Prozentsatz der Menschen, die sagen, dass Religion in ihrem Leben sehr wichtig ist, pro Land – Umfragen des Pew Research Center, 2018

America is such a black sheep in the western world regarding this.

Looks like a travel advisory map

Ethiopia checks out, it was incredible how religious it was. Even in central Addis Ababa you’ll see pedestrians, taxi drivers, and light rail passengers do the hand cross thing every time they pass by a church.

As a Korean the most common question I got while I was living there was „Korea is Christian right?“ because of how active Korean evangelicals were in much of Africa. I’d let them know, to their disappointment, that we’re probably one of the least religious societies on the planet.

It is interesting that Norway is considerably more ‘religious’ than Sweden or any of the other Northern European countries cited in this survey.

The real surprise for me is Uruguay on 29%. It has a very strong secular tradition, by global as well as Latin American standards; I can testify to this from experience as I spent time there as a (British) postgrad student. One of the main political parties, the centre-right Partido Nacional (aka Blanco) has Catholic roots, but many of its voters are not devout Catholics and some are agnostic. Most Uruguayans I met were agnostic, atheist or deist; only a small minority were practising Catholics. I admit to a metropolitan bias as I was based in Montevideo, but I did see a survey stating that Uruguay had one the highest (possibly the highest) global percentage of atheists and agnostics!

Incredible how well this correlates with lattitude. Almost as if cold knocks God out of you. Yes, correlation is not causation and yes, it’s not really just the cold. Still, the *apparent* correlatiin is striking.