TruthBook Religious News Blog

By staff writers
6 Feb 2009

The Bertelsmann Stiftung International Religion Monitor study says its research shows that Christian faith still has a strong personal influence in Europe - but not so much on people's political outlook.

On average, nearly three-quarters (74%) of people surveyed in Germany, France, Austria, Poland, Switzerland and the UK think of themselves as religious or very religious.

Italy and Poland came top of the six countries, with 89% and 87% respectively of the population seeing themselves as religious. The United Kingdom (63%) and France (54%) were the lowest. Russia, which was not included as part of Europe in this study, came lower still with 51%.

Overall, 57% of respondents said they attend religious services and practiced their faith “more or less regularly”, and 61% pray.

Traditional Roman Catholic countries tend to have more highly religious adherents than Protestant countries – in Poland 40% of people class themselves as very religious, compared with only 19% of the British population. Poles also attend church more regularly than other Europeans – 64% reported a high level of public religious practice compared with 17% in Germany.

Young people are as likely as the older generation to believe in God or some idea of the divine and the afterlife, with 41% of young people holding strong religious beliefs compared to 42% of the population as a whole.

The secular online news source EU Observer recently reported on the study – one of the first pieces of comment by EUO on religious affairs. The article quotes the survey saying: "the role which [religion] plays in tying together the countries of the European Union should not be underestimated".

However the EU Observer suggests that religious belief influences the political views of only 27% of respondents (and only 29% in Poland), and comments that "Europeans remain strongly religious but like to keep faith out of politics".

Sociologists such as Professor Grace Davie at the University of Exeter have long argued that religion and spirituality are mutating rather than disappearing in Europe, even though that continent retains its exceptionalism for having secularised more than any other continent.

She suggests the changing patterns of believing and belonging, which defy the simple interpretations of both secularist and 'religious revivalist' advocates, are due the emergence of "multiple modernities" in the world today - whereas the old secularisation thesis was that 'modernisation' was always accompanied by the demise of religion.

The data now suggests otherwise.

Labels: Bertelsmann Stiftung International Religion Monitor, Christianity, Europe

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Friday, July 11, 2008

German Study: Religion Stronger Than Ever Among Global Youth

10.07.2008

A worldwide survey by Germany's Bertelsmann Foundation has found religion is as strong as ever among most of the globe's young people, with Europe the main enclave where religion is on the decline.

Releasing details Thursday, July 10, the respected social-science foundation said the findings would surprise Europeans. It said the notion that young people were less religious than their parents was a typically European perception, not a global reality.

"Young people in developing countries and Islamic states are just as religious as adults," the study's authors said. "In Morocco, about 99 percent believe in God and life after death. Among Brazilians, Turks and Nigerians, 90 percent are believers and even in Israel, Indonesia and Italy, the rate is 80 percent."

Martin Rieger, who heads the Religion Monitor, a Bertelsmann project to track faith, said: "The notion that religion continuously declines from generation to generation can be clearly disproved, even in some of the industrialized nations."

Religious Brits

The study found religious belief was stronger among young people in Britain and Israel than among their parents.

The first findings of the Bertelsmann Monitor of Religion, which will be continuously updated in future, were issued to mark World Youth Day, a Catholic youth festival being celebrated with Pope Benedict XVI in Sydney, Australia on July 20.

Globally, 85 percent of young people aged 18 to 29 are religious believers, with 44 percent defined as deeply religious in the sense that they often pray, discuss religious issues and are guided in day to day behavior by religion.

In non-religious nations such as France, Russia and Austria, daily prayer is a fixture for only 9, 8 and 7 percent of young adults respectively. The United States is quite different, with 57 percent of young adults praying daily, the survey found.

Labels: belief, Bertelsmann Foundation, Europe, religion, youth

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Friday, February 08, 2008

Religion and the Death Penalty

Religion and the Death Penalty

By Walter Berns
Monday, January 28, 2008

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to decide whether the Constitution allows the death penalty for the rape of a child.

--New York Times, January 5, 2008

The best case for the death penalty--or, at least, the best explanation of it--was made, paradoxically, by one of the most famous of its opponents, Albert Camus, the French novelist. Others complained of the alleged unusual cruelty of the death penalty, or insisted that it was not, as claimed, a better deterrent of murder than, say, life imprisonment, and Americans especially complained of the manner in which it was imposed by judge or jury (discriminatorily or capriciously, for example), and sometimes on the innocent.

