It was not until the war was won and Czechoslovakia became its own country that the people were finally free from Catholicism in the very recent year of 1918. If you are Polish you are catholic ("polak to katholik"). [6] The Catholic Church then lost about half of its adherents during the communist period of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (19601990), and has continued to decline in the contemporary epoch after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 restored democracy in Czechoslovakia. Some 49 percent felt life was created by coincidence without help from a higher power. Press J to jump to the feed. Czech-American art history major at Arizona State University who lives in Prague.
Religion in the Czech Republic is varied, with a vast majority of the population (78%) being either irreligious (atheist, agnostic or other irreligious life stances) or declaring neither religious nor irreligious identities, and almost equal minorities represented by Christianity (11.7%, almost entirely Catholicism) and other religious identities or beliefs (10.8%). Therefore, Communism did not bring its rejection of religion until centuries of disfavor for Catholicism in Czech culture. As the Commonwealth grew weaker, people flocked to the safety of Catholicism to unite them against other religions and to give them hope. [11], In the 2021 census, 21,539 Czechs (0.2% of the population) identified themselves as adherents of Jediism (a real philosophy based on that of the fictional Jedi of the Star Wars space opera[27]), 5,244 as Muslims, 2,696 as Pastafarians (a social movement for a light-hearted interpretation of religion), 2,024 as Hindus, 1,901 as Jews, 1,053 as adherents of Biotronics (incorporated as the Community of Josef Zezulka, Spoleenstv Josefa Zezulky[28]), and 89,254 (0.8% of the population) as adherents of other minority religions. Again, don't have time to get into ot sadly, but for more on contemporary Polish religion and national identity see, The Crosses of Auschwitz. IO: 27572102. I personally wouldn't recommend God's Playground to anyone who doesn't have some sort of knowledge of Polish history. Source: Current Bachelor student on Erasmus in Poland and this has been mentioned in various courses. Even when people say that they are catholic on the census, they mostly mean cultural catholic, someone who identifies catholic just because their parents did and they never been to a church. Ethnic Czech Buddhists are otherwise mostly followers of Vajrayana traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, Mahayana traditions of Korean Buddhism, and Theravada traditions. [19], The Community of Native Faith was among the government-recognised religious entities until 2010, when it was unregistered and became an informal association due to ideological disagreements between the Castists and other subgroups about whether Slavic religion was Indo-European hierarchic worship (supported by the Castists), Neolithic mother goddess worship, or neither. A further 3 percent had their own ideas. Some 53 percent never go to religious services, but the last place in this category was the st nad Labem, with 73 percent never going. [20] The leader of the organisation since 2007 has been Richard Bigl (Khotebud), and it is today devoted to the celebration of annual holidays and individual rites of passage, to the restoration of sacred sites associated with Slavic deities, and to the dissemination of knowledge about Slavic spirituality in Czech society. Every day we sift through the not-so-good bits to bring YOU the shiny bits! A total of 7 percent think the world was created by God and is less than 10,000 years old, while 10 percent lean toward theistic evolution, which assumes that God created the world and used evolution to bring it to its present state. I would say you're missing the biggest factor, which I wrote out here: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14xxsq/why_does_the_czech_republic_have_so_many_atheists/c7hvlf9. [21] While the contemporary association is completely adogmatic and apolitical,[22] and refuses to "introduce a solid religious or organisational order" because of the past internal conflicts,[23] between 2000 and 2010 it had a complex structure,[22] and redacted a Code of Native Faith defining a precise doctrine for Czech Rodnovery (which firmly rejected the Book of Veles). The pandemic caused one-fifth of the