Europe is less Christian than at any other time in its modern history. Overall church attendance is in decline, it’s increasingly common for Europeans to identify as agnostics or atheists, and, among the faithful, Christianity is no longer the continent’s default religion.  

Yet, unlike the United States, Europe has never experienced anything resembling a “War on Christmas” – no backlash about the holiday and no push to remove religious symbols from public life.

The difference does not appear due to religious belief, but rather to institutional inheritance.

Religion in Europe was already embedded into public life generations before the recent trend toward secularization and the mass arrival of people from other faiths. Even at its height, religion was never an entirely private matter. It was established as an institution of the state – and even after centuries those institutions remain.

Even the European Christian churches that have seen their congregations erode over time have maintained their civic role.

(As of 2020, about 67% of Europeans were Christians, compared to roughly 72% in 2010, according to the Pew Research Center.)

In the U.K., King Charles is the head of state as well as the head of the Church of England.

In Italy, home to the Vatican City, political leaders often make a show of consulting the Pope ahead of major initiatives, and a small slice of government tax revenue each year is earmarked for the church.

Scandinavian governments broke many of the formal ties with the Lutheran Churches over the last two decades, though they are still referred to as “state churches” and many residual bonds remain.

In most European countries, crosses still appear prominently on the walls of government buildings, in courts, and in classrooms, while speeches from public figures are often sprinkled with Biblical references. Around the holidays, municipal governments erect Christmas decorations and town squares host Christmas markets.

European secularization began when power started drifting away from the clergy in the late 1600s, during the Enlightenment and in the wake of a series of devastating religious wars. With the establishment of state schools and the advent of economic industrialization, daily life for Europeans became less focused on the church, and after World War II the influence of churches was reduced even further.

But none of that impacted the role Christmas and other Christian holidays had for communities. Those dates remained part of European countries’ calendars and not to a specific constituency.

From the start, religion had a different role in the U.S., where it is constitutionally protected but institutionally separate from the state. Churches in the U.S. remain private associations, not civic fixtures, and individual expressions of faith are voluntary.  At least in part because of that, Christmas and other Christian holidays are highly symbolic in the U.S. – and often fertile ground for culture clashes.