In several lists and rankings of irreligiosity and atheism, some European countries score rather high. Consistently figuring among them is the Czech Republic. Characterised by a turbulent religious history – the brutal Thirty Years’ War began and ended in Prague in the 17th century –, the Bohemian and Moravian lands have manifested original and at times surprising forms of religiosity, spirituality, and esotericism up until the modern and postmodern times. The mediaeval Bohemian Hussite movement prefigured many aspects of Lutheranism before the country fell again under the spell of the Roman Catholic Church, whereas the myth of “Praga magica”, to mention yet another but very different example, is largely a romantic and avant-gardist narrative. With the advent of the socialist regime in the mid-20th century and for the following forty years, though, Czechoslovakia saw an accelerated, top-down form of secularisation, fuelled and propagated by communist state atheism.
Religion and Spirituality After the Fall of Communism
In 1989, the post-socialist transition restored religious freedom and removed the coercive atheist framework. Consequently, the country saw a distinctive cluster of dynamics in the realm of things religious and spiritual. Rather than experiencing a straightforward and long-lasting “revival” of institutional religions such as the Christian denominations traditionally present in the country, Czechs experienced ambivalent religious and irreligious transformations, characterised by a marked secularisation combined with religious diversification and fragmentation – more or less in line with what the theory of “post-secularism” predicates.
Immediately after the Velvet Revolution, which brought Communism to an end in these lands, traditional denominations such as the Hussite Church and, especially, the Roman Catholic Church, did gain a temporary momentum (as is visible from the chart above) and recovered some institutional and political presence, also reclaiming property and social roles. In the 1990s, declaring one’s religiosity or affiliation with a Christian church was a symbolic resource usable to demonstrate not having been aligned with the Communist ideology and with the socialist regime. Hence, religious actors who had opposed communism, such as underground priests and dissident Christians, earned moral capital immediately after 1989, but that did not translate into broad cultural or political authority. Affiliation with Christian denominations witnessed a generalised decline. As time passed, legal and political disputes (parliamentary debates, court rulings, and public protests) have kept church-state relations a live public issue well into the 2010s and 2020s.
More recent evidence, e.g. the results of the 2021 census, shows a clear majority of respondents reporting no religious belief and only a small minority identifying as church-affiliated. Irreligion, atheism and “apatheism” can indeed be considered as typically Czech attitudes, and one should not underestimate how widespread and profoundly rooted they are in the country. However, this is not the only story the statistics tell and certainly not the only one ethnographic research evokes.
Indeed, both quantitative surveys and ethnographic studies document phenomena of widespread “churchless faith” and spiritual bricolage: many Czech people express belief in God, transcendence, “energies” of sorts, or supernatural beings or “forces” while remaining detached from church membership or regular religious life. Non-communal and non-traditional collective ritual life is also thriving in alternative forms unprecedented and even unimaginable under Communism and its strict control over the public sphere. This has created a landscape where beliefs and practices are rather atomised and where religious identities and spiritual manifestations are more fluid and consumer-orientated than in many other European states.
Religious Diversity and Spiritual Consumerism
The key words to understand today’s Czech religious landscape are individualisation, fragmentation, and diversification. Urban areas especially – Prague above all – show clear patterns of secularisation proper (atheism, irreligiosity, and apatheism), fragmentation and diversification, and a greater presence of alternative spiritualities, while rural and older populations are more likely to retain traditional Catholic identity or other church-affiliations.
New religious movements, the reconstitution of old pagan beliefs and witchcraft, magical and re-enchanted practices, Protestant and Orthodox churches, charismatic and evangelical groups, Jewish revival, Buddhism and other Oriental traditions, secular spiritual and humanist groups, believing in “something”, and migrant religions have all found some ground to grow, though numerically they remain relatively small. At the same time, folkloric and para-religious practices (fortune-telling, esotericism) continue to have cultural resonance in some segments of the population.
Rites of passage are increasingly creative and diversified. Humanist ceremonies blend with purely secular ones, and neo-pagan or Wiccan weddings are also on the rise, weaving into individual narratives, imaginaries, and lifestyles. As shared by Lenka, a young student from Prague, during an interview,
I found it meaningful to mark such an important episode in my life with a ritual, because I believe in the power of symbols, although I am not a religious person.
Others have embraced parody or protest religions, such as the Flying Spaghetti Monster Church, or other invented religions, such as Jediism. These movements have now all made it into the official statistics and are being studied by scholars of religion.
These phenomena are, as I said, relatively small and have little social visibility and political influence. But research suggests that they are on the rise, and statistics also suggest that their aggregate number may in fact nowadays slightly outnumber all Christian denominations taken together. This brings us to the conclusion that a certain “effervescence” is indeed taking place in contemporary Czechia, one that however relative and contained, seems to be mounting – especially if compared with the socialist spiritual deadland.
The fall of the Czechoslovak communist regime in late 1989 opened the doors for religious institutions to re-establish themselves and their influence on society. However, the dominant trend soon afterwards and over the past 30 years or so has rather been a generalised persistent secularisation paired with privatised, diversified, and non-institutional forms of religiosity and spiritual practices, which appear to be the corollary of typical neoliberal transformations such as the marketisation and individualisation of religion and spirituality.