Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-gvh9x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-24T12:12:12.453Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - A Religious Revival in Post-Communist Europe?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2012

Pippa Norris
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Ronald Inglehart
Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Get access

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Sacred and Secular
Religion and Politics Worldwide
, pp. 111 - 132
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2004

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×