ZURICH – The number of apostates is on the rise in Switzerland. Many have left the faith from the Catholic and Protestant sects of Christianity. For the first time in history, those who declared no religious belief got a majority in the census of religious believers, according to the statistics of the Swiss Federal Statistics Department.
34 percent of the Swiss population currently do not believe in any religion. The latest estimates put Catholics at 32 percent, and Protestants and other Christian denominations at about 25 percent. In 1970, 96 percent of the Swiss population was Christian. The figures at that time were 49 percent Protestant and 47 percent Catholic.
In 2022 alone, 34,561 people left the Catholic Church and 30,102 people left the Protestant Church. According to the Federal Statistics Department, most of the apostates are young people in urban areas. A spokesman for the Swiss Pastoral Sociological Institute said of the young people’s apostasy that “the main messages of Christianity are not going away from the minds of the Swiss people, but the churches should pay more attention to keep people firmly in the faith in the changing times.” If the graph of the number of believers of the Christian denominations is downward, the growth of other religions is upward, albeit slowly. Muslims were 3.6 percent in 2000 and increased to 5.9 percent in 2022. During the same period Jews went from 0.7 to 1.3. Hindus make up 0.6 percent of the Swiss population.
Summary:
Apostates on the rise in Switzerland