Around the world, millions of people have traded the religious traditions of their upbringing for no religion at all.
In countries across Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, between 20 percent and 50 percent of the population has switched religions, according to a report out this week from the Pew Research Center. In most cases, they are now unaffiliated.
Over a third of adults in Spain and more than a quarter of those in Sweden, Germany, Canada, the Netherlands, the UK, and Australia are former Christians who are no longer religious. The US is not far behind at 19 percent.
While the survey doesn’t indicate when people left—whether they dropped the Christian label recently or long ago—Americans recognize the trajectory. US churchgoers have seen friends and family leave over disillusionment, deconstruction, and hurt, with some speaking out as part of the exvangelical movement.
But other places have their own contexts for religious switching.
Among the 36 countries in the Pew survey, Christians in Sweden and fellow European countries had some of the lowest retention rates. In Sweden, 4 in 10 adults who once identified with the faith—often due to membership in the national church—now consider themselves atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular.
Scandinavia ranks among the most secular regions in the world, where “religion was something simply left behind in the process of becoming an adult. The leaving of religion was something hardly memorable and of little personal significance,” Swedish scholars wrote in a paper out this month on religious deconstruction.
Yet a small network has emerged among Christians who had a different experience leaving Sweden’s minority churches, including charismatic, Pentecostal, and Evangelical Free.
“The stories told in the podcast Exvangeliet (and other similar podcasts) give a radically different picture of what it might mean to leave a Christian community in Sweden. The stories narrated are full of anger, bitterness, anxiety, loneliness, and grief,” scholars wrote. “Podcasted stories highlight that it is also the case that the ‘secular Swedes’ have little understanding of religion and the struggle of leaving a religious community.”
In Sweden and in the Netherlands, 30 percent of the population was raised Christian but left the faith, far exceeding the small percentage of non-Christians who joined.
“In many countries surveyed, more people were raised as Christians and have left Christianity than have become Christians after being raised in some other tradition or without a religious affiliation,” according to the report. “In other words, Christianity has experienced an overall or ‘net’ loss in adherents due to religious switching in many places.”
Pew researchers wrote that the trend around net losses for Christianity “is especially strong in many high-income countries.”
Singapore is one exception. Church growth in Singapore is outpacing the departures, with three Singaporeans becoming Christians for each one who leaves the church.
Pew found that in most places, people across generations were about as likely to report religious switching, although younger adults were more likely to disaffiliate from faith in several countries, including a handful in Latin America.
Leaders with the Lausanne Movement have cited previous Pew projects on the global rise of the religious “nones,” writing that new evangelistic approaches are needed “to address the issues related to religious disaffiliation and secularization behind it.”
In countries where Christian identity has fallen, church leaders face the challenge of convincing their secular neighbors to return to the fold. Niklas Piensoho, a Pentecostal megachurch pastor in Stockholm, sees the lingering cultural Christianity among the disaffiliated as a potential point of connection.
“My first step in talking with people here in one of the most secularized countries on earth is not what most might expect,” he told Outreach Magazine last year. “Among average people in Sweden, we still have strong connections to Christian ethics and values—such as providing for the poor, helping those in need and supporting people who are vulnerable. My first step is to look for what I can affirm.”
Correction: The figures in the chart of unaffiliated former Christians by country have been updated.
