Rising numbers of non-believers, unaffiliated: should Christians be worried?

In the past, majority of people in Norway believed in God, but according to a recent survey, this is no longer the case.

The latest results of the annual Norwegian Monitor socio-cultural study, conducted by Ipsos Norway, show that 39 percent of the 4,000 people questioned do not believe in God. This is higher than the 37 percent of respondents who said they do believe, while 23 percent are undecided.

The survey, however, did not specify any paticular religion, belief or affiliation.

"It could be the Christian god, an independent god or one from other faiths. But since we started asking the question 30 years ago, the percentage of those who said they aren't sure has been about the same," Ipsos Norway's Jan-Paul Brekke said, as quoted by The Local. "There are quite a few immigrants included [in the survey] but the majority of them come from Western religious traditions. We have only a few Muslims in our material."

This is the first time that the numbers were reversed. According to the report, 50 percent of respondents in 1985 when the annual survey was first conducted said they believed, while only around 20 percent claimed the did not. Two years ago, however, the numbers were equal.

In the latest survey, 44 percent of respondents in Vest-Agder are believers while the Norwegian capital of Oslo had only 29 percent, the lowest in the country.

The decline in the number of those who admit to believing in God is not only confined in Norway, however. The Pew Research Center conducted a survey last year, which shows that 22.8 percent of Americans do not identify with any religion, a significant rise from the 16.1 percent in 2007.

Arthur Brooks, author and president of the American Enterprise Institute, however, does not believe that the Christian church is at risk of collapsing. Citing scholar Rodney Stark, the author of "The Triumph of Faith," Brooks said that while there is an increase in "unaffiliated" people -- or "the rise of the nones" -- there is neither a significant decrease in the number of those who go to church nor of those who identify themselves as atheists.

"If Stark is right, the recent 'rise of the nones' may not imply anywhere near the cataclysmic collapse in the American practice of Christianity as has often been claimed," he said in an article on the AEI website.