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Christianity is the largest religion in Belgium , with the Catholic Church representing the largest community, though it has experienced a significant decline since the 1950s (when it was the nominal religion of over 80% of the population). Belgium's policy separates the state from the churches, and freedom of religion of the citizens is guaranteed by the country's constitution.
According to the Eurobarometer poll carried out by the European Commission in 2021, the share of Christians was 49%, with Catholicism being the largest denomination at 44%. Protestants and other Christians comprised 4% and Orthodox Christians comprised 1%. Non-religious people comprised 41% of the population and were divided between those who primarily identified as atheists (15%) or as agnostics (26%). A further 2% of the population was Muslim, with the remainder belonging to other religious or unspecified groups.
According to a 2010 Eurobarometer poll: [2]
Some religious people dispute these precise figures, as it is difficult to determine the number of Belgian Christians that believe in a personal deity. What is also unclear is the number of registered Belgian Catholics with deistic beliefs or who periodically attend small Evangelical churches.
Religious group | Population % 1981 [3] | Population % 2009 [3] | Population % 2015 [4] [5] [6] | Population % 2018 [7] | Population % 2019 [8] [9] | Population % 2021 [1] |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Christianity | 74.5% | 52.5% | 59% | 63% | 60% | 49% |
Catholicism | 72.0% | 50.0% | 51% | 57% | 54% | 44% |
Protestantism and other Christians | 2.5% | 2.5% | 6% | 5% | 5% | 4% |
Orthodox Christianity | 2% | 1% | 1% | 1% | ||
Islam | 3.0% | 5.0% | 5% | 8% | 5% | 2% |
Judaism | 0.4% | 0.4% | – | – | – | – |
Buddhism | – | 0.3% | – | – | – | 1% |
Other religions and unspecified including "Refusal to answer" and "Do not know" | – | – | 5% | – | 4% | 7% |
Atheism | 2.5% | 9.2% | 14% | 9% | 10% | 15% |
Not religious | 21.5% | 32.6% | 17% | 20% | 21% | 26% |
An online Ipsos survey conducted between 20 January and 3 February 2023 on a representative sample of Belgians aged 16 to 74 found that 47% had no religion, 44% was Christian, 4% was Muslim and 2% followed an other religion. The remaining 3% refused to answer. The Christians were further subdivided into 38% of total respondents being Catholic and 5% being other Christians. The sample size was more than 500 people and the confidence interval was +/- 5 percentage points. [10]
The Belgian constitution provides for freedom of religion, and the government generally respects this right in practice. However, government officials have the authority to research and monitor religious groups that are not officially recognised. There are a few reports of societal abuses or discrimination based on religious belief or practice, and some reports of discrimination against minority religious groups.
Belgian law officially recognizes many religions, including Catholicism, Protestantism, Anglicanism, Islam, Judaism, and Eastern Orthodoxy, as well as non-religious philosophical organizations (Dutch: vrijzinnige levensbeschouwelijke organisaties; French: organizations laïques). [11] Buddhism is in the process[ when? ] of being recognized under the secular organization standard. Official recognition means that priests (called "counselors" within the secular organizations) receive a state stipend. Also, parents can choose any recognized denomination to provide religious education to their children if they attend a state school. Adherents to religions that are not officially recognized are not denied the right to practice their religion but do not receive state stipends.
