An exploration of the salience of Christianity for national identity

Most scholars of identity focus on processes of boundary maintenance rather than on the cultural content of identity categories (e.g., language, religion). In this article, the author explores the cultural content of national identity categories in Europe. He focuses on individual and col-lective factors that are associated with the salience of Christianity for national identity in seventeen European countries. At the individual level, the author focuses on the relationships between the salience of Christianity for national identity and religious majority and minority status, the fre-quency of attendance of religious services, and their interaction. At the country level, using a group-threat perspective, he examines the relation-ships between the salience of Christianity for national identity and the size of various non-Christian populations, diversity in the non-Christian pop-ulation, and their statistical interaction. Individual-level survey data ar