Close to God, far from the Divine Liturgy? Faith and church participation beyond the findings of a polltranslated
Archimandrite Athenagoras Soupourtzis writes
Professor of Ecclesiastical and Canon Law, Theological Academy of Volhynia
Doctor of Canon Law E.K.P.A., LLM School of Law D.P.Th. – Sunderland University Law School LLM
91% of Greeks go to church even rarely; only 9% declare that they never attend. In a Europe where distancing from religious life has elsewhere become the majority attitude, this magnitude is not self-evident.
Of course, the recording of religious life with the tools of empirical research is a useful contribution to the public debate, without exhausting the object to which the findings refer; this dictates a corresponding caution in their interpretation.
The evidence comes from MRB's recent survey of "Parapolitics" ("Trends" wave, June 2026, sample of 2,000 people). Size takes on its full significance in light of European data; in the Pew Research Center's comparative survey of Western Europe, the median of those who say they rarely or never go to church is 58%. The categories of the two surveys are not completely comparable; the order of magnitude, however, is clear. In the…
