Reconstructing Religious Attendance in European Communist Countries

Abstract

Background

The research on religion under communism suffers from a lack of quantitative data on religious attendance to complement the existing information about government policies and anecdotal data about the operation of religious organizations under communism. The available data are scarce and often unreliable.

Purpose

This paper presents a method for reconstructing data on past religious attendance and presents a dataset that contains an estimate of religious attendance rates in seven European communist countries covering the period between the 1930s and the 1990s. Such data are needed to corroborate and complement the sources currently available.

Methods

The reconstruction is based on retrospective questions in surveys conducted in the post-communist period, particularly the ISSP. The paper also verifies the internal consistency of the reconstructed attendance rates using different characteristics of survey respondents to predict their reported attendance. Further, it verifies external consistency against post-communist surveys (ISSP, EVS) and the data available from the communist period.

Results

The dataset support existing literature and provide some new information about religiosity under communist rule. The reconstructed attendance rates appear internally consistent, and the responses regarding past religious attendance do not seem to be driven primarily by the respondents’ present characteristics. The estimated past attendance rates are also consistent with other sources.

Conclusions and Implications

The dataset provides additional data that allow an evaluation of the level and change of religious attendance, the effectiveness of communist anti-religious campaigns and secularization trends in the communist countries. Such data were not available before that were estimated in a consistent way across different countries and time periods. The method can also be used in other settings.