When it comes to national identity, neither religion nor where you were born is necessarily very important. That’s the striking message from a newly published cross-national survey by the Pew Research Center. Polling over 14,000 people in 14 countries, researchers found that people overwhelmingly considered faith and birthplace to be secondary factors in forging a common national identity. Emphasizing the importance of language and customs over religion or place of birth, the report also reveals some significant generational shifts in attitudes governing what makes people belong to a nation. [...]
Across all countries, younger people were far more likely to consider religion less important to national identity. In only two countries did the gap between older and younger citizens’ views on the relative identitarian significance of religion measure 10 percent or less. One was Poland—where the Catholic church has historically acted as a repository for nationalist aspirations repressed in other political arenas—and the other was France. France likely shows little difference in opinion between age groups because its strong tradition of official secularism means that the yoking together of Catholicism and national identity is singularly rare, even among the elderly. [...]
If many people many people are abandoning the idea of religion as the cement of national identity, they are not necessarily replacing it with an emphasis on where people are born. Figures on the importance of birthplace in national identity reveal a complex picture. While in Europe, only Hungary and Greece show a majority of respondents stating that birthplace is very important, more Europeans consider it very or somewhat important than not significant.
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