It seems that when Christianity is popular, Christians are content with the idea of a firewall separating Church and State. It’s only when Christianity begins to lose it’s influence over the population at large that Christians begin to campaign for the State to adopt a Christian character.
Looking at survey data from 18 Western countries, they found:
-The fewer Christians in a country, the greater the support among Christians for a greater public role for religion (as shown in the graph).
-The polarization of views between Christians and non-religious on a public role for religion is greatest in countries where there are fewest Christians.
The relation is illustrated with a nice scatterplot:
Some of this can be attributed to specific factors in Europe relating to religious pluralism. Consider my coblogger Martin Rundkvist’s reflections on carolling. Even if a society is very secular, if the dominant religious orientation is uniform, then its background assumptions suffuse one’s daily life. One can therefore be a “cultural” Catholic or Lutheran, with an attachment to the exoteric forms associated with the religion, without being a believer. But when you have religious pluralism thrown into the mix people are going to disagree strenuously about exoteric forms. This applies even to the post-religious; an American atheist from a Jewish background may have a different attitude toward Christmas than an American atheist from a Catholic background. In other words, as European societies have become less Christian over the past generation, they’ve also had to face more religious pluralism. Christians will become more assertive and aggressive in direct response to Europe’s growing Muslim community, which wishes to contest the tacit monopoly that Christianity has long had in Europe as the Faith.
But another issue which might be at work is that as nominal or marginal believers fall away, the set of individuals who remain committed Christians are more religious and exhibit more fidelity to their identity than before. This may result in a group of Christians who are much more cohesive and can engage in collective action out of proportion to their numbers. Whereas before more marginal and nominal members of the community might have served as a check on excessive activism, today those individuals may no longer be part of the Christianity community.
The power of an organized Christian community is clear in a society such as South Korea. Though only around 30% of the population is Christian, with almost half the population not having a religious affiliation at all, Christians have been over-represented in positions of power. The growth of the Christian religion has been rapid, but has slowed over the past 15 years. It seems possible that it may be nearing its “natural limit.” But that does not mean that it won’t influential in the years to come.
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