Are Czechs the least religious of all?

Dana Hamplová
Survey after survey shows the Czech Republic to be the least religious
country. That may be true, but it's not the whole story

Central Prague. The Czechs have a rich religious history, but don't seem very interested in organised religion any more. Photograph: Petr David Josek/AP

It is often argued that the Czech Republic is one of the most secular countries
in the world. This claim is usually based on the sociological surveys and
census data which show that only a small proportion of Czechs goes regularly
to church and that most of the Czech Republic's population does not report
even a formal affiliation to any church
However, the idea that Czechs are almost completely indifferent to any
religion is not accurate. The apparent lack of interest in traditional forms of
Christianity is accompanied by the massive popularity of what sociologists
call "invisible" or "alternative" religion and what could be best described as a
belief in magic. Czechs may not be very enthusiastic churchgoers but many
of them easily accept the idea that fortune-tellers can predict the future, lucky
charms bring good fortune or that the stars might influence their lives.
Moreover, claims about Czech non-religiosity are also complicated by the
growth of charismatic and evangelical movements in recent years. Even
though the total number of evangelicals and charismatics is small, some of
these denominations have multiplied their membership several times in the
10 years between the last two censuses.
Weak support for traditional church religion is partly a legacy of Czech
nationalism of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century and its
interpretation of the country's religious history. Catholicism, which was the
major religion at that time, was seen as an Austrian import that forcibly
replaced the "true" religion of the Czech nation – Protestantism. The
denunciation of the Hapsburg monarchy and German language and culture
(though, paradoxically, the German-speaking urban intelligentsia played a
major role in the first wave of Czech nationalism) thus also included also a
rejection of the Catholic faith. Nationalist anti-Catholic arguments appealed to
many Czechs even though most of the population remained formally affiliated
to the Roman Catholic church.
However, in 1918, when Czechoslovakia gained independence from the
Hapsburg monarchy, the country experienced a massive religious change
without any parallel in Europe at that time. In the first three years of
independence, one and half million of Catholics (mainly of Czech ethnicity)
left the church and this trend – even though in a much weaker form –
continued in the following years. As not much survived from the Czech
Protestantism and the Hussite movement into the 20th century, the Protestant
churches were too weak to step in and fill the gap. Some ex-Catholics joined
a newly formed liberal denomination called the Czechoslovakian (Hussite)
church but a significant number of them simply became "unaffiliated". And
even the Czechoslovakian (Hussite) church itself did not prove to be a
success as it lost about 90% of its members in the next decades.
Indifference towards church religion was, in the second half of the 20th
century, further deepened by the anti-religious propaganda and persecution
of the communist regime but we should not interpret the Czech non-religiosity
simply as a legacy of the communist past. The Czech population had rather
ambiguous attitudes towards the church even before the onset of the
communism, which explains why none of the other Central European post-
communist country displays a similarly low support for traditional religion as
the Czech Republic's population.
However, as already mentioned, our picture would not be complete if we
concluded that all churches are doomed or that Czechs are simply indifferent
to any form of religion. On the contrary, small evangelical and charismatic
denominations are thriving. While the numbers of evangelicals are still small
and we can debate the real importance of their expansion, the substantial
popularity of magic and superstition cannot be pushed aside as trivial. The
growth of the evangelicalism, then, and persistence of an interest in the
supernatural both suggest that, under the secular surface, many Czechs
hunger after something beyond their everyday material world.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Czech_Republic