Research commissioned by The Iona Institute has suggested that young people in Northern Ireland are the most favourable towards religion in the province.
Nearly a third (30 per cent) of 18-24-year-olds surveyed by the institute have a positive attitude towards religion, while just four per cent have a “very negative” view.
As well as being more favourable to religion in general, the poll found that young people were the most likely to have a positive view of the Catholic Church (17 per cent).
Speaking to Catholic publication Crux, Iona Institute director David Quinn said the findings among young respondents were encouraging.
“The fact that some kind of revival of interest in religion is occurring among the youngest age group surveyed should encourage all the Churches,” he said.
“It is not an outlier finding because polls elsewhere have seen the same thing. Maybe a growing subset of young people are concluding that secularism isn’t really giving satisfactory answers to life’s big questions."
Over a quarter of all survey respondents (28 per cent) identified as Catholic, compared to 14% who were Presbyterian, and 11% who said they belong to the Church of Ireland. Over a third (36 per cent) were religious 'nones' - not belonging to any religion.
Over half (56 per cent) described themselves as "religious and/or spiritual", compared to 39% who said they were neither.
The poll was conducted by Amarach Research on behalf of the Iona Institute and involved speaking to 1,200 adults.
Iona said the research showed that Northern Ireland could no longer be viewed through the old Catholic versus Protestant lens, now that significant segments of the population do not identify with either denomination.
Quinn said, “One big thing it shows is that the North cannot be thought of in Catholic versus Protestant terms anymore because now we have a lot of ‘nones’, that is people who don’t belong to any religion. They have a ‘plague on both your houses’ attitude."
Hostility between Catholics and Protestants dominated the headlines during “The Troubles”, a decades long social conflict involving terrorist and armed groups as well as the British state. Thousands of people were killed and injured in violent incidents, with the conflict officially coming to an end with the Good Friday Agreement of 1997. Violent incidents have sporadically occurred since that time.
Quinn sees challenges nonetheless. He said, “In the future, there will probably be fewer ‘cultural Christians’ around, that is, people who say they are Christian but don’t practice. Instead, society could be divided between those who believe in religion and those who don’t believe, with little in between, that is between the religious and the ‘nones’.
“This seems to be what is happening in both the North and the South. The overall conclusion, however, is that religion is not disappearing, contrary to past predictions.”
