Census 2022 question on religion

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120661107#Comment_120661107

I think the focus on decline of Catholicism as opposed to rise of non-religion becomes pertinent for many of us in this forum when we ask ourselves why should we even care? The simple truth remains that the Catholic church* has a disproportionate negative influence in the lives of non-Catholics, most notably in our school system but also elsewhere. My belief is, that for all the talk about divestment, the Catholic church are unwilling to concede anything more than a token number of the schools they control for fear of much faster and deeper erosion of their base. The current state of decline of the Catholic church has to be viewed in the context of a disproportionate majority of young children being educated within a Catholic ethos, regardless of parental preferences. Put more bluntly, we have a significant part of our population being coerced into a Catholic tradition against their will to prop up a failing church. This clearly needs to change and this need has been apparent for a very long time.

(* by Catholic Church in this instance I include the hierarchy and laity)

Hotblack Desiato

@Peregrinus That mismatch would be of no concern to anyone if we had secular health and education systems.

Edit: Smacl, that post pretty much nails it. Although I can't resist pointing out a parallel...

Put more bluntly, we have a significant part of our population being coerced into a Catholic linguistic tradition against their will to prop up a failing church language.

Might as well kick both sacred cows while I'm at it.

Cabaal

I fully expect Catholics to drop by a further 10 pts come the next census.

The drop in the recent census was not surprising at all, the church is disconnected from the avg joe and most people that call themselves catholics are infact "bouncy castle catholics" and do not agree with many of the core catholic beliefs. The catholic church is a religion in crisis.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120661506#Comment_120661506

You make a good point. Where I was coming from, really, was that in the "Atheism and Agnosticism" forum people should be interested in atheism/agnosticism/non-religion in itself, and as something more than simply "not Catholicism". As Ireland becomes less and less monolithically Catholic the two concepts increasingly diverge, and there's more to be said about non-religion than simply "we're not Catholic!"

That's illustrated by the numbers quoted earlier in the thread showing that the rise in the number of non-religious, in absolute terms, is much bigger than the fall in the number of Catholics. Clearly non-religion is growing as a result of factors other than alienation from Catholicism, and it follows that more and more non-religious people are not going to be ex-Catholics; they'll be people who never had any religious background, or who have come from other religious backgrounds.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120662691#Comment_120662691

Sorry, but . . . "bouncy castle Catholics"? I love the image, but can you explain the metaphor?

Cabaal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120664773#Comment_120664773

Catholics in name that hate the idea of going to mass every Sunday, don't believe in core catholic beliefs, voted yes in repeal ref, marriage ref and divorce refs but they love the day out for communion and confirmations where the kids can play on a bouncy castle.

They typically respond to people like me with "What!? You didn't baptise your child! But won't you be upset that they'll miss out on the day out for communion/confirmation".

In response to which I generally ask them are they disappointed that their kid is missing out on having their bar mitzvah (mitzvah for a girl), at which point they explain they are not jewish and they miss the point entirely.

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120664641#Comment_120664641

I tend to disagree here, speaking as a life-long atheist raised by atheist parents. I'm an atheist in much the same way as I don't follow football. Suggesting an atheist should have interest in 'atheism/agnosticism/non-religion' is akin to saying someone who is bored witless by football should take an active interest in why they don't like football. What is more interesting to me is secularism, as many of us from a wide range of traditions (yourself included from memory), would consider ourselves secularist in one form or another. For me, in a nutshell, this is advocating for the happy co-existence of 'freedom of religion' with 'freedom from religion' where anyone is free to openly and publicly celebrate their traditions but not to forcibly impose them on others who might not share their world view. My thinking, very simply, is we should strive for an inclusive society that actively celebrates diversity and accepts each others differences.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120664976#Comment_120664976

Fair enough, and I don't disagree with any of it. But even secularism is different from "not-Catholicism" — so very different, in fact, that it's perfectly possible to be a Catholic and advocate secularism, at least in some understandings of "secularism".