Camus said all this and more, and what he said in addition is instructive. The death penalty, he said, "can be legitimized only by a truth or a principle that is superior to man," or, as he then made clearer, it may rightly be imposed only by a religious society or community; specifically, one that believes in "eternal life." Only in such a place can it be said that the death sentence provides the guilty person with the opportunity (and reminds him of the reason) to make amends, thus to prepare himself for the final judgment which will be made in the world to come. For this reason, he said, the Catholic church "has always accepted the necessity of the death penalty." This may no longer be the case. And it may no longer be the case that death is, as Camus said it has always been, a religious penalty. But it can be said that the death penalty is more likely to be imposed by a religious people.

The reasons for this are not obvious. It may be that the religious know what evil is or, at least, that it is, and, unlike the irreligious, are not so ready to believe that evil can be explained, and thereby excused, by a history of child abuse or, say, a "post-traumatic stress disorder" or a "temporal lobe seizure." Or, again unlike the irreligious, and probably without having read so much as a word of his argument, they may be morally disposed (or better, predisposed) to agree with the philosopher Immanuel Kant--that greatest of the moralists--who said it was a "categorical imperative" that a convicted murderer "must die." Or perhaps the religious are simply quicker to anger and, while instructed to do otherwise, slower, even unwilling, to forgive. In a word, they are more likely to demand that justice be done. Whatever the reason, there is surely a connection between the death penalty and religious belief.

European politicians and journalists recognize or acknowledge the connection, if only inadvertently, when they simultaneously despise us Americans for supporting the death penalty and ridicule us for going to church. We might draw a conclusion from the fact that they do neither. Consider the facts on the ground (so to speak): In this country, 60 convicted murderers were executed in 2005 (and 53 in 2006), almost all of them in southern or southwestern and church-going states--Virginia and Georgia, for example, Texas and Oklahoma--states whose residents are among the most seriously religious Americans. Whereas in Europe, or "old Europe," no one was executed and, according to one survey, almost no one--and certainly no soi-disant intellectual--goes to church. In Germany, for example, leaving aside the Muslims and few remaining Jews, only 4 percent of the people regularly attend church services, in Britain and Denmark 3 percent, and in Sweden not much more than 1; in France there are more practicing Muslims than there are baptized Catholics, and a third of the Dutch do not know the "why" of Christmas. Hence, the empty or abandoned churches, or in Shakespeare's words, the "bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang."

What explains this obsession with the death penalty? Hard to say, but probably the fact that abolishing it is one of the few things Europeans can do that make them feel righteous; in fact, very few. Nowhere in the new European constitution--some 300 pages long, not counting the appendages--is there any mention of religion, of Christian Europe, or of God. God is dead in Europe and, of course, something died with Him.

This "something" is the subject of Camus's famous novel The Stranger, first published in 1942, 60 years after Nietzsche first announced God's death, and another 60 before the truth of what he said became apparent, at least with respect to Europe and its intellectuals. The novel has been called a modern masterpiece--there was a time, and not so long ago, when students of a certain age were required to read it--and Meursault, its hero (actually, its antihero), is a murderer, but a different kind of murderer. What is different about him is that he murdered for no reason--he did it because the sun got in his eyes, à cause du soleil--and because he neither loves nor hates, and unlike the other people who inhabit his world, does not pretend to love or hate. He has no friends; indeed, he lives in a world in which there is no basis for friendship and no moral law; therefore, no one, not even a murderer, can violate the terms of friendship or break that law. As he said, the universe "is benignly indifferent" to how he lives.

It is a bleak picture, and Camus was criticized for painting it, but as he wrote in reply, "there is no other life possible for a man deprived of God, and all men are [now] in that position." But Camus was not the first European to draw this picture; he was preceded by Nietzsche who (see Zarathustra's "Prologue") provided us with an account of human life in that godless and "brave new world." It will be a comfortable world--rather like that promised by the European Union--where men will "have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night," but no love, no longing, no striving, no hope, no gods or ideals, no politics ("too burdensome"), no passions (especially no anger), only "a regard for health." To this list, Camus rightly added, no death penalty.

This makes sense. A world so lacking in passion lacks the necessary components of punishment. Punishment has its origins in the demand for justice, and justice is demanded by angry, morally indignant men, men who are angry when someone else is robbed, raped, or murdered, men utterly unlike Camus's Meursault. This anger is an expression of their caring, and the just society needs citizens who care for each other, and for the community of which they are parts. One of the purposes of punishment, particularly capital punishment, is to recognize the legitimacy of that righteous anger and to satisfy and thereby to reward it. In this way, the death penalty, when duly or deliberately imposed, serves to strengthen the moral sentiments required by a self-governing community.

Walter Berns is a resident scholar at AEI. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Democracy and the Constitution (AEI Press, 2006).

