” only 64 percent say the Bible has described God.
One in three is there’s that unknown “higher power.”
Large numbers, led by
“nones” and assisted by the non-practicing Christians, suggest there are no
spiritual forces in the universe at all.
“If the Christian identity
of Europe has become an issue, it is precisely because Christianity as faith
and practices faded away in favor of a cultural marker which is more and more
turning into a neo-ethnic marker,” Pew quotes Olivier Roy, a French political
scientist, commenting. In fact, across the continent, many contend science
makes religion unnecessary.
The survey also takes a poke
at America. “The vast majority of adults in the United States, like the
majority of Western Europeans, continue to identify as Christian (71 percent).
But on both sides of the Atlantic, growing numbers of people say they are
religiously unaffiliated (i.e., atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’).
About a quarter of Americans (23 percent, as of 2014) fit this description,
comparable to the shares of ‘nones’ in the UK (23 percent) and Germany (24
percent),” Pew said.
“Yet Americans, overall, are
considerably more religious than Western Europeans. Half of Americans (53
percent) say religion is ‘very important’ in their lives, compared with a
median of just 11 percent of adults across Western Europe. Among Christians,
the gap is even bigger – two-thirds of U.S. Christians (68 percent) say
religion is very important to them, compared with a median of 14 percent of
Christians in the 15 countries surveyed across Western Europe. But even
American ‘nones’ are more religious than their European counterparts. While one-in-eight
unaffiliated U.S. adults (13 percent) say religion is very important in their
lives, hardly any Western European ‘nones’ (median of 1 percent) share that
sentiment.” Pew reported, “Similar patterns are seen on belief in God,
attendance at religious services and prayer.”
Comments
Churches have been
infiltrated and compromised to become irrelevant and they wrecked themselves.
It is one of the goals listed in the American Communist Party Goals republished
in 1963. It is related to the victimization myth and the politics of division
scam. The decline of Christianity in Europe is the result of World Wars and the
embrace of socialism and globalism where the government has replaced the
churches.
In the US we simply
find church attendance less useful in helping us develop our personal
relationship with God.
The churches have
bought in to the Marxist UN narrative of globalism, anti-capitalism, attacks on
private property and free speech, socialism, social justice, liberation
theology, open borders, amnesty, crony trade, gay subculture acceptance, a bias
for abortion and statism, with fake environmentalism and anti-discrimination as
the dominant doctrines. This extreme liberalism has driven away most
church-goers.
Churches are missing
the boat by not reentering the education and healthcare businesses to lower
costs and regain relevance.
Pew is a Liberal
organization and that is why their analysis of this is so circular.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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