Religious Disaffiliation in a Secularized Society: A Register-Based Study of Finland on the Impact of Policy and Legislative Changes

<p dir="ltr">Finland, like other Nordic countries, is known for being practically very secular while maintaining a high level of National Lutheran Church membership in the population. The affiliation level has dropped drastically in recent decades under socio-cultural changes and the weakened relationship between the church and the state. In the current study, we deploy unique Finnish national register data with individual religious affiliation information for the entire population from 1970 to 2020 to investigate how the three policy or legislative changes have impacted disaffiliation in the Finnish population: the introduction of female priest 1984-1988, the same-sex marriage legislation 2015-2017, and the new laws on religious freedom and digital services in 2003. We show that the for the introduction of female priests and same-sex marriage, disaffiliation was mainly observed prior to the changes, possibly due to the debates and controversies over the issue. The 2003 reforms have dramatically increased disaffiliation, meaning that the secular church members can be easily motivated to disaffiliate by a bureaucratic change that simplifies the disaffiliation process. Thus, we suggest that secularization in Finland is likely to continue with value changes, institutional adaptations, and being non-religious becoming more socially acceptable.</p>