Publication details
Intergenerational reproduction of non-religion in the Czech Republic
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The Czech Republic is regularly rated among the least religious countries in many international comparative surveys countries. Some sociological studies have noticed that the secular profile of the Czech Republic is exceptional even within the region of post-communist Central and Eastern Europe, whose religious development was strongly formed for almost a half-century by an explicitly anti-religious regime. Special attention is merited by the noticeable difference in the religious profiles of the populations of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, two countries that constituted one state for a significant period of the twentieth century. However, several studies by Czech scholars have been published in recent years that oppose the widely shared thesis that Czech society is the most atheist society in contemporary Europe. They argue that this thesis is based on a misunderstanding of the character of Czech religiosity, which is distinguished by a strong tendency towards privatization and individualization and high levels of distrust of traditional religious institutions, mainly the big Christian churches. This scholarly critique is grounded in empirical data that they interpret as evidence for the unsubstantiated mistaking of atheism for individualized and privatized spirituality. In this paper, we pursue two basic goals: first, to analyze in more detail the nature of Czech non-religiosity; and second, to study the patterns of inter-generational reproduction of non-religiosity in the Czech population. In our analysis, we combine the sociological (or socio-demographical) perspective with theoretical impulses from the cognitive study of religion. |