Secularization versus religious revival in Eastern Europe: Church institutional resilience, state repression and divergent paths.

Publisher: Academic Press Country of Publication: United States NLM ID: 0330501 Publication Model: Print-Electronic Cited Medium: Internet ISSN: 1096-0317 (Electronic) Linking ISSN: 0049089X NLM ISO Abbreviation: Soc Sci Res

Publication: New York, NY : Academic Press
Original Publication: New York, Seminar Press.

Political Systems* ; Religion* ; Secularism* ; Social Change*; Catholicism ; Communism ; Demography ; Europe, Eastern ; Humans ; Surveys and Questionnaires

Despite continuing for over two decades, the debate about the nature of the trends in religiosity in post-Communist Eastern Europe remains unresolved: some arguing that these countries are undergoing the same process of secularization as the West, while others insist that the entire region is experiencing a religious revival. Using national sample surveys from the early 1990s to 2007 to examine the change in demographic predictors of religiosity, we show that Catholic and Orthodox countries are experiencing different trends, the first group displaying evidence of secularization and the second of revival, and that these two different trends are likely to derive from the legacies of state repression and the differing abilities of the churches to resist such repression. We argue that the current literature has thus taken a mistakenly general approach, and that the post-Communist region consists of at least two distinct groups of societies with different trends in religiosity.
(Copyright © 2016. Published by Elsevier Inc.)

Keywords: Central and Eastern Europe (CEE); Postcommunist; Religion and religiosity; Secularization; State repression

Date Created: 20160315 Date Completed: 20170203 Latest Revision: 20170203

20221213

10.1016/j.ssresearch.2015.11.001

26973030