Europe is starkly divided between east and west on attitudes towards minorities and social issues such as gay rights and abortion, data shows.

Despite the fall of the iron curtain and the eastward expansion of the EU, the attitudes of people in central and eastern countries differ significantly from those in western Europe, according to surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center involving 56,000 adults.

Asked if they would be willing to accept a Muslim or a Jew into their family, fewer than half of respondents in almost all central and eastern European countries said yes compared with more than half in western European countries. Only Croatia and Italy bucked the trend.

Armenia was the country least accepting of minorities, with 7% saying they were open to a Muslim joining their family and 28% saying the same about a Jew. The Netherlands came out on top at the other end of the scale, with 88% saying they would accept a Muslim and 96% a Jew.

According to Pew, “attitudes towards religious minorities in the region go hand-in-hand with differing conceptions of national identity”. With some exceptions, people in central and eastern Europe considered being Christian – Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant – a major part of their national identity, whereas a majority in most western European countries regarded it as unimportant.

A similar geographical divide was apparent on another measure of nationalism: cultural chauvinism. Central and eastern Europeans were generally more likely to agree that “our culture is superior to others”. The countries in which this attitude was most prevalent were Greece, Georgia, Armenia, Bulgaria, Russia, Bosnia, Romania and Serbia.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A gay rights activist at a rally in central Moscow last year. Photograph: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images

The survey results generally indicated a European divide, with high levels of religious nationalism in the east and more openness to multiculturalism in the west, said Pew.

On the issue of same-sex marriage, there were majorities in favour in every western European country surveyed by Pew, in contrast to eastern European countries where majorities in most countries opposed marriage equality.

The most hostile countries were Georgia, Armenia, Russia and Moldova, where more than 90% opposed same-sex marriage and 5% or less approved of it. The most liberal countries on the issue were Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.

The picture was slightly more mixed on abortion, but the trend was the same. Georgia, with 85%, and Moldova, with 79%, were the countries where people were most opposed to legal abortion, compared with only 3% of Swedes and 6% of Danes. Abortion is generally legal across Europe, with the exception of Poland.

Christianity was the majority religion in 27 of the 34 countries it surveyed, with Orthodoxy the dominant faith in the east, Catholicism prevalent in central and south-western European countries, and Protestantism the main tradition in northern Europe.

Muslims made up half the population of Bosnia and sizeable minorities in Russia and Bulgaria but represented a relatively small share of population in most other countries.

People with no religious affiliation made up at least 15% of the population of all western European countries, although the state with the biggest proportion of “nones” was Czech Republic with 72%.