I am a 14 year old American Teenager, and I was raised Catholic, but due to several big problems I have with the Catholic Church such as the Child sexual abuse scandal and the concept of hell, I am a non-denominational Christian now. In America, most of the youth (at least where I live) are apathetic about religion, but there are a few religious people I know who are teenagers as well (many of them non-Christian). I’m asking the question in the title of this post because I’ve heard that Europe is even more secularized than America, and I wanted to hear what actual Europeans think about the subject.
2 comments
Has the “youth been secularised”? That is a weird way to phrase it…
The honest answer is, I don’t think so. Denmark is far from a secular country, and among most people, also young people, some form of “Evangelism Light” or “Cultural Christianity” is the norm. So Christianity survives in traditions and in rituals, and to some extend also in a function of simply not relating to it, accepting a Christian identity, though without people necessarily believing. There is a certain apathy you also mention, where a lot of people simply don’t relate to their own religiosity or lack thereof, and accepts whatever they now are.
There are ofc. groups like the Inner Mission, and various free-churches of Baptist, charismatic, Pentecostal and so on denominations, who do attract young people, and do have youth groups, but they are the minority. But they do exist, and are somewhat growing in popularity. But back to the “being Christian without believing”-part.
Many Danes, also young Danes, are aware of the influence that Christianity has on our culture, and the way that Christian holidays and rituals are intrinsically tied to much of the national identity, so they go through with those traditions and rituals, and keep reproducing them with their kids, irregardless of their own possible lack of faith.
There has never been a great break with the church in Denmark; well, there has been, from the left, from socialist organisations, but even that opposition has subsided, and old labour movement attempts at creating secular and atheist alternatives to the Christian traditions have died out. For example many trade-unions used to organise community _juletræsfester_, around Christmas, in the Yuletide, as an alternative to the very bourgeois celebration of baby jebus. These attempts have generally been defeated by a popular insistence on the 19th century traditio-religious Christmas, with its contents.
I feel I need to tie a comment to church attendance, as the low church attendance is often brought up as an expression of Danish secularism. The theology of the Danish national church, and the general Evangelical-Lutheran theology, which remains the most dominant form of Christianity in Denmark, posits that _going to church isn’t a requirement to be a good and faithful Christian_. So even though only ~3% of Danes attend church services regularly, this shouldn’t be taken to mean that people are _necessarily_ less religious.
My own estimate is that around 1/3rd of Danes are “truly” religious. Both counting believers and fundamentalists—in the sense of Kierkegaard, not in the sense of groups like ISIS or WBC—but this doesn’t include that large share of Danes who maintain and reproduce Christianity through things like traditions and rituals because of the cultural role that Christianity fills.
Personally, I’m not religious. I don’t believe “in God, or in anything like that” to quote my late grandfather. But other members of my family are religious, many of them consciously so.
Is your question really whether or not there are 0 religious young people left in any European country? If so that’s a rather obvious of course not.