The number of people turning their backs on organized religion in Switzerland has surged in recent years, diminishing in importance for the nine million population in a country where the Protestant Reformation played an important part.

Religion is of little importance in Switzerland – and becoming more irrelevant, World Radio Switzerland reported on Nov 18, citing two surveys recently published by the Swiss Pastoral Sociological Institute and the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation.

The report said that in 2023, year nearly 35,000 left the Catholic faith, and just over 39,000 abandoned the Protestant Reformed Church.

Now, 52 percent don't believe in a god at all – but 49 percent do believe in some form of life after death.

Of Switzerland's 8.9 million people, Roman Catholics account for 34.4 percent, Protestants 22.5 percent, other Christians 5.7 percent, Muslims 5.4 and 29.4 are "unspecified", according to the CIA Factbook.

The results were shown in the second edition of the survey "How are you, Switzerland?", commissioned by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC).

They confirmed that traditional religions only play a minor role for most of Switzerland's population.

For the first time, questions were asked on the subject of faith and less than a third of respondents said they strongly believe in God, while over half said they did not believe in God at all.

At the same time, three out of four respondents said they strongly believed in science.

Belief in God and science are not fundamentally mutually exclusive, according to Swissinfo.

When asked whether they believed in extraterrestrial life, only one in four people answered with a definite "yes," even though science itself considers it highly probable and UFOs continue to exert a great fascination.

And, while belief in science is strong, it is not uniform.

Two factors influence this trust: age and education level.

Younger people show greater trust in science and this decreases with age. Also, the higher the level of education, the stronger the belief in science.

The French lawyer Jean Calvin arrived in Geneva in 1536, and he laid out the principles of what has become known as Calvinism.

He transformed the city into one of the leading lights of the Reformation in Europe. Since then, Geneva has often been called the "Protestant Rome."