If a survey about the scientific method and objective truth, and there's a group where 80% say that they identify as believing in science and objective truth, but only 5% say it's "very important"...
More than 80% of Danes say that they are religious, but only 5% say it’s “very important”.
If a survey about the scientific method and objective truth, and there's a group where 80% say that they identify as believing in science and objective truth, but only 5% say it's "very important" to them, what would these contrasts suggest about the reality of their identification? Not to pick on Danes: this is a world wide every country thing, where there are more people who profess membership than participants.
Tolerance and trust in people who follow other religions ... Another way to understand people’s tolerance or trust is to ask whether they would or would not want particular groups as neighbors. In the chart below, you can see the share of people who said they would not want neighbors who followed a different religion from them.
This is one of the most important question one the whole survey for me: do we love tolerate our neighbours. Canada at 5.9% is higher than I thought. Would it be controversial to correlate religious identification with tolerance?
Last comment, China. They had much more religious identification in 2005. Their birth rate was doing okay then. GDP rose some but still quite low in comparison with other developed countries. They ended one child policy 10 years ago, and have been encouraging births for a few years now to no effect. With birth rate this low, they're not going to be the superpower they thought they would be by now.
More recently, China has offered parents 3,600 yuan (£375; $500) per each of their children under the age of three. Certain provinces are also dishing out their own baby bonuses, including additional payouts and extended maternity leave.
Some of these incentives have stirred controversy. For instance, a new 13% tax on contraceptives - including condoms, birth control pills and devices - has sparked concern about unwanted pregnancies and HIV rates. [...] The nation will lose more than half of its current population by 2100. (BBC, Jan 2026)
The numbers for Denmark indeed do not make sense. Highly misleading. They did not do their homework. Probably the 80% number is because afaik every newborn is more or less automatically a member...
The numbers for Denmark indeed do not make sense. Highly misleading. They did not do their homework.
Probably the 80% number is because afaik every newborn is more or less automatically a member of the church. It's opt-out, not opt-in, afaik.
In this poll all "religious" means is affiliated with a religion or identifying as a religion. Not anything about beliefs or practices. I don't agree that it's misleading. The data is really...
In this poll all "religious" means is affiliated with a religion or identifying as a religion. Not anything about beliefs or practices.
I don't agree that it's misleading. The data is really specific and they defined their terms.
The fact that folks gain church membership at birth absolutely skews that of course but it's not making any claims about the beliefs and is real data.
The fly out on religious affiliation It's explicitly defined and explained. If I say I'm Catholic but don't believe in God I'd get marked as religious. Emphasis mine.
One way to understand how religious a society is, and what religions people identify with, is to simply ask people directly.
At the bottom of this article, we discuss some of the limitations of relying on self-reported survey data.
Globally, most people say they belong to a religion, with Christianity and Islam accounting for the largest shares, but patterns vary widely across countries and regions.
That’s what the data on religious affiliation in this section captures. It relies on survey and census responses. Someone is described as being religious or non-religious based on their self-identification. If they report in a survey that they are Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, this is what is recorded, regardless of their actual practices or specific beliefs.
In this section, we look at this same affiliation data from several angles: how many people identify with a religion, which religions they identify with, and how these patterns vary across countries and regions.
Most of this data comes from the Pew Research Center. Its large global analyses are based on more than 2,700 sources of data, including national censuses, large-scale demographic surveys, general population surveys, and population registers.2
It's explicitly defined and explained. If I say I'm Catholic but don't believe in God I'd get marked as religious.
If I may push back a little against the use of the term "misleading": You can find out more about the data set's methodology here, including their sources (Danish figures seem to come from ten...
If I may push back a little against the use of the term "misleading":
You can find out more about the data set's methodology here, including their sources (Danish figures seem to come from ten separate studies), why their numbers can differ from other surveys, and also how they estimate the religious composition of children (as I understand it, it's not based on church membership, but in practice quite similar to what you suspected).
As always with these things, precision also matters. Being religious is different from believing in god or believing in a higher power. As the article that you linked to also says (if I parse the Danish correctly, particularly the term troende): although the number of Danes believing in God is dropping, it doesn't necessarily mean that the population is getting less religious. ("Men selvom færre danskere tror på Gud i dag, betyder det ikke, at vi er mindre troende, siger religionssociolog Brian Arly Jacobsen fra Københavns Universitet.")
