Education and Religiosity in Budapest at the Millennium

Abstract

During State Socialism, Budapest residents gradually lost their religiosity. For each social group, the loss was always most radically felt among the more educated. During the decades of party—state rule, the place of religious education in schools was taken over by religious education in church (this was partly due to strong political pressure). The only parents who did not send their children to classes in religious education (either in church or in school) were those who had previously become secularized. Since the change of regime, attitudes toward religion have become one of the most fundamental political cleavages. Budapest is a metropolis whose middle classes are fairly secularized, but whose intellectual elite is sharply divided into a secularized atheistic majority and a minority that is overtly religious and assigns political value to its views.