Religion
In 1519, Huldrych Zwingli became the pastor of the Grossmünster in Zurich, and soon thereafter Zurich became a reformed or Protestant canton. Even though Zwingli died in battle in 1531, the canton remained a stronghold of the Swiss Reformed Church over the following centuries. While a plurality of the population is Protestant (43%), 31% of the population was Roman Catholic in 2004, a legacy of considerable immigration from Southern Europe.
From the 2000 census, 380,440 or 30.5% were Roman Catholic, while 497,986 or 39.9% belonged to the Swiss Reformed Church. Of the rest of the population, there were 29,592 members of an Orthodox church (or about 2.37% of the population), there were 1,435 individuals (or about 0.11% of the population) who belonged to the Christian Catholic Church, and there were 70,897 individuals (or about 5.68% of the population) who belonged to another Christian church. There were 6,461 individuals (or about 0.52% of the population) who were Jewish, and 66,520 (or about 5.33% of the population) who were Islamic. There were 5,878 individuals who were Buddhist, 6,024 individuals who were Hindu and 1,456 individuals who belonged to another church. 165,324 (or about 13.25% of the population) belonged to no church, are agnostic or atheist, and 50,090 individuals (or about 4.01% of the population) did not answer the question.
Read more about this topic: Canton Of Zurich
Famous quotes containing the word religion:
“Cultures essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? If none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Whoever seeks to set one religion against another seeks to destroy all religion.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (18821945)