Secularism in Eastern Europe

Abstract

A Gallup poll conducted in 2007-2008 showed a signifi cant divide between Western and Eastern Europe in terms of their levels of secularism and religiosity. Respondents in most Western European, but in few Eastern European, countries declared that religion occupied no important place in their lives. A majority of respondents in Slovakia, Romania and Poland said that religion played a role in their lives. Between 37 and 48 percent of respondents in Hungary, Slovenia and Albania made similar statements. The only post-Communist countries where religiosity remained very low were Estonia and the Czech Republic (with 84 percent and 74 percent of respondents declaring that religion played no role in their lives). The three most religious European countries were all post-Communist states-Romania, Macedonia and Poland-where religion played a role in the lives of the vast majority of respondents (from 77 percent to 82 percent). 1 The annual Eurobarometer has confi rmed that, with the exception of the Czechs and the Estonians, Eastern Europeans believe in God in greater numbers than Western Europeans, and atheism is more pronounced in Western Europe, where secularism affects some religious groups (Protestants and Roman Catholics) more than others (Muslims), as well as long-established denominations far more than newer immigrant communities. 2 According to Mattei Dogan, while Western Europe, especially the Scandinavian states, has recently faced a pronounced secularist trend, Eastern Europe has registered increased levels of religiosity (see Table 5.1). 3This chapter explains the lower levels of secularism, and the corresponding relatively higher levels of religiosity, Eastern Europe has registered after the collapse of communism in 1989. Following Peter Berger, secularism is ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols,’ 4 and thus it is closely tied to persistently declining levels of religiosity across generations, as Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart insisted. 5 Besides theories presented in the literature to date, this chapter adds another possible explanation for why secularism has not affected many post-Communist countries by linking the high post-1989 religiosity to the way modernisation unfolded in Eastern Europe after 1945, when it was accompanied by a range of repressive policiesthat extended to religious affairs. As Andrew Greeley wrote, ‘Never before in human history has there been such a concerted effort to stamp out not merely a religion, but all trace of religion. . . . Atheistic communism thought of itself as pushing forward the inevitable process of secularization in which religion would disappear from the face of the earth-a process which, in perhaps milder form, is an article of faith for many dogmatic social scientists.’ 6The following discussion focuses on six post-Communist countries that joined the European Union in 2004 and 2007: Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Romania and Bulgaria. To these, we added Albania. These countries, which shared a Communist past from 1945 until 1989 (1990 for Albania) without being Soviet Union territories, belong to the regions of Central Europe and the Balkans. The chapter excludes several post-Communist countries: the former Yugoslavia, which faced ethnic war in the 1990s and is yet to gain acceptance into the European Union, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which are in the European Union but were Soviet until 1991, and East Germany, which was incorporated into the unifi ed Germany in 1990 and thus ceased to exist as a sovereign state.