World's least religious countries

[C C]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worl...countries/

EXCERPT: The world's most populous country is also the globe's least religious. [...] 90 percent of all Chinese consider themselves to be atheists or not to be religious. [...] China [...is...] followed by countries in Europe — about three fourth of all Swedish and Czech also said that they were either atheists or not religious. Although China's society has deep religious traditions, decades of Communist rule have installed a widespread atheistic materialism that still surprises many visitors.

[...] Western Europe and Oceania are the only regions where about 50 percent of the population or more either consider themselves to be atheists or not religious, as well. [...] With 65 percent, Israel has surprisingly many citizens who consider themselves not religious or to be atheists.

[...] The survey's authors found that people younger than 34 tend to be more religious than older respondents. This is particularly surprising from a U.S. perspective where an increasing number of younger citizens do not identify with any religion at all — contrary to older Americans.

[...] According to their analysis, education plays a smaller role in determining the religiousness of an individual than income. "Among those with a medium high and high income less than 50 percent say they are religious, against 70 percent of those with low, medium low and medium income." [...]

This list of the world's least religious nations does not indicate a decline of belief. Worldwide, six out of 10 people say that they are religious. Most believers can be found in Africa and the Middle East [...] followed by Eastern Europe, America and Asia. "With the trend of an increasingly religious youth globally, we can assume that the number of people who consider themselves religious will only continue to increase...."

[elte]

I'm not surprised that younger people who were lacking the level of instruction like their patents had against adopting a belief in the supernatural would have a tendency to become believers.  One of the results of evolution is that humans are predisposed to deal with disquieting philosophical questions superstitiously.

[Yazata]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worl...countries/

EXCERPT: The world's most populous country is also the globe's least religious. [...] 90 percent of all Chinese consider themselves to be atheists or not to be religious.

I don't believe that.

My experience with Chinese immigrants is that most of them are Chinese traditional religionists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_tra...l_religion

They venerate ancestors, they take things like Feng Shui and traditional Chinese medicine very seriously and are often huge believers in traditional forms of magic. Chinese can be hugely supersititious, and that's mixed up with all kinds of Daoist-derived metaphysics and with belief in various cosmic forces and spirits and traditional deities.

The thing is, Chinese traditional religion isn't recognized by the Chinese authorities and in China it's illegal to be a member of an unrecognized religious group. Most Chinese don't formally sign up with religious groups, since doing so can make them objects of discrimination by the avowedly atheist authorities.

[...] China [...is...] followed by countries in Europe — about three fourth of all Swedish and Czech also said that they were either atheists or not religious.

I'm a little skeptical about that too. I've seen figures for Denmark in which many Danes report that they don't believe in God. But when asked if they believe in a 'higher power', about 80% will say 'yes'. That's not all that different than what we see in the United States, except that Americans will often use the word 'God' to refer to a vague 'higher power'.

Although China's society has deep religious traditions, decades of Communist rule have installed a widespread atheistic materialism that still surprises many visitors.

At least superficially. I'd be willing to wager that there has been far less change at the level of people's actual worldviews.

If atheistic "materialism" (with Marxists you never know what that word really means) really was triumphant in China, why would the Chinese authorities be so fearful of unauthorized religious expression and why would they try so desperately to suppress it? Fo Guang Shan is the most recent example, but the fear dates back to imperial China, when Daoist secret societies were often hotbeds of anti-regime agitation.

My bottom line observation is that there's probably a lot less variation in underlying religiosity around the world than the academic authors of "surveys" would like us to believe. What varies is the standing of "religion" among opinion-leading elites who wield local power .

In China, where an ostensibly atheist Communist Party in control, and where unrecognized religious expression has been perceived as potentially subversive since Imperial times, people are reluctant to reveal their religious ideas. And in the Middle East, where fundamentalist Islamism is ascendant, where everyone is simply assumed to have been born Muslim, and where leaving the Islamic Ummah is punishable by a very unpleasant death, no doubt a lot of people are claiming a religious adherence that they don't really feel.  

In Europe, with its history of state churches and "progressive" anti-clericalism, there's always been more social pressure from the media and education elites to be outwardly nonreligious than one finds in the United States, where visibly belonging to the religion of one's choice has always been seen as an expression of America's fundamental liberty.