respondents to reflect on the meaning of life and their own mortality. Over two hundred years later, the Thirty Years War came to an end, and the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled over what would become the Czech Republic. If you're interested I wrote it out here: As to the strong position of Catholicism in Poland - in my opinion it goes back as far back as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Prague did have the most people who strongly believe alien civilizations exist, at 27 percent, and also the most people who read both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, at 14 percent. As for those who believe, 48 percent were brought to faith by family, and 57 percent acquired a belief in God or a higher power before reaching adulthood. The defeat of Bohemians estates by the Habsburg monarchy in the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 affected the religious sentiments of the Czechs, and A particular consequence of the rigorous re-catholisation of the state in the 17th century was that the absolute majority of the population formerly Utraquists and Protestants (Lutherans or Brethren) joined the Roman Catholic Church. A coworker and I were talking about the Czech Republic and she mentioned there were a lot of atheists there. Because I'm under a time crunch, I'll skip a few steps (read the article, it's not entirely convincing but it's the best explanation I've found on the issue--I'm actually writing an article critiquing the paradigm Froese is using but that's another issue). For example, 72 percent said they do not discuss the existence of God and about half do not usually talk about the existence of a higher power or how the universe and humans could have come into existence. Reading time: 3 minutes. [1] Other 3,162,540 Czechs, or 30.1% of the population of the country, did not identify themselves with either religious or irreligious identities. [26], Media related to Religion in the Czech Republic at Wikimedia Commons, Orthodox Christianity, Jehovah's Witnesses and other Christians, Irreligious and not self-identifying people, "Other Christians" in the census include people who declared themselves simply "Christians" without denomination, as well as, German Evangelical Church in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, Old Catholic Church of the Czech Republic, Silesian Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession, Orthodox Church of the Czech Lands and Slovakia, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, "Obyvatelstvo podle nboenskho vyznn a pohlav podle vsledk stn lidu v letech 1921, 1930, 1950, 1991 a 2001", "Obyvatelstvo podle nboensk vry a pohlav podle vsledk stn lidu v letech 1921, 1930, 1950, 1991, 2001 a 2011", "2011 Census: Population by religious belief and by regions", "2011 Census: Population by religious belief and by municipality size groups", "Obyvatelstvo podle nboensk vry v letech 1991 a 2021", "2021 Census: Population by religious belief and by regions", "World Buddhist Directory Czech Republic", "Wicca.cz Tradin inician Wicca v esk republice", " ' ' ", " 19982005 : ? Church of Saint Joachim, a Lutheran church in Jchymov, Karlovy Vary Region. 
I am Polish yet atheist. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts. On top of that, the Catholic Church was, due to its strong position, a bastion of resistance in communist times. I should be cleaning my room before my girlfriend gets here so I'll have to be brief. More than 1,500 people over the age of 18 took part in the survey via online or telephone interviews. The Czechs had given up on Christianity long before that. Remember about Warsaw Confederation. In the wake of the Reformation, Utraquist Hussites took a renewed increasingly anti-Catholic stance while some of the defeated Hussite factions (notably the Taborites) were revived. [1] In the census of 2021, 47.8% of the Czechs declared that they did not believe in any religion, while 30.1% did not declare any identification, neither religious nor irreligious. You are right, the Hussite wars are still well remembered here and are seen as one of the defining moments in Czech history. In modern times, Czech people primarily identify as atheist, agnostic, or personally spiritual. [5] At the end of the 18th century, Protestant and Jewish minorities were once again granted some rights, but they had to wait another century to have full equality.
