The Accelerating Turn Away from Traditional Religious Denominations in the Post-Socialist Countries of Eastern and Central Europe in the First Decades of the 2000s and Its Possible Causes

In recent years, the social role of religion has again come to the fore in the Euro-Atlantic region. The social and political events of recent times are very strongly linked to the religious dimension, just think of the war in Ukraine and what José Casanova (Casanova 2022) stated about it. After the Second World War, traditional religiosity gradually began to decline in most of Western Europe. In the case of the former socialist country, this was a much more complex process, considering that the socialist regimes were officially anti-religious, so there were essentially no research and census data on the level of religiosity. Religiosity has reached a role that goes beyond itself, as it has become a symbol and tool of resistance to the system. Thus, for some time after the fall of the systems, it was difficult to separate how much the religious data appearing in the first measurements covered real religiosity and how much it was mixed with political meaning. It is no coincidence that after 1990 we talked about a religious revival for a while in the former Soviet occupation zone. In recent decades, however, a gradual decline has become visible. What can the 2021 census tell us about the region's religious status compared to other regions of Europe, 35 years after the regime changes. During the presentation, I will present the transformation that took place in the decade of 2010 with the help of the results of the European censuses and the EVS (in the case of countries where religious affiliation is no longer measured during the census). At the end of the presentation, I would like to explain the reasons for the change with the help of our own domestic survey research data (2020 and 2021).