I'm probably labouring the point a bit here, especially as I think we are largely in agreement. But the growth of the non-religious sector of Irish society is of significance for reasons which go beyond "these people are not Catholic" is really all that I'm saying.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120664976#Comment_120664976

Most of what is discussed on this forum is about secularism/the interaction of religion(s) with the state, etc. The 'what is atheism' 'you must believe in something' 'why are you discussing what you don't believe in' etc. type threads were a thing in the early years mainly driven, it seems, by god botherers incensed that this forum existed at all, and incensed enough to start threads 🤪 they're long gone now.

As far as boards is concerned the debate on the existence of god is over, and god lost (and disappeared in a puff of logic).

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120665001#Comment_120665001

Whenever Irish catholic clerics write on the subject of secularism they either define it as irreligion, or anti-theism, because these definitions suit their purposes much better than what secularism really means.

Same as materialism. I can guarantee anyone educated in an Irish catholic school left with the impression that materialism = greed.

Of course in countries where other religions are much larger than the RCC it's all in favour of secularism in the true sense then - they are happy to have the state protect THEIR right to their beliefs in that case, but where they have (had!) enough power and influence they used the state to attack others' right to freedom of belief.

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120665001#Comment_120665001

the growth of the non-religious sector of Irish society is of significance for reasons which go beyond "these people are not Catholic" is really all that I'm saying.

We'll need the detailed demographic breakdown to more fully understand it but, at a guess, the major factor is generational. For many of the younger generation religion is neither mandatory nor relevant. Where it is mandatory, this is to a large degree due to religious instruction at school. Where this is not reinforced in the home, religion becomes irrelevant. As we move on a generation, we have parents who would consider religion irrelevant and we get the acceleration in numbers declaring as non-religious. Religious observance in the home has to compete with NetFlix, TikTok and PlayStation*. Add to this the dwindling cohort of ageing clergy and it seems likely the trend will continue. Even with all this in play, I'd guess we still have very many people self identifying as religious (primarily Catholic) for traditional reasons. Declared church attitudes to same-sex marriage, abortion, etc... along with ongoing abuse scandals within the church have made many question even this.

In support of the assertion that nominal religious affiliation is generational, we see non-religious weddings are currently on a par with religious weddings. This in turn suggests only half of those of marrying age identify as religious. It seems reasonable on that basis that identifying as religious will likely continue to decline as new generations replaced old ones.

(*not an attack on religious observance, the same could be said of reading books or playing outdoors)

Hotblack Desiato

The huge shift away from church* weddings is a sea change in Irish society which doesn't get the recognition it deserves IMHO. I got married in 2006, most of those present had never attended a civil wedding before, I'd only attended one. Today it's more unusual to have a church wedding than a non-church one!

These couples are in very many cases the parents of present day, or future, primary school going children but in this regard, unlike weddings, they will have little or no choice.

[*] I say 'church' not 'religious'. The Irish state classes Spiritualist weddings as religious, but depending on the couple's wishes they can have no religious/spiritual content or references at all - and of course don't take place in a church. There aren't enough humanist celebrants to go round and the HSE is more restrictive on when a civil ceremony can take place. The Spiritualists are happy to fill the gap

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120666636#Comment_120666636

I think what we have here is a substantial disengagement from religion which, yes, is generational.

But this isn't a simple binary — you're either a weekly churchgoer and a paid up member of the Christian Mothers' Sodality, or an atheist. There's plenty of evidence from other countries that people can have a very low engagement with religion — "Christmas and Easter", so to speak, or even less than that — and still retain a religious identification which is meaningful to them, and this can persist for generations. And this identification can be reflected in behaviour — e.g. people who don't go to church opting to pay the church tax, choosing to send their children to Catholic schools, etc. Only 40% of Icelanders attend church more than once a year, and only 10% more than once a month, but 90% of them pay tax to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Iceland.

This is very annoying to some of the regulars on this board, but I don't imagine the people to whom this applies care very much about that. What remains to be seen in the Irish context is where we will end up. How many of those who disengage or largely disengage from religious practice will renounce a religious identity completely, and how many will retain one?

