In the 39th issue of the journal Social Change in Switzerland, Jörg Stolz and his colleagues use two surveys of all local religious groups in Switzerland to show that secularisation continues to advance. This process concerns not only the Reformed and Catholic churches, but the religious landscape as a whole. Over the last two decades, the number of local religious groups has fallen and the average age of their members has risen.
In Switzerland, local religious groups are organised into parishes, communities, mosques, synagogues or temples. Based on two comprehensive surveys and representative polls, a team of sociologists of religion has shown that the number of local religious groups will fall by 7% between 2008 and 2022. The Reformed and Catholic churches in particular have lost many local groups. In Switzerland's Muslim community, the number of mosques has also fallen slightly - even though the number of regular attendees has increased.
The situation is different for charismatic (or Pentecostal) evangelical communities. They are on the increase worldwide and, in Switzerland too, more than 200 new groups of this type have sprung up since 2008. But because so many groups have disappeared, the number of these local communities and regular participants has remained stable between 2008 and 2022. Charismatic evangelical communities in Switzerland are therefore not growing, but have a high fluctuation rate.
The decline in religiosity is also reflected in the proportion of the population that regularly attends religious services/ceremonies. In Switzerland, this will fall from around 11.6% to 9.5% between 2008 and 2022. There is a strong trend towards ageing: around half of regular participants are now over 60. The average age of spiritual leaders (priests, imams, etc.) has also risen sharply, from 50.8 to 53.8. This strong ageing trend is evident not only in the recognised Christian churches, but also in the Evangelical communities and among Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and Hindus in Switzerland. This result contradicts the idea that secularisation is limited to the traditional churches.
>> Stolz, J., Köhrsen, J., Senn, J., Monnot, C., Buzzi, A-L., & Hearn, A. (2024). Sécularisation et inclusion. L'évolution des groupes religieux locaux en Suisse, 2008-2022. Social Change in Switzerland, N°39, www.socialchangeswitzerland.ch
Contact
- Prof. Jörg Stolz, University of Lausanne, +41 (0)79 961 51 57, joerg.stolz@unil.ch
The series Social Change in Switzerland continuously documents the evolution of the social structure in Switzerland. It is published jointly by the Swiss Competence Centre for Social Sciences FORS and the LIVES Centre - The Swiss Competence Centre for Research on Life Courses and Vulnerabilities. The aim is to trace changes in employment, family, income, mobility, voting or gender in Switzerland. Based on state-of-the-art empirical research, it is aimed at a wider audience than just specialists.