Religious change and church attendance in Western Europe

This chapter focuses on religious change by looking at the development of religious practice in seventeen Western European countries, from the beginning of the seventies to the present. Church attendance is the variable examined, aiming at introducing the national religious maps that are discussed more thoroughly in each chapter throughout the book. The chapter draws on a number of well-known longitudinal cross-sectional studies (Eurobarometer, ESS, EVS, WVS, ISSP). The results show that, over the past fifty years, patterns of church attendance clearly differ across three clusters of countries. In Ireland, Northern Ireland, and most of Southern European countries, church attendance exhibits a slow decline. In Central European countries together with Great Britain and Spain, the decline is much steeper. Finally, the Scandinavian countries and Eastern Germany have been characterized by very low levels of church attendance since the 1970s.