phands, where did you find those numbers?
I decided to crunch them to see what I could learn about them. I normalized them by dividing them by the average of the numbers for the 30-49 and 50-64 cohorts, and I found some interesting trends. The 18-29 cohort was about 0.5 to 1 times the average, with France having 1.4 times the average. The 30-49 cohort had 0.8 to 1.1 of the average, and the 50-64 cohort 0.9 to 1.2 of the average -- not much variation. But the 65+ cohort was dramatically bigger. Its points clustered around 1.9, ranging from 1.7 to 2.2, with the extremes being the US at 1.2 and Lithuania at 3.7.
So going down in age, there is a big drop around 65 years old, with a slow decline afterward. From polls over the years, people in the US tend to be relatively fixed in their religiosity after about 18 to 20 years of age. If that fixity is also true of Europe, then we can ask what made a difference in the childhood and teens of those under 65. Anyone that age this year would have been 15 years old in 1964, and an obvious candidate is the great tumult in the late 1960's and early 1970's that several nations experienced. So did the Sixties cultural revolution decouple many people from organized religion, with their descendants staying decoupled?
This trend of elder religiosity also occurred in former Soviet-bloc countries, including the former Soviet Union itself. Despite Communism, many people there continued to take their opium.