After attaining autonomy from the federal government in religious matters, the Flemish Parliament passed a regional decree installing democratically elected church councils for all recognised religious denominations and making them subject to the same administrative rules as local government bodies, with important repercussions for financial accounting and open government. In 2006, however, Catholic bishops still appointed candidates to the Catholic Church councils because they had not decided on the criteria for eligibility; they were afraid that candidates might be merely baptized Catholics. By 2008, however, the bishops decided that candidates for the church councils had only to prove that they were over 18, a member of the parish church serving the town or village in which they lived, and baptized Catholic. [12]
In 2022, the country was scored 3 out of 4 for religious freedom. [13]
Catholicism has traditionally been Belgium's majority religion, with particular strength in Flanders. However, by 2009, Sunday church attendance was 5.4% in Flanders, down from 12.7% in 1998. [14] Nationwide, Sunday church attendance was 5% in 2009, down from 11.2% in 1998. [15] As of 2015, 52.9% Belgian population claimed to belong to the Catholic Church. [6] According to Ipsos, only 41% of the working-age, internet connected people declared to be Catholics. [16]
Until 1998, the Catholic Church annually published key figures such as Sunday mass attendance and the number of baptized children. In 2006, it announced that mass attendance for the Christmas period was 11.5%, and weekly mass attendance (not only on Sundays) was 7%, [17] for the Flanders region. Since 2000, Sunday church attendance in Flanders has dropped by an average of 0.5%–1% each year. [18] In the years 2010 to 2016, 12,442 people in Flanders formally left the Catholic Church. [19]
The “Catholic Church in Belgium 2023” report said that 50% of Belgium’s population identified as Catholic in 2022 down from 53% in 2017 with 8.9% attending Mass at least once a month. [20]
In 1566, at the peak of Belgian Reformation, there were an estimated 300,000 Protestants, or 20% of the Belgian population. [21] The Spanish reconquest of the Southern Netherlands in the Eighty Years' War prompted most of the Belgian Protestants to flee to the north or convert, causing the region to again be overwhelmingly Catholic. As of 2017, Protestantism represented 4% of the total population, according to Pew Research. [22]
The Administrative Council of Protestant and Evangelical Religion in Belgium is a coordinating group that mediates between many Protestant groups and the government. The largest Protestant denomination is the United Protestant Church in Belgium, with some 138 affiliated churches. [23]
Belgium had thirteen Anglican churches as of 2012, [23] including the pro-cathedral, Holy Trinity, Brussels. They are part of the Church of England's Diocese in Europe, and of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe. [24]
Eastern Orthodox Christians made up 1.6% of the total Belgian population in 2015. [6] The region with the greatest proportion of Eastern Orthodox Christians was the Bruxelles-Capital Region, in which they formed 8.3% of the population. [25] Ipsos' survey in 2016 found that Orthodox Christianity was the religion of about 1% of the working-age, internet connected Belgians. [16] The Eastern Orthodox Church in Belgium is subdivided into several canonical jurisdictions: Russian, Ecumenical, Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian.
There are significant Armenian communities that reside in Belgium, many of them are descendants of traders who settled during the 19th century. Most Armenian Belgians are adherents of the Armenian Apostolic Church, with smaller numbers belonging to the Armenian Catholic Church or the Armenian Evangelical Church. These churches have not yet received official recognition.
In 2015, according to the Eurobarometer survey made by the European Commission, 5.2% of the total Belgian population was Muslim. [6] In a 2016 study, Ipsos found that 3% of the working-age, internet connected Belgian population declaring to be believers in Islam. [16]
As of 2015, it was estimated that 7% of the Belgians (781,887) were Muslims, including 329,749 in Flanders (forming 5.1% of the region's population), 174,136 in Wallonia (4.9%), and 277,867 in Brussels (23.6%). [26]
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There is a small but long-standing Jewish community concentrated in Antwerp.
Eurobarometer 2015 found only 0.2% of the total Belgian population declaring to be Buddhist. [6] Despite that, one year later Ipsos found that 2% of the working-age, internet connected Belgians were Buddhists. [16]
According to Ipsos, 1% of the working-age, internet-connected Belgians declared that they believed in Confucianism. [16] This segment of the population may include many – if not all – the Chinese communities in Belgium.
Hinduism forms a negligible but growing minority in Belgium. In 2006, there were about 6,500 Hindus in the country. [27] this increased to 7,901 Hindus in 2015 [28] and 10,000 in 2020. [29] The majority of Hindus in Belgium originate from Nepal, some come from diamond trading communities in India, and some are native converts, mostly of the ISKON movement. [30] [27] Hindus in Belgium in 2023 push to be recognized as an official religion in Belgium. [31]
Antoinism is a Christian-inspired new religious movement which was created by Louis-Joseph Antoine (1846–1912). It remains the only significant such movement to originate in Belgium and has adherents in France and elsewhere.
Jainism is a Dharmic religion from India which has around 2,000 adherents in Belgium (as of 2020), consisting mainly of Indian migrants who specialize in the diamond trade within Antwerp. The Shankheswar Parshvanath Jain temple, which is located in the Antwerpian municipality of Wilrijk, remains the only Jain temple within continental Europe. [32]
After the Roman period, Christianity was brought back to the southern Low Countries by missionary saints like Willibrord and Amandus. In the 7th century, abbeys were founded in remote places, and it was mainly from these abbeys that the Christianization process was started. This process was expanded under the auspices of the Merovingian dynasty, and later by Charlemagne, who even waged war to impose the new religion.
From the Spanish military conquest of 1592 until the re-establishment of religious freedom in 1781 by the Patent of Toleration under Joseph II of Austria, Catholicism was the only religion allowed, on penalty of death, in the territories now forming Belgium. However, a small number of Protestant groups managed to survive at Maria-Horebeke, Dour, Tournai, Eupen, and Hodimont. [33]
Religion was one of the differences between the almost solidly Catholic south and the predominantly Protestant north of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, formed in 1815. The union broke up in 1830 when the south seceded to form the Kingdom of Belgium. In Belgium's first century, Catholicism was such a binding factor socially that it prevailed over the language divide (Dutch versus French). The decline in religion's importance as a social marker across late-20th-century Western Europe explains to a large extent the current centrifugal forces in Belgium, with language differences (increasingly reinforced by a positive feedback effect in the media) no longer being kept in check by a religious binding factor. If anything, the Catholic Church has acquiesced to these changes by having a Dutch-speaking university (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) and a French-speaking university (Universite Catholique de Louvain).
