Value Endorsement Among Protestants and Catholics Within and Between Countries in Europe: Implications for Individualism

Protestantism, as opposed to Catholicism, is widely seen as having contributed to the rise of Western individualism. However, little is known about potential value differences between these two branches of Christianity in contemporary Europe. In the current work, we examined patterns of value endorsement among current and former Protestants and Catholics within and between 20 European countries using data from the European Social Survey (N = 163,586). Results reveal that within a given country, Protestants are more likely to endorse self-transcendence values than Catholics are, and these findings held when controlling for religiosity, differences in socioeconomic status, and differences in religious de-identification. Surprisingly, differences between Protestants and Catholics in value endorsement were sometimes larger among less (vs. more) religious respondents and were detectable even among former Protestants and Catholics, with former Protestants resembling religious respondents more than former Catholics did. Results also reveal that some Protestant–Catholic differences are consistent across cultures, whereas others— principally on the dimension of openness to change versus conservation—are moderated by which group is the majority heritage. We discuss the possible contribution of Protestantism to Western individualism’s universalistic orientation, considering the association between Protestantism and self-transcendence values.