Switzerland's non-religious population becomes largest group for first time

GENEVA

Switzerland's population with no religious affiliation overtook the Catholic community for the first time in 2022, the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO) announced Friday.

The FSO said the proportion of the population with no religious affiliation has increased to 34% in the last 50 years, while Catholics and Protestant-Reformed have steadily decreased to 32%.

As recently as 1970, only 1% of the population had no religious affiliation. That proportion rose to 11% by the turn of the millennium to 34%.

Only 16% of those aged 75 and older have no religious affiliation, according to the FSO. Those in the 25 - 34 age group comprised the highest proportion of people with no religious affiliation at 42%.

Overall, more men do not belong to any religion than women. According to the Federal Statistical Office of the Swiss Confederation, BfS, the main reason for abandoning religious affiliation was that they had lost or never had faith.

The BfS report said an additional one-third said that they disagreed with statements of the respective religious community. However, the BfS does not give an exact figure or explanation of the meaning of the statements.

The FSO also does not mention whether there is a connection with cases of abuse in Swiss churches.

In a report published in October, the Swiss Pastoral Sociological Institute (SPI) linked the high number of people leaving the church in Switzerland to the disclosure of cases of abuse, among other things.

In a study published in October, the University of Zurich showed that there had been at least 1,002 cases of sexual abuse in the Swiss Roman Catholic Church since the middle of the 20th century.

The school said it was only "the tip of the iceberg," as most cases were not reported or the documents destroyed.