I'd say that religious tolerance stopped being viewed as a good thing after the Deluge, when protestants were seen as a collaborants. Hopefully it will help a bit. Altar dedicated to the god Thoth by a Czech practitioner of Kemetism. However, the Czech Republic is a leader in secularism and non-religion among its neighboring countries, many of whom were also under Communist rule. 2022 PragueLife! [4], Since the Battle of White Mountain, widespread anti-Catholic sentiment and resistance to the Catholic Church underlay the history of the Czech lands even when the whole population nominally belonged to the Catholic Church, and the Czechs have been historically characterised as "tolerant and even indifferent towards religion". So I'd put 1650s as a decade when things changed, After the Church burned Jan Huss and his followers, the people became distrustful of them, communism only pushed those feelings to the surface. [8] Christianity remained relatively higher in percentage among the populations of the agrarian south-eastern regions of Moravia, while the percentages were already very low in the large cities and the north-western more industrialised regions of Bohemia. If anything (though I'd even say this is going too far) the Communists were just the last nail. Petr Chelick continued in the wake of the Bohemian Hussite Reformation and gave rise to the Hussite Moravian Church. Please read the rules before participating, as we remove all comments which break the rules. The Portal for Public History. Why? His death only led to a further uprising of the Hussites influence and rejection of the Catholic Church. The survey also looked at the extent to which people talk about selected topics. Mormon meetinghouse in Brno, South Moravian Region. Which was not completely untrue - calvinist Janusz Radziwi wanted to control Lithuania as his independent kingdom and Polish bretherns helped in creating the Rednot treaty, first attempt in partitioning Poland. [4] At the same time, the association of Catholicism with the unpopular erstwhile Habsburg power led to widespread anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism, and to a revival of the native historical form of Czech Protestantism, namely Hussitism; in 1920, Hussites split out of the Catholic Church with about 10% of the formerly Catholic clergy and established themselves as the Czechoslovak Hussite Church. Another 7 percent felt space aliens brought life to Earth. The highest level of belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was in the Zln region, at 35 percent, and the least in the Liberec region, at 6 percent. In the 2021 census, 5,257 Czechs declared themselves adherents of Buddhism. Czechs were much more likely to draw on non-Catholics like Jan Huss, who in many ways is the quintessential Czech but not at all Catholic. 2021 PROGma Net Sistemas Ltda CNPJ: 10.404.592/0001-60. I would argue that Communism was just a blip. Prague was in the middle at 22 percent. Consequently, it is logical to conclude that you cannot merely point to Communism as the answer to why Czechs are not religious. [4] By the time of the collapse of the Habsburg power and the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, the position of the Catholic Church had already been weakened by criticism from the intellectual class and by the social changes brought by the rapid industrialisation of especially the northern and western pars of the country, Bohemia. [6] The data from the national censuses show that Catholics decreased from 76.7% of the Czechs in 1950 prior to the communist period, to 39.1% in 1991 after the fall of communism, to 26.9% in 2001, to 10.5% in 2011, and to 9.3% in 2021. [14] In the 2021 census, 2,953 Czechs identified themselves as Pagans (including 189 Druids). [1] The Czechoslovak Church was supported by the government of the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tom Masaryk (18501937). The people of Bohemia were forced to adopt a religion they had not agreed with for centuries. Av. [11], Roman Catholicism was the main tradition of Christianity historically practised by the Czechs after they converted from Slavic paganism, and although in the 15th and 16th century many Czechsin many areas and periods mostjoined Proto-Protestant and Protestant churches, the Habsburg monarchy which gained imperial power on the Czech lands in the early 17th century enacted a Counter-Reformation movement which reconverted most Czechs to the Catholic Church. Magazine (v6 Ventures Limited). Later, the partitions of Poland and the rule of Communism only made the position of Catholicism in Poland stronger. [1] In the same census, 13,298 (0.1%) identified themselves as Jehovah's Witnesses, and very small minorities as Mormons of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, adherents of the Unification Church, and of other minor Christian churches. The same survey asked whether people believed in the existence of alien civilizations but not specifically whether UFOs visited Earth. The only person that might know this is my brother who is agnostic. Czechs on the other hand, though demographically Catholic at the start of the century, didn't draw on Catholic identity as strongly in creating national identity. [1] Other Protestant minorities include Anglicans, Adventists, Apostolic Pentecostals, Baptists, Brethren, Methodists, and nondenominational Evangelicals.[1]. On the other hand, 26 percent were purely or very nonspiritual, and another 28 percent were rather nonspiritual, adding up to 54 percent. Rather, many historians believe that a long history of anti-Catholic sentiments and rejection of organized religion led to the prominent atheism seen in the Czech Republic today. Error: API requests are being delayed. [7] Protestantism did not recover immediately after the Habsburg Counter-Reformation; it regained some ground when the Habsburg monarchy disintegrated in the early 20th century (in 1950 about 17% of the Czechs were Protestants, mostly Hussites), although after the 1950s it declined again and today it is a very small minority (around 1%). So, what is the answer? [1], The communist period of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (19601990) certainly saw an oppression of Christianity, thus contributing to its decline, but also hampered the appearance of any alternatives in the area of religion, so that Christianity continued to have a monopolistic position in the religious interpretation of the world. A majority of Czech people believe in God or some higher power, according to a STEM/Mark survey conducted for the Christian group Maranatha. Basically the 2nd Defenestration and it's pan-European after effects play a much bigger role. She said it was because the Communists stamped out all religion, but I pointed out that that doesn't make sense, since Poland was also behind the Iron Curtain and remains staunchly Catholic. One quick thing: it's "katolik". [17] Besides Slavic Rodnovers, Germanic Heathens and Celtic Druids, in the Czech Republic there are also Wiccan followers,[18] and one Kemetic organisation, Per Kemet. This makes belief in God or some higher power and belief in alien civilizations almost tied. According to my professor, a lot of Poles go to church today because they feel Polish and not necessarily because they are strong believers. [4] In 19391945, Nazism annihilated or expelled most of the Jewish population. Some 21 percent of Czech people strongly or mostly believe in God, and an additional 35 percent believe in some form of a higher power, totaling 56 percent. [9] According to the scholar Jan Spousta, throughout the 20th century Christianity gradually lost its character as the Czechs' traditional religion, and was abandoned by most while turning into a religion of sincere choice for the minority who continues to identify itself with it and practise it.
