Maybe. I know that a lot of churches have the dynamic where disaffected ex- or quasi-members complain that their beliefs aren't accepted as those of proper church members, yet the church continues to count them as adherents when it comes time to cite numbers.
Countries with some sort of established church, or a church that is in some sense the default, get a lot of the phenomenon you describe in which a lot of people are sort of nominal members but never darken the church door. Here, I mostly hear it with secular Catholics and Jews, who tend to regard their religion as akin to or part of an ethnic category: something you are rather than something you believe. These people probably get counted as Catholics and Jews in statistics, because they were born that way, but they're not particularly religious.
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Date: 2006-04-16 03:16 pm (UTC)Countries with some sort of established church, or a church that is in some sense the default, get a lot of the phenomenon you describe in which a lot of people are sort of nominal members but never darken the church door. Here, I mostly hear it with secular Catholics and Jews, who tend to regard their religion as akin to or part of an ethnic category: something you are rather than something you believe. These people probably get counted as Catholics and Jews in statistics, because they were born that way, but they're not particularly religious.