There is both good news and bad news for Christians in Denmark.
The good news is that the number of baptisms is on the rise, according to Anders Gadegaard, the dean of Copenhagen's Church of Our Lady (Københavns Domkirke).
"We are seeing an increase in the number of enrolments [and] a rising interest in belonging to the Church of Denmark," Gadegaard said as quoted by The Local, a Danish online news source.
However, Gadegaard admitted a sharp rise in the number of people who recently decided to leave the Church of Denmark. In the second quarter of this year alone, he said 10,300 people left the church—the highest quarterly figure since 2007, when official statistics on church withdrawals were first recorded.
He said the figure was twice as high as in the first quarter of the year and more than four times higher in the same period last year.
What is triggering the Christian exodus from the Danish church?
Gadegaard pointed at the Danish Atheist Society (Ateistisk Selskab) as the prime instigator. The group launched a massive advertising campaign in the spring that included banners on buses asking, "Why believe in a god?", "Why should faith cost something"? and "Did Jesus and Mohammed speak with a god?".
The ads urge the public to visit the group's website, udmeldelse.dk, which provides short and easy instructions for leaving the church, allowing readers to easily access the necessary paperwork to leave the church.
The biggest come-on in the Atheist Society's campaign is their pronouncement that Danes will each save about 133,000 kroner (over $20,000) in church taxes in their lifetime if they quit the church.
Despite the atheist group's apparent success in convincing many Danes to leave the church, Gadegaard said he doesn't think it will have a lasting effect.
"I think the number is a reflection of a very special situation created by the atheists' campaign. We're not talking about a whole new trend that will continue," he told Politiken.
Denmark is not the only Scandinavian country that's seeing a record number of Christians leaving the church. Up north in Norway, over 25,000 Norwegians decided to leave the church in a matter of weeks last month. That is a huge number considering Norway's population of 5 million.
Unlike in Denmark, this exodus appeared to be the inadvertent handiwork of the Church of Norway itself when it launched a new website allowing people to easily verify their status within the church. The site also allows for a simpler withdrawal process—giving more than 25,000 Norwegians the tool to leave the church.