Labels: Albert Camus, America, capital punishment, Europe, religion, Walter Berns

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Monday, July 23, 2007

In Europe, God Is (Not) Dead

Christian groups are growing, faith is more public.
Is supply-side economics the explanation?

By ANDREW HIGGINS
July 14, 2007

Stockholm

Late last year, a Swedish hotel guest named Stefan Jansson grew upset when he found a Bible in his room. He fired off an email to the hotel chain, saying the presence of the Christian scriptures was "boring and stupefying." This spring, the Scandic chain, Scandinavia's biggest, ordered the New Testaments removed

In a country where barely 3% of the population goes to church each week, the affair seemed just another step in Christian Europe's long march toward secularism. Then something odd happened: A national furor erupted. A conservative bishop announced a boycott. A leftist radical who became a devout Christian and talk-show host denounced the biblical purge in newspaper columns and on television. A young evangelical Christian organized an electronic letter-writing campaign, asking Scandic: Why are you removing Bibles but not pay-porn on your TVs?

Scandic, which had started keeping its Bibles behind the front desk, put the New Testament back in guest rooms.

After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.

CHANGING OPINIONS

In Europe, the cradle of the Enlightenment and secularization, issues of religion have figured prominently in recent public discourse. Below, some examples.

* * *

Sinéad O'Connor, Irish singer, caused a stir in 1992 by ripping up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on "Saturday Night Live" and shouting "Fight the real enemy!" She's now released "Theology," a collection of Bible-based songs:

"I adore religion and love it. Obviously, like anything, it has all sorts of negatives sometimes, as we all do," she told Beliefnet, a Web site. She described the photo-tearing episode as "an act of love for God, actually. But, also an act of rattling the bars of something that I do love, but I don't love [the Catholic Church] as much as I love God."

* * *

Gérard Depardieu, French film star known for his chaotic personal life, met Pope John Paul II in 2000 and was urged to play Saint Augustine, a 4th-century North African bishop who, after a dissolute youth, became a pillar of faith and one of the church's pre-eminent philosophers. Depardieu read selections of Saint Augustine's "Confessions" in Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral in 2003.

"I was heavy with spirituality without knowing it. I was touched by the light of Saint Augustine," Depardieu told the French Catholic newspaper La Croix. "Saint Augustine's quest touched me personally because it reflected by own fragility."

* * *

Sting, British rock star, was raised a Catholic, turned away from organized religion but has often talked about faith. On "The Oprah Winfrey Show," he said:

"Religion is an interesting word. It comes from Latin; it means to reconnect, reconnect with the world of the spirit. There are many ways to reconnect with the world of the spirit, not just through going to church or praying, you can reconnect through music, through the woman or the man you love. These are my roots to the sacred."

* * *

Oriana Fallaci, combative Italian journalist and lifelong critic of religion, grew close to the Catholic Church toward the end of her life. She met Pope Benedict XVI and praised him as a bulwark against Islam. She died in 2006, leaving her book collection to a university run by the Vatican.

"I am an atheist, yes. An atheist-Christian," she said in New York in 2005.God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. At the same time, anxiety over immigration, globalization and cutbacks to social-welfare systems has eroded people's contentment in the here-and-now, prodding some to seek firmer ground in the spiritual.

Some scholars and Christian activists, however, are pushing a more controversial explanation: the laws of economics. As centuries-old churches long favored by the state lose their monopoly grip, Europe's highly regulated market for religion is opening up to leaner, more-aggressive religious "firms." The result, they say, is a supply-side stimulus to faith.

"Monopoly churches get lazy," says Eva Hamberg, a professor at Lund University's Centre for Theology and Religious Studies and co-author of academic articles that, based on Swedish data, suggest a correlation between an increase in religious competition and a rise in church-going. Europeans are deserting established churches, she says, "but this does not mean they are not religious."

Upstarts are now plugging new spiritual services across Europe, from U.S.-influenced evangelical churches to a Christian sect that uses a hallucinogenic herbal brew as a stand-in for sacramental wine. Niklas Piensoho, chief preacher at Stockholm's biggest Pentecostal church, says even sometimes oddball, quasi-religious fads "tell me you can sell spirituality." His own career suggests that a free market in faith is taking root. He was poached by the Pentecostals late last year after he boosted church attendance for a rival Protestant congregation.

Most scholars used to believe that modernization would extinguish religion in the long run. But that view always had trouble explaining why America, a nation in the vanguard of modernity, is so religious. The God-is-finished thesis came under more strain in the 1980s and 1990s after Iran, a rapidly modernizing Muslim nation, exploded with fundamentalist fervor and other fast-advancing countries in Latin America and Asia showed scant sign of ditching religion.

