BELIEVING AND BELONGING IN EUROPE

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates (trends and determinants of) individual combinations of religious believing and belonging in Europe from a cross-national and longitudinal perspective. Individual level data for the period 1981–2007 in 42 countries derived from the European Values Survey and the European Social Survey are harmonised and enriched with contextual characteristics, constituting a more comprehensive data base for Europe than any previous research. Complementary hypotheses from modernisation and market theories are derived systematically and tested rigorously. We find differential trends. In western societies, the popularity of secularity and consistent religiosity has persisted. In former communist societies, the popularity of consistent religiosity has increased whereas secularity has decreased. In both western and former communist societies, solitary religiosity has been a clear yet small phenomenon, somewhat increasing in western societies and somewhat decreasing in former communist societies. A crucial hypothesis derived from modernisation theories, stating that financial and social security would decrease consistent religiosity, is empirically supported.

Keywords:

• religion
• secularisation
• modernisation
• religious markets
• believing
• belonging

Acknowledgement

This research project has been supported by a major grant from NORFACE, entitled: Religious Sources of Solidarity, explicitly focusing on religious changes in Europe.

Notes

¹An analysis of the two operationalisations in the fourth wave of the EVS (1999–2002) and the first round of the ESS (2002–2003) in the same countries shows that the treatment of the middle category as religious is best in terms of comparability of average levels of religiosity (recoding 0–4 as non-religious versus 5–10 as religious): the difference between ESS, round 1 data is on average only 1.77% lower regarding religious people than the previous EVS wave 4 data. Moreover, we also tested whether the findings were robust in case we used a slightly different mode of coding religious self-definition: the results turned out to be substantially similar.

²We also considered and executed an even stricter analysis, in which we only included those who never attend. We found very much similar trends and results.

³We considered to include the Religious Freedom Index derived from Inglehart and Norris which is, however, not available at so many points in time. Therefore, we followed the advice of anonymous reviewers to refrain from including it.

⁴Unfortunately, the OECD measure for social expenditure is not available for several countries and periods. We tested whether leaving out social expenditure from the final model would substantially change the estimates for the other predictors in the model. This turned out not to be the case: a model without social expenditure would lead to the same conclusions with regard to the other predictors.

⁵Time and country are actually crossed factors. However, the software in which we were able to run our analyses, HLM, does not provide the possibility of cross-classified multinomial logistic models. Therefore, we decided to treat years in which data are collected as if they are nested within countries.

⁶We also tried to estimate a model without the EVS data. Unfortunately, probably due to the limited number of higher level cases and a high number of higher level independent variables, this model did not converge. None the less, we are confident that a model without ESS data is sufficient as a robustness test, because a model without EVS data should logically result in more or less similar deviations – but in the opposite direction – from the model on the complete data set.

⁷We briefly describe the presence of the four types of believing and belonging in Europe, ignoring longitudinal changes, just for this descriptive purpose. Let us start with the consistent categories: the category of secularity appeared to contain 31.6% of all respondents, whereas the category of consistent religiosity contained 40.8% of the respondents. Next, we focus at the inconsistent categories: the category of solitary religious people contained 19.6%, and the fourth, often neglected, category of habitual attendants contained 8.0%. Yet, we find substantial variation in the presence of these types across countries.

⁸Predicted probabilities are calculated from the logits of the various combinations of religiosity versus secularity. These logits are derived from the diverging trends model in Table 1. The predicted probability for secularity (the reference category) is: 1/(1 + e^{^}logit_{Consistent religiosity}+e^{^}logit_{Solitary religiosity}+e^{^}logit_{Habitual attendance}). The predicted probability of non-reference categories is, for example for consistent religiosity: e^{^}logit_{Consistent re‘ligiosity}/(1 + e^{^}logit_{Consistent religiosity}+e^{^}logit_{Solitary religiosity}+e^{^}logit_{Habitual attendance}). See e.g., Borooah (2001) for a detailed discussion.

⁹We decomposed this trend descriptively for the different former communist countries. We found this trend to be rather strong in following countries like: Bulgaria, Belarus, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, the Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine, and East Germany; however, somewhat less strong in countries like: Estonia and Romania.

¹⁰We also decomposed this trend for different former communist countries. This trend was rather strong in countries like: Bulgaria, Belarus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, the Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine and East Germany.

¹¹Let us explain briefly. We find that the main effects of year of survey (–0.001 for consistent religiosity versus secularity; –0.022 for habitual attendance versus secularity) apply to western European countries. However, for countries with a communist past, the estimated trend is the main effect of year of survey with the interaction added (–0.001 + 0.043 = 0.042 for consistent religiosity versus secularity; –0.022 + 0.065 = 0.043 for habitual attendance versus secularity).

¹²Recent descriptive analyses regarding church attendance and religious self-assessment show partially similar trends in many former communist countries (Mueller, 2011): moderate over-time increases in church attendance and rather massive increases in religious self-assessment. In these analyses different data sources were employed, including data in 1990 and 2008, meanwhile ignoring available data sources from the years in between 1990 and 2008.