I've enjoyed pondering this chart assembled by religious demographer Ryan Burge:
It combines data on weekly church attendance from various European countries and all 50 American States. Reliable church attendance figures are hard to come by. Often they're based on self-reports in surveys, which usually exaggerate attendance: when researchers do an actual body-count in churches, the numbers always come out lower. But for now, I'm going to take the numbers at face value.
First and most obviously, the United States is much more religiously observant than Europe (from here on, I'll say "religious," problematic as that may be): The least religious state, New Hampshire, outranks most of the European countries shown.
Within the United States, New England earns its reputation as the least religious part of the country. All of the New England states rank in the bottom 10.
In Europe, Poland is in a class by itself, with church attendance higher than any American state and any other European country.
Of the European countries with fairly high church attendance (comparable to US figures), most are predominantly Roman Catholic. Two (Cyprus and Montenegro) are predominantly Orthodox. Traditionally Protestant countries dominate the bottom of the chart, though some traditionally Catholic and Orthodox countries are there too. I'm tempted to say that Protestantism has relatively little staying power against the onslaught of modernity. But then how would I account for the greater religiosity of the majority-Protestant United States?
A few online pundits have held up Russia and, more recently, Hungary as beacons of Christianity when compared with the "decadent" West. They won't get much help from this chart. Hungary hovers near the bottom of the chart, with 8% church attendance. Russia isn't shown here, but all reports I've read put church attendance even lower, at around 6%.
There are some odd omissions: Greece and Romania, two strongly Orthodox countries, as well as Russia, are missing. Why? No reliable data?
Many studies have noted the very rapid rise of "The Nones" -- Americans with no religious affiliation -- in recent years, accelerating strongly since 1990 or so. I suspect that a re-do of this chart 10 years from now might look quite different.
