Development and transformation of the religious landscape in Prague after the fall of communism

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is the analysis of trends and processes in the religious landscape of the Czech capital of Prague in the period of political transformation after 1989. Czech society has been secularised to an extent unprecedented in the rest of Europe. The paper uses also the term religious landscape in a broader sense mostly as both territory and society of a selected larger territorial unit. The general trend of secularisation of modern Czech (Prague) society is accompanied by diversification (almost atomisation) of religious communities. The paper attempts to describe the main reasons for the transformation in religiosity in Prague after the fall of communism between 1991 and 2011 as well as outlines the fundamental consequences of these changes. The city of Prague has also experienced regional differentiation of religious development, evidenced by the quantitatively dwindling Roman Catholic Church on the one hand, and the growth of the Brethren Evangelical Free Church on the other. The rising importance of alternative religiosity is probably associated with the trend of secularisation of society and thus the transformation of the original Christian society into a society with prevailing occult or esoteric knowledge.