Trends, determinants, and outcomes of religious affiliation in a highly secular context: Studying religion through national register data in Finland

The Nordic countries are among the most secular societies in the world.

However, religion remains salient for many parts of life and traditional narratives of secularization are facing challenges by recent developments in religious diversification, individualization and deregulation, growing religious minorities, and the religious conservative backlash against liberalization.

However, relevant research has been hampered by a lack of large-scale and fine-grained quantitative data, especially in the Nordic context with high secularity and (historically) low religious diversity.

In this project, we will deploy unique Finnish register data with information on individual religious affiliation 1971-2020, and answer key questions in the sociology of religion: trends and explanations of religiosity of younger cohorts with group comparisons, outcomes of religious individualization and diversity with causal inference, and how individual and contextual factors of religion jointly affect behaviors.

It will be a pioneering research project in the sociology of religion, unprecedented in international research, that uses the unique population-wide register data to research individual religion.

We make a significant contribution not only by answering these central questions in the field but also by improving our understanding of secularization and religion's salience in an increasingly dynamic world. The findings will also inform current public debates on cultural and religious issues.