Catholic identification in Ireland has fallen from about 90% a generation ago to just under 70% today. That's a dramatic fall which I expect will continue. But mass attendance was estimated at 35% in 2016, and I would guess is lower today. That points to a lot of people who have stopped going to mass but haven't (yet) renounced a Catholic identity. Some of them probably will, in time; some of them never will. Some of their children will, but some of their children won't. And we don't yet know how big those two groups will turn out to be.

smacl

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120668661#Comment_120668661

I agree entirely, there are without a doubt very many people who identify as Catholic who barely even pay lip service to religious practise. It would be interesting, to me at least, to know what their beliefs actually are. More importantly perhaps, it would be interesting to understand what role they think religion should play in our society. My feeling is that many are quite happy to keep religious instruction in the school curriculum just so long as they don't have to spend any of their own precious time being involved in the religious instruction of their kids. Likewise, chucking a few bob at a swanky confirmation party as a display of affluence. These, I think, are the 'bouncy castle Catholics' Cabaal referred to earlier, to whom religion is more about tradition and social conformity than any heartfelt belief.

The non-religious weddings thing becomes interesting in this context, as it represents not just a turn away from religion in a younger generation, but also from tradition. These are people who clearly reject nominal religious affiliation and identity, where I'd imagine in many cases, there is still external pressure from parents and family for a religious ceremony. I can't imagine many of these people would involve their children in communion or confirmation parties in years to come, so we likely have a future growing cohort of people who not only don't practise religion but also don't identify as religious.

There is also a clear disconnect for many between Christian (and even more so Catholic) morality and that held by the majority of our society. The optics surrounding abuses by the clergy worldwide in recent decades also undermines the credibility of the church to dictate on morality, which also no doubt has people turning away from the church both in terms of religious practice and identity.

The census just scratches the surface on all of this, and what the future holds is anyone's guess. If I was a betting man, my punt would be that Ireland will no longer be a Catholic majority country within 20 years and that the percentage identifying a Catholic will stabilise at around 40%. That said, I'd need pretty good odds to actually put any money on it ;)

darjeeling

The 2022 Irish census figures on religion by age group have been published. In 2016 we'd seen a big shift away from religion in younger adults, and this trend continues, with around a quarter of young adults ticking 'no religion'.

As these younger adults become parents, they increasingly tick 'no religion' for their children, and we see about 16% of 'no-religion' pre-schoolers in the 2022 census.

Among young adults, not many more than half tick 'Roman Catholicism', and the percentage among pre-schoolers has fallen to two thirds.

Around 60% of young adults identify with a Christian denomination, and a little under three in four pre-schoolers are put down as Christian.

An unusual feature of this census is a big increase in people with 'no stated' religion. This may have something to do with the way the question was worded this time.

Elsewhere, Orthodox Christianity accounts for around 3% of 25-45 year-olds and 2% of children, Islam accounts for 2 to 3% children and young adult age groups, and Hindus account for around 2% of 25-35 year-olds.

Peregrinus

An unusual feature of this census is a big increase in people with 'no stated' religion. This may have something to do with the way the question was worded this time.

It could have something to do with that. (Was the wording of the question changed this time?) But if, as I suspect, what this reflects is a sharp rise in the number of people simply not answering the religion question, it may point to a signficant change in the way religion is viewed in Ireland

In the past, whatever your position on religion in Ireland, there was a largely shared assumption that the question was an important one which everybody, whether religious or not, ought to have thought about, and ought to have nutted out some kind of position for themselves. What the sharp rise in the "not stated" figure might indicate is a growing section of the population who are just not interested in religion — religious questions don't interest them or seem relevant or important; they don't want to think about them; they don't want to have to adopt a position on them. They're completely indifferent to religion.

smacl

I find the age distribution on the graph below interesting as it suggests that the changes are most likely generational and permanent. For example, if you look at the 2016 graph and shift it to the right by 6 years (i.e. to look at where the folks from 2016 were in 2022), you see that the entirety of that graph still lies below to red 2022 graph. Not only are those who are leaving religion in their 20s not returning to religion, older people are increasingly leaving their religion too. My interpretation of the drop in the graph between 0-4 and 15-19 is the effect of compulsory religious education in schools for both the pupils and their parents filling out the census form. What's also interesting here is that the biggest relative change is in the 0-4 to 10-14 ranges which suggests increasingly children born to non-religious parents and never having religion. Again this points to compulsory religion in most schools running contrary to the preferences of a large part of the population.