Now even Europe, the heartland of secularization, is raising questions about whether God really is dead. The enemy of faith, say the supply-siders, is not modernity but state-regulated markets that shield big, established churches from competition. In America, where church and state stand apart, more than 50% of the population worships at least once a month. In Europe, where the state has often supported -- but also controlled -- the church with money and favors, the rate in many countries is 20% or less.

Consider the scene on a recent Sunday at Stockholm's Hedvig Eleonara Church, a parish of the Church of Sweden, a Lutheran institution that until 2000 was an official organ of the Swedish state. Fewer than 40 people, nearly all elderly, gathered in pews beneath a magnificent 18th-century dome. Seven were church employees. The church seats over 1,000.

Hedvig Eleonara has three full-time salaried priests and gets over $2 million each year though a state levy. Annika Sandström, head of its governing board, says she doesn't believe in God and took the post "on the one condition that no one expects me to go each Sunday." The church scrapped Sunday school last fall because only five children attended.

Just a few blocks away, Passion Church, an eight-month-old evangelical outfit, fizzed with fervor. Nearly 100 young Swedes rocked to a high-decibel band: "It's like adrenaline running through my blood," they sang in English. "We're talking about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

Passion, set up by Andreas Nielsen, a 32-year-old Swede who found God in Florida, gets no money from the state. It holds its service in a small, low-ceilinged hall rented from Stockholm's Casino Theatre, a drama company. Church, says Mr. Nielson, should be "the most kick-ass place in the world." Jesus was "king of the party."

The message has lured some unlikely converts, including a heavily tattooed, self-described former mobster. "I've gone soft," says Daniel Webb, the son of an English father and Swedish mother, who spent five years in jail for illegal arms possession and assault. He was baptized, like most Swedes, in the Church of Sweden but never prayed. He went to church for the funerals of fellow hoods but scoffed at Christian sympathy for the meek.

Europe's upstart churches aren't yet attracting anywhere near enough customers to offset a post-World War II decline. But they are shaking up and in some places reviving the market for religion, argues Rodney Stark, a pioneer of religious supply-side theory at Baylor University in Texas.

Mr. Stark first developed the notion of a "religious market" in the 1980s as a way to explain America's persistent faith. It posits that people are naturally religious but that their religiosity varies depending on the vigor of what he calls religious suppliers. "Wherever churches are a little more energetic and competitive, you've got more people going to church," he says.

The notion that Adam Smith's invisible hand reaches into the spiritual realm has many detractors. Steve Bruce, a professor of sociology at Aberdeen University in Scotland, says market theory "works for cars and soap powder but it does not work for religion." Christianity in Europe, he says, has reached the point of no return, like a dying language doomed because too few people transmit its vocabulary to their children.

The Church of Sweden is also skeptical of the supply-side view. "We don't sell a product," says archbishop Anders Wejryd. With 1,800 congregations, he says, his church must cater to a spectrum of views. He says the Church of Sweden's more dynamic parishes, some of which mimic evangelicals' methods, are thriving.

Predictions that Christianity is doomed in Europe date back centuries. Writing in the early 1700s, Thomas Woolston, an Englishman, estimated it would die out by 1900. A century later, France's Auguste Comte proclaimed the end of mankind's "theological stage." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels viewed religion as a symptom of capitalist ills that would be cured by socialism. More recently, the demise of Christianity in Europe has led to warnings that the continent risks becoming "Eurabia," a land dominated by Islam.

Conservative U.S. preachers and politicians curse European nonbelief and trumpet the religious values of America's pilgrim fathers. But Mr. Stark, the supply-side theorist, says America's religiosity is relatively recent. In 1776, he says, around 17% of Americans belonged to churches. That is about the same as the current proportion of the population in Belgium, France, Germany and the U.K. that worships at least once a month, according to 2004's European Union-funded European Social Survey.

In the U.S., the American Revolution ended ecclesiastical hegemony in the 11 colonies that had an established church and unleashed a raucous tide of religious competition. As Methodists, Baptists, Shakers and other churches proliferated, church-going rose, reaching around 50% in the early part of the 20th century, he says.

Europe never developed such a religious bazaar. The Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the Catholic Church in Italy and France, state-funded churches in Germany and others lost their de-facto "monopoly" status to other denominations over a century ago. But they retained their ties to the state and economic privileges.

Grace Davie, professor of sociology at Britain's Exeter University, compares them to "public utilities" -- institutions that people look to for basic services such as weddings and funerals but that don't demand day-to-day involvement. The Church of Sweden, for example, has a near-monopoly on death. Its broad property holdings, gathered since the 16th century, include most of Sweden's graveyards. The state still pays it to oversee funerals, even those involving Muslim rites.