This does suggest that people's relationship with religion and spirituality is changing, but that is not something that this dataset shows that well, as it is not something that it specifically focuses on. That would require a somewhat different approach and methodology.
Except that isn't what "religious" means. It's referring to identification with a religion not belief or practice. In part, that's so that they can separate folks who identify with a religion and...
Except that isn't what "religious" means. It's referring to identification with a religion not belief or practice. In part, that's so that they can separate folks who identify with a religion and folks who say that they have belief in God, for example, or attend church with some frequency. But all of those things vary a lot depending on what religion somebody identifies with.
Well, are they correlated or not? If they are, perhaps it would be controversial to just say that without backing it up but there can be a dialogue about why those things are correlated. But if...
Would it be controversial to correlate religious identification with tolerance?
Well, are they correlated or not? If they are, perhaps it would be controversial to just say that without backing it up but there can be a dialogue about why those things are correlated. But if they aren't actually shown to be correlated by any actual data (and I don't get the sense they are from this data -- certainly it doesn't seem to hold when one compares Europe and North America, and I think the data from Asia directly contradicts it even without the "trust in neighbors of different religion" section having data on the Middle East), I think it would just be saying something deliberately inflammatory.
Note that you can add and remove countries for each interactive chart.
If a survey about the scientific method and objective truth, and there's a group where 80% say that they identify as believing in science and objective truth, but only 5% say it's "very important" to them, what would these contrasts suggest about the reality of their identification? Not to pick on Danes: this is a world wide every country thing, where there are more people who profess membership than participants.
This is one of the most important question one the whole survey for me: do we
lovetolerate our neighbours. Canada at 5.9% is higher than I thought. Would it be controversial to correlate religious identification with tolerance?Last comment, China. They had much more religious identification in 2005. Their birth rate was doing okay then. GDP rose some but still quite low in comparison with other developed countries. They ended one child policy 10 years ago, and have been encouraging births for a few years now to no effect. With birth rate this low, they're not going to be the superpower they thought they would be by now.
The numbers for Denmark indeed do not make sense. Highly misleading. They did not do their homework.
Probably the 80% number is because afaik every newborn is more or less automatically a member of the church. It's opt-out, not opt-in, afaik.
Link to actual numbers
In this poll all "religious" means is affiliated with a religion or identifying as a religion. Not anything about beliefs or practices.
I don't agree that it's misleading. The data is really specific and they defined their terms.
The fact that folks gain church membership at birth absolutely skews that of course but it's not making any claims about the beliefs and is real data.
https://i.ibb.co/jP9D1vrn/image.png
"Share of people who are religious" - "regardless of beliefs"
What?
Please explain how this makes sense.
The fly out on religious affiliation
It's explicitly defined and explained. If I say I'm Catholic but don't believe in God I'd get marked as religious.
Emphasis mine.
If I may push back a little against the use of the term "misleading":
You can find out more about the data set's methodology here, including their sources (Danish figures seem to come from ten separate studies), why their numbers can differ from other surveys, and also how they estimate the religious composition of children (as I understand it, it's not based on church membership, but in practice quite similar to what you suspected).
As always with these things, precision also matters. Being religious is different from believing in god or believing in a higher power. As the article that you linked to also says (if I parse the Danish correctly, particularly the term troende): although the number of Danes believing in God is dropping, it doesn't necessarily mean that the population is getting less religious. ("Men selvom færre danskere tror på Gud i dag, betyder det ikke, at vi er mindre troende, siger religionssociolog Brian Arly Jacobsen fra Københavns Universitet.")
This does suggest that people's relationship with religion and spirituality is changing, but that is not something that this dataset shows that well, as it is not something that it specifically focuses on. That would require a somewhat different approach and methodology.
Thank makes way more sense. Thank you
Except that isn't what "religious" means. It's referring to identification with a religion not belief or practice. In part, that's so that they can separate folks who identify with a religion and folks who say that they have belief in God, for example, or attend church with some frequency. But all of those things vary a lot depending on what religion somebody identifies with.
Well, are they correlated or not? If they are, perhaps it would be controversial to just say that without backing it up but there can be a dialogue about why those things are correlated. But if they aren't actually shown to be correlated by any actual data (and I don't get the sense they are from this data -- certainly it doesn't seem to hold when one compares Europe and North America, and I think the data from Asia directly contradicts it even without the "trust in neighbors of different religion" section having data on the Middle East), I think it would just be saying something deliberately inflammatory.