Abstract
The religious change in Hungary since 1990 is characterized by a dual process. After a short period of general strengthening of religion, which was already observed in the 1980s, the church-related religiosity began to slowly but steadily decline. In parallel, there was a further increase in the dimension of faith and some other individual forms of religiosity. For a long time, studies from 2008 (EVS, ISSP) were the latest sources