In a telephone survey of more than 24,000 people in Western Europe, Pew discovered that, particularly when it came to Christianity, beliefs about God and identification as a Christian didn’t always overlap. In Western Europe in particular, the poll suggested, Christianity serves as a kind of cultural and nationalist identity marker as much as, if not more than, it does a religious faith. [...]
Just 64 percent of church-attending identified Christians believe in God as described in the Bible, while a mere 24 percent of non-practicing Christians do. (By contrast, 80 percent of American Christians say they believe in the biblical God.)
Among church-attending European Christians, high percentages express views that suggest a degree of nationalism: 72 percent say that it is important to be ethnically linked to a given country in order to be considered “fully” a member of that country (thus, for example, Germans “should” have German ancestry), and 49 percent believe that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with their culture. These numbers drop among non-practicing Christians — just 52 percent say someone’s full membership in a country should be predicated on their ethnicity, and 45 percent say Islam is incompatible with their culture.
The answers to those two questions drop even further among the religiously unaffiliated — down to 42 and 32 percent, respectively. More broadly, churchgoing Christians in Europe tended to have more negative views about Muslims, Jews, and immigrants than their non-churchgoing Christian counterparts, who in turn had more negative views than the religiously unaffiliated.
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