Greg Daly
The vast majority of Irish Christians are raising their children in the Faith, a new survey has found, with even non-practising Christians more inclined to have their children brought up in their religion than non-practising Christians elsewhere in Western Europe.
Almost 25,000 adults across 15 countries were interviewed last year for ‘Being Christian in Western Europe’, a survey by the Washington, DC-based Pew Research Centre, which found that in a typical Western European country just 64% of adults identify as Christian and only 18% of adults say they attend Christian religious services at least monthly. In Ireland, however, these figures stand at 80% and 34%, respectively.
Services
Only Italian and Portugese Christians report higher rates of church attendance, with the former being 40% and the latter 35%, inviting comparisons with 2016’s European Social Survey figures that found Irish religious practice to be the second highest of 18 surveyed countries, second only to Poland.
According to the new figures, 99% of Ireland’s church-attending Christians are raising their children as Christians, with 92% of those who identify as Christian without attending religious services even monthly doing likewise. Of non-practising Christians in the 15 surveyed countries, only Germans and Italians are as likely to have their children raised as Christians.
Strikingly, only 5% of Ireland’s non-practicising Christians are raising their children without any religious affiliation, according to the survey. No other surveyed country has as few non-practising Christians raising their children outside the Faith altogether, with non-practising German Christians being the next-least likely to do so, at 7%.
In Sweden, by comparison, 31% of non-practising Christians are raising their children without a religious identity.
The poll has also revealed that non-practising Christians are the single largest religious group in Western Europe, with many of these saying that while they identify as Christian, they believe in a higher power but not God “as described in the Bible”, the vast majority of non-practising Christians favouring believing that abortion and same-sex marriage should be legal.
It found that in Ireland, 42% of church-attending Christians favour legal abortion with 81% of non-practising Christians doing so, marginally higher than the 80% of religiously non-affiliated who do so.