ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the debate about the importance of different religious orientations in Europe by suggesting a measurement model that allows to distinguish church religiosity and presents the relative importance of each religious orientation across 11 European countries. It introduces the most important religious options available to Europeans. Since 1950, empirical research on religion in Europe was framed in terms of secularization theory. Some expectations about the results of the measurement model will be formulated that will help to guide the process of model selection. The chapter describes the dataset and the operationalization of the concepts and also presents the results of the Multiple group latent class analysis-model. It also describes that five patterns of religious orientations were expected to be found in the data: church religiosity, believing without belonging, atheism, religious indifference, and alternative spiritualities. Studies on religious orientations implicitly or explicitly assume that historically in Europe church religiosity was dominant.