Until the late 20th century, Catholicism played an important role in Belgian politics. One significant example was the so-called Schools' Wars (Dutch: schoolstrijd; French: guerres scolaires) between the country's philosophically left-wing parties (liberals at first, joined by Socialists later) and the Catholic party (later the Christian Democrats), which took place from 1879 to 1884 and from 1954 to 1958. Another important controversy happened in 1990, when the Catholic monarch, King Baudouin I, refused to ratify an abortion bill that had been approved by Parliament. The king asked Prime Minister Wilfried Martens and his government to find a solution, which proved novel. The government declared King Baudouin unfit to fulfill his constitutional duties as monarch for one day. Government ministers signed the bill in his place [34] and then proceeded to reinstate the king after the abortion law had come into effect.
This section relies largely or entirely upon a single source .(June 2022) |
In 2002, the officially recognized Protestant denomination at the time, the United Protestant Church of Belgium [35] (consisting of around 100 member churches, usually with a Calvinist or Methodist past) and the unsubsidized Federal Synod of Protestant and Evangelical Churches (which had 600 member churches in 2008 but did not include all Evangelical and Charismatic groups outside the Catholic tradition) together formed the Administrative Council of the Protestant and Evangelical Religion (ARPEE in Dutch, CACPE in French). The council is now the accepted mouthpiece of Protestantism in all three linguistic communities of Belgium: Dutch, French, and German.
The 21st century has witnessed significant changes in the religious demography of Belgium, characterized by a decline of Catholicism and the growth of irreligion and other religions, some of them brought by waves of immigration from foreign countries, including Pentecostalism, Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Chinese religions.[ citation needed ][ clarification needed ]
Apart from Islam, however, these groups are very small demographically, especially alongside the unaffiliated demographic of 37%. [36]
Results of the 2021 Census for England and Wales, which asked the question "What is your religion?", showed that Christianity is the largest religion, followed by Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Taoism in terms of number of adherents, while Shamanism is the fastest growing religion. Among Christians, Anglicans are the most common denomination, followed by Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Unitarians, and Baptists. This, and the relatively large number of individuals with nominal or no religious affiliations, has led commentators to variously describe the United Kingdom as a multi-faith and secularised society. The Census has also been criticised by statisticians and demographers for its use of a leading question which critics say inflates the number of people reporting a religious identity. Other major surveys which ask a differently worded question find a majority of people in the UK do not belong to a religion, with Christianity the largest religion.
The Catholic Church is "the Catholic Communion of Churches, both Roman and Eastern, or Oriental, that are in full communion with the Bishop of Rome ." The church is also known by members as the People of God, the Body of Christ, the "Temple of the Holy Spirit", among other names. According to Vatican II's Gaudium et spes, the "church has but one sole purpose–that the kingdom of God may come and the salvation of the human race may be accomplished."
Christianity is the largest religion in Germany. It was introduced to the area of modern Germany by 300 AD, while parts of that area belonged to the Roman Empire, and later, when Franks and other Germanic tribes converted to Christianity from the fifth century onwards. The area became fully Christianized by the time of Charlemagne in the eighth and ninth century. After the Reformation started by Martin Luther in the early 16th century, many people left the Catholic Church and became Protestant, mainly Lutheran and Calvinist. In the 17th and 18th centuries, German cities also became hubs of heretical and sometimes anti-religious freethinking, challenging the influence of religion and contributing to the spread of secular thinking about morality across Germany and Europe.
The majority of the religious population in France identifies as Christian. Catholicism is the most prominent denomination in France, but has long lost the state religion status it held prior to the 1789 French Revolution and during various non-republican regimes of the 19th century, including the Restoration, the July Monarchy and the Second French Empire.
Religion has been a major influence on the societies, cultures, traditions, philosophies, artistic expressions and laws within present-day Europe. The largest religion in Europe is Christianity. However, irreligion and practical secularisation are also prominent in some countries. In Southeastern Europe, three countries have Muslim majorities, with Christianity being the second-largest religion in those countries. Ancient European religions included veneration for deities such as Zeus. Modern revival movements of these religions include Heathenism, Rodnovery, Romuva, Druidry, Wicca, and others. Smaller religions include Indian religions, Judaism, and some East Asian religions, which are found in their largest groups in Britain, France, and Kalmykia.
