[daanluttik]

I always feel like the counts for Christian branches provide an extremely skewed view. Since it's faily common for people to count themselves as Catholic or Orthodox simply due to their upbringing (even when they don't believe there is a God) on the other hand people who consider themselves Protestant almost exclusively don't just believe in God and the authority of the Bible but usually wont consider themselves Protestant without having made a formal choice to follow Jesus and join a church (whatever that means from within their denomination).

I think that if you only count Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants who believe in God, the authority of the Bible Protestants suddenly become a majority possibly a very large majority.

I might be wrong in this; I grew up in the Netherlands where officially we have 20% Catholics and 15% Protestants but although I live in one of the most "Catholic" places of the country I havent encountered a single Catholic that goes to church exept for on eastern and chrismas (and then they usually do it to please family, and yes I thought for a while if it is really not a single one). On the other hand everyone I encountered who calls himself a Protestant meets that more strict definition I talked about above. And Ive heard similar stories from international students in my university.

But again I might be very wrong and am definitely open to data that proves me otherwise.

[skissane]

It is complicated. Some people who come from a Catholic or Orthodox background still want to identify with that background as a cultural identity (e.g. "cultural Catholic") even if they no longer believe in its doctrines or follow its practices. The same happens sometimes for Protestants too, but seems to be somewhat less common among them–a Protestant who stops believing is more likely to just be a "none" than to call themselves "culturally Protestant".

One can point to some examples of "cultural Protestantism" though. Northern Ireland: in the 2011 census†, over 40% of its population identified as "Protestant", but for many of them it is primarily a cultural identity rather than a religious one. The outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins has repeatedly called himself a "cultural Anglican", and I'm sure he'd not be the only person to say that (although Anglicans disagree among themselves about whether Anglicanism is Protestant, so a "cultural Anglican" may not necessarily consider themselves a "cultural Protestant")

> but usually wont consider themselves Protestant without having made a formal choice to follow Jesus and join a church (whatever that means from within their denomination).

That's a biased criterion because the criterion itself is based on Protestant cultural assumptions, which in turn are based on Protestant theological assumptions. Many Protestants believe one becomes a Christian by making "a formal choice to follow Jesus". Catholics and Orthodox believe one becomes a Christian by baptism, and infants who are incapable of making such a choice are regularly baptised. It is not that Catholics and Orthodox do not care about personal faith, they do, but they do not make it the central focus in the way that many Protestants do.

And that (in part) explains why there are more cultural Catholics than cultural Protestants – to Catholics, the Church is first and foremost a community, and once you are in, you are in for life – maybe you no longer attend, don't believe, don't want to have anything to do with it – but if you ever change your mind, you'll be welcome back with a minimum of fuss, as if you'd been there all along. So Catholic theology encourages the "cultural Catholic" phenomenon in a way that Protestant theology does not.

† The 2021 census results are due out next year, which will give us a more current picture of Northern Ireland's religious demographics