Around 75% of Sweden's nine million people are nominally members of the "state church" -- though few ever worship and around 10% are avowed atheists, says Jonas Bromander of the Church's research unit. Sweden's evangelical churches, by contrast, have only 31,000 members, but they worship regularly and are growing, slowly, in number.

Tension between the Church of Sweden and would-be competitors goes back to the early 19th century, when early evangelicals were banished into exile. So-called free churches were later permitted but they remained in the shadow of the state-coddled Church of Sweden.

After World War II, the Church of Sweden followed the leftward direction of Swedish political life. The Ecclesiastical Department, the ministry that supervised the church, was headed for years by a prominent atheist. Liberal theology triumphed. Church attendance plummeted.

In the early 1980s, Ulf Ekman, a Church of Sweden priest, set up Livets Ord, or the Word of Life, an American-style congregation in Uppsala. His strict Bible-based message and charismatic preaching style attracted a flood of worshippers, and also controversy. The Church of Sweden stripped Mr. Ekman of his status as a preacher. The media denounced him as a cult leader bankrolled by America. The government investigated. Today, his church has around 3,000 active members.

A big impetus to the return of faith is fear of the future, says Elisabeth Sandlund, editor of Sweden's main Christian newspaper, Dagen. In Sweden and across Europe, old moorings are coming loose as cradle-to-grave welfare systems buckle. "People want something solid to hold on to," says Ms Sandlund. While working as a financial journalist, she started sneaking off to church and in 1999 eventually told her husband she believed in God. "He was not happy," she says.

Whether competition for believers actually boosts belief stirs bitter academic discussion. Measuring religiosity is difficult and each side cites different statistics. The latest data from a major research project that tracks churchgoing and belief in concepts such as God and soul, the European Values Survey, were compiled between 1981 and 1999. (They show a decline in faith in the 1980s followed by a leveling off and, for some indicators, a slight bump in the 1990s.)

To try to refute the supply-siders, Aberdeen University's Mr. Bruce points to Poland and Ireland, highly religious countries each dominated by a Catholic "monopoly church." Mr. Stark and those in his camp counter that market mechanisms in Poland and Ireland were trumped by the church's role as a vehicle for nationalism. More revealing, they say, is America's boisterous religious market and its high levels of religiosity.

One factor now spurring religious competition in Europe is the availability of state money that traditionally flowed almost entirely to established churches. It still does, but the process is more open.

In Italy, the state used to pay the salaries of Catholic priests, but in 1984 it began letting taxpayers choose which religious groups get financial support. The proceeds of a new "religious tax" of 0.8% are now divided, according to taxpayer preference, among the Catholic Church, four non-Catholic churches, the Jewish community and a state religious and humanitarian fund.

The result is an annual beauty contest ahead of a June income-tax deadline, as churches try to lure taxpayer money with advertising campaigns. Catholics get the lion's share -- 87% of nearly $1.2 billion in 2004, the last year for which figures are available. But according to a 2005 study by Italian lawyer Massimo Introvigne and Mr. Stark, the system "reminds Italians every year that there is a religious economy."

Sweden has also overhauled church financing. In 2000, the government gave up formal control of the Church of Sweden. With great fanfare it replaced what had been a church "tax" with an annual "fee," still collected by tax authorities, levied on Church of Sweden members.

For the first time, taxpayers were told what they owed in cash -- instead of being given just a percentage figure, which is typically under 1% of household income. Church of Sweden membership dropped abruptly, and the church launched a publicity drive pitching religion. Membership stabilized, though church-going continued to decline. Still, the established church last year received around $1.6 billion in membership fees via state tax collectors. The church also brings in some $460 million in funeral-and-graveyard administration taxes.

A government-run commission provides money to 28 registered religious groups outside the Church of Sweden, but these funds totaled only $7 million last year. Passion Church and other such ventures rely mostly on voluntary donations by their worshippers. This, says Kjell-Axel Johanson, an evangelical priest, keeps upstarts more in tune with their flock. He recently set up a new church that, unable to afford a permanent home, rents a bar for a few hours. "God doesn't care about packaging," he says.

Hotel chain Scandic, meanwhile, has reversed course. Before Christians mobilized, it planned to keep a few copies of the New Testament at the front desk, along with the Quran and Hebrew Bible. With the hotel under new ownership since April, Bibles are back in rooms. The Swedish arm of Gideons, a Bible distribution group, recently gave the chain 10,000 New Testaments in Swedish and English.

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com

Labels: Andrew Higgins, Christian, church, Europe, evangelicals, faith, God, money, secular, supply-side economics, Sweden