Historical reasons for the decline of religious affiliation: communism, confession or church’s relation with national identity?

ENIn the beginning of the 19th century, the European populations in culturally Western Christian societies were religiously affiliated. By the end of the 20th century some decline of religious affiliation had occurred in all societies. Among the post-communist societies, however, the decline in religious affiliation has occurred with significant variations. The data from the World Values Surveys (WVS) of 1999/2000 shows an extraordinary high level of religious affiliation in Poland, which is surpassed only by Malta. At the opposite extreme, the three least religiously affiliated traditionally Western Christian cultures come also from the post-communist region. In general, the levels of church membership have declined less in Catholic, mono-confessional, and West-European societies. The alienation of individuals from the traditional Christian Churches, however, has not been primarily caused by the Confessional tradition, the Communist politics of religion or modernization, but because of the nature of the cultural relationship between the traditional religion and the national identity during the last two centuries. European nation-building started with the process of confessionalization (confession-building) of societies, which united or, if to use the sociological term, de-differentiated the “political” and “religious” spheres of life to the extent that the “sense of religious belonging” became equivalent to the sense of political membership. The Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed (Calvinist), and Anglican confessions of faith, formulated since the Reformation, defined the political membership and guaranteed the internal coherence of the society and culture. Typically, where religious minorities were tolerated, they were tolerated also as confessional minorities.