[4] In 1918 the Habsburg monarchy collapsed, and in the newly independent Czechoslovakia, in 1920, the Catholic Church suffered a schism as the Czechoslovak Hussite Church re-established itself as an independent organism. During the 15th and 16th century, most of Czechs were adherents of Hussitism, and at the same time many Sudeten Germans of the Czech lands joined the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther and his doctrine (Lutheranism). [8] Boivoj I, Duke of Bohemia, baptised by the Saints Cyril and Methodius, was the first ruler of Bohemia to adopt Christianity as the state religion. So, how did it happen that the Czechs and the Poles developed such different attitudes towards religion? Rodnover idol at a park in Kovov, South Bohemian Region. Answers must be in-depth and comprehensive, or they will be removed. 1088 Parque Cidade Nova, Mogi Guau SP, Cep: 13845-416. Jlio Xavier Da Silva, N. Source: Being a Pole / Pawe Jasienica's books. Unsurprisingly, this did not lead to positive feelings towards the Catholic Church. Although Jan Hus was declared heretic by the Catholic Church and burnt at the stake in Constance in 1415, his followers seceded from the Catholic Church and in the Hussite Wars (14191434) they defeated five crusades organised against them by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund. Poland was fairly tolerant towards other religions during the Piast (~960 - 1370) and Jagiellion (1377 - 1572) Dynasties. It's quite big and covers the whole of Polish history, including all the connections between Polishness and catholicism. The only nearby country that comes close to the Czech indifference to religion is Estonia. Nearly 70 percent believe in the effectiveness of acupuncture or acupressure, and 58 percent think some faith healers have the ability to heal. During the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century, the Utraquists sided with the Catholic Church, and following the joint UtraquistCatholic victory, Utraquism was accepted by the Catholic Church as a legitimate doctrine to be practised in the Kingdom of Bohemia, while all the other Hussite movements were prohibited. Hinduism and Judaism followed at a distance. With that history I guess a lot of people might not be very enthusiastic about a catholicism they as a people didn't choose for themselves. Church of the Conversion of Saint Paul, a historic centre of the Hussite Moravian Church in Brands nad Labem-Star Boleslav, Central Bohemian Region. Taborites and Utraquists were the two major Hussite factions. [6] Protestantism today constitutes a small minority of around 1% of the population; according to the 2021 census, only 0.2% of the Czechs (23,610) adhered to the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, 0.3% (32,577) adhered to the Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren, and 0.1% (11,047) were Lutherans of the Augsburg Confession (still mostly Silesian). [1], In the late 14th century, the religious and social reformer Jan Hus started a Proto-Protestant movement which would have been later called "Hussitism" after him. I'd add that pre WWII Czech Republic was more diverse and I believe more industrialized and urban and less rural, though I feel like the Froese article explains a lot of that away by saying the differences weren't that significant. However, this change was mainly influenced by the geopolitical situation.