5 - A Religious Revival in Post-Communist Europe?

Summary

has a steady erosion of religion taken place in post-Communist nations, similar to the secularization process experienced in Western Europe? Or, as supply-side theory implies, has the last decade brought a resurgence of religiosity in this region, following the fall of communism? The literature remains divided about these issues in part because the limitations of the available evidence make it difficult to resolve this debate. As one commentator remarked, the former Communist states were uninterested in collecting any official statistics concerning religious affiliation and church attendance apart from intelligence to be used in its dismantling. The occasional surveys that were conducted during the Soviet era were not based on representative national samples. During this period, responses to survey questions about religiosity may also have been constrained by fear of governmental sanctions. As a result, prior to the early 1990s, we lack reliable cross-national surveys allowing us to compare long-term trends in religious attitudes and behavior. Among the twenty-seven post-Communist European nations that exist today, Hungary was the only one included in the 1981 World Values Study, although Wave 2 conducted during the early 1990s covered a dozen post-Communist states, Wave 3 during the mid-1990s expanded to twenty-two countries, and fourteen were surveyed in Wave 4 during 1999–2001. In the absence of reliable representative surveys conducted during the Communist era that would enable us to examine a long time-series, we think that the best alternative way to probe into long-term trends is to examine surveys carried out during the 1990s using generational comparisons, based on the assumption that the attitudes toward religion that were instilled during a given generation's formative years will leave lasting traces in subsequent years.