Anyway, that's my reading of the tea leaves, I also tell fortunes and read Tarot cards should anyone be interested... 😉

Peregrinus

Hi Smacl

My interpretation of the drop in the graph between 0-4 and 15-19 is the effect of compulsory religious education in schools for both the pupils and their parents filling out the census form.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Can you expand?

I imagine that for all three cohorts 0-4, 5-9 and 10-14, their religious identification is assigned by their parents. Assuming that most children are born when their parents are aged 30-35, the parents of most of the (say) 10-14 cohort are in the 40-44 or 45-59 cohorts. But we note that non-religion is much higher in the "parent" cohorts than in the "child" cohort. And the same is true if we look at the parent cohorts that correspond to the other two child cohorts. How are we to explain this?

Possible explanations include:

• Non-religious adults choose to have fewer children
• People who have children are less likely to reject religion
• People who reject religion for themselves do not always make a similar choice for their children; they leave that for the children to do in their own time. (This may be especially true in families where one parent identifies as non-religious and the other does not.)

It's not clear that any of these things are the result of the religious education the children receive. Indeed, it's hard to see how the religious education the children receive could have any effect on the choices the parents make.

And, if religious education is having an effect on this, I query how relevant it is whether the education is compulsory or not. Do the effects of maths, or English, or history classes differ according to whether the subject is compulsory or not? Not saying you might not have a point here, but I think it could stand to be unpacked a bit.

smacl

As per your previous post, we're seeing an increase in indifference towards religion. So rather than talking about people rejecting religion, as some kind of positive emphatic act, they're simply not engaging with religion unless forced to do so. One such time is to nominally accept a religion for their child in order to get into the local school. If little Jimmy had to be baptized in order to get into St Wilgefortis school around the corner, little Jimmy is now a Christian in the eyes of his parents. Parents don't care less, but Jimmy, never having actually been to church with a family member unless strictly necessary, also abandons religion on leaving school.

We live in a society that has preferred our children to be religious in terms of getting a state funded education. Many of those who don't care much about religion either way will accept this status quo, no questions asked.

darjeeling

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121344774#Comment_121344774

It's striking that between the 2016 and 2022 censuses there's been a 5% drop in all Christian denominations in people in their 70s and 80s. That's not happened in any previous census and it makes me think that the two little words tacked on the end of the question caused people to respond differently when answering,  “What is your religion, if any?” The new form implicitly gives people permission not to answer the question, and a large number chose not to do so.

I don't know that we can assume that the people who didn't answer the question are indifferent to religion. Maybe they just don't have a strong enough identification with any one religion or lack thereof, and preferred - now that they were allowed to do so - not to tick a box when none of them quite felt right. Or maybe they didn't think it was a question that should have been on the census in the first place.

Hotblack Desiato

It's illegal for baptism to be a requirement for admission to just under 95% of primary schools - someone tell the parents... because the church won't!

Do they actually think that the secret police match up census forms to individuals, or something, and don't want to be caught lying on the census when they said on the school admission form little Johnny was a catholic? Stranger things have happened.

ohnonotgmail

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121346639#Comment_121346639

>>It's illegal for baptism to be a requirement for admission to just under 95% of primary schools -

Open to correction but can schools not give priority to children who have been baptised? I'm sure I've heard that.

Hotblack Desiato

Minority religion schools can, yes. Church of Ireland about 5% of primary schools and literally a handful of others.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121345486#Comment_121345486

Pretty sure there was a drop (not quite as large as that) in the OAP cohort in 2016, but finding anything about age breakdown on the CSO website is all but impossible and Boards search returned nothing even though there was definitely much census discussion at the time.

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121346639#Comment_121346639

But not often. What seems more likely to me is that (a) some parents baptise their children in the (mistaken) belief that this will provide a school enrolment advantage, and (b) having baptised their children, they think of them as having a religious affiliation that ought correctly to be recorded in the census return. You can argue with those beliefs, obviously, but that doesn't mean that people might not genuinely hold them.

Hotblack Desiato

People believe all sorts of odd things don't they 😁