Christianity is the largest religion in Luxembourg, with significant minorities of non-religious people and adherents of other faiths.
Religion in the Netherlands was dominated by Christianity between the 10th and 20th centuries. In the late 19th century, roughly 60% of the population was Calvinist and 35% was Catholic. Also, during the Holocaust, there was a big Jewish population. Since then, there has been a significant decline in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, with Protestantism declining to such a degree that Catholicism became the foremost form of the Christian religion. The majority of the Dutch population is secular. Relatively sizable Muslim and Hindu minorities also exist.
Religion in Italy has been historically characterised by the dominance of the Catholic Church since the East–West Schism, but, over the years, due to immigration, the influx of Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Protestants, Buddhists and Hindus, as well as proselytism, religious pluralism has increased. Italy also features a pre-Christian Jewish community and one of the largest shares of Jehovah's Witnesses in the world.
Christianity in Italy has been historically characterised by the dominance of the Catholic Church since the East–West Schism. However, the country is also home to significant Christian minorities, especially Orthodox Christians, Protestants and Jehovah's Witnesses.
Catholic Christianity is the predominant religion in Malta. The Constitution of Malta establishes Catholicism as the state religion, and it is also reflected in various elements of Maltese culture.
Religion in Austria is predominantly Christianity, adhered to by 68.2% of the country's population according to the 2021 national survey conducted by Statistics Austria. Among Christians, 80.9% were Catholics, 7.2% were Orthodox Christians, 5.6% were Protestants, while the remaining 6.2% were other Christians, belonging to other denominations of the religion or not affiliated to any denomination. In the same census, 8.3% of the Austrians declared that their religion was Islam, 1.2% declared to believe in other non-Christian religions, and 22.4% declared they did not belong to any religion, denomination or religious community.
Christianity in France is the largest religion in the country. France is home to The Taizé Community, an ecumenical Christian monastic fraternity in Taizé, Saône-et-Loire, Burgundy. With a focus on youth, it has become one of the world's most important sites of Christian pilgrimage with over 100,000 young people from around the world converging each year for prayer, Bible study, sharing, and communal work.
Religion in Sweden has, over the years, become increasingly diverse. Christianity was the religion of virtually all of the Swedish population from the 12th to the early 20th century, but it has rapidly declined throughout the late 20th and early 21st century.
Christianity is the most prevalent religion in the United States. Estimates from 2021 suggest that of the entire U.S. population about 63% is Christian. The majority of Christian Americans are Protestant Christians, though there are also significant numbers of American Roman Catholics and other Christian denominations such as Latter Day Saints, Eastern Orthodox Christians and Oriental Orthodox Christians, and Jehovah's Witnesses. The United States has the largest Christian population in the world and, more specifically, the largest Protestant population in the world, with nearly 210 million Christians and, as of 2021, over 140 million people affiliated with Protestant churches, although other countries have higher percentages of Christians among their populations. The Public Religion Research Institute's "2020 Census of American Religion", carried out between 2014 and 2020, showed that 70% of Americans identified as Christian during this seven-year interval. In a 2020 survey by the Pew Research Center, 65% of adults in the United States identified themselves as Christians. They were 75% in 2015, 70.6% in 2014, 78% in 2012, 81.6% in 2001, and 85% in 1990. About 62% of those polled claim to be members of a church congregation.
The dominant religion in Slovenia is Christianity, primarily the Catholic Church, which is the largest Christian denomination in the country. Other Christian groups having significant followings in the country include Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism (Lutheranism). Islam, Judaism and Hinduism are small minorities in Slovenia. About 18% of the population are either agnostic or atheist.
The predominant religion in the Republic of Ireland is Christianity, with the largest denomination being the Catholic Church. The Constitution of Ireland says that the state may not endorse any particular religion and guarantees freedom of religion.
In 2022, the constitution of Belgium provides for freedom of religion. The law prohibits discrimination based on religious orientation; however federal law bans face-coverings being worn in public.
Estonia, historically a Lutheran Christian nation, is today one of the least religious countries in the world in terms of declared attitudes, with only 14 percent of the population declaring religion to be an important part of their daily life. This is thought to largely be a result of the Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940, prior to which Estonia had a large Christian majority.
The main religion traditionally practiced in Latvia is Christianity. As of 2019, it is the largest religion (68.84%), though only about 7% of the population attends religious services regularly.
The decline of Christianity in the Western world is the decreasing Christian affiliation in the Western world. While most countries in the Western world were historically almost exclusively Christian, the post-World War II era has seen developed countries with modern, secular educational facilities shifting towards post-Christian, secular, globalized, multicultural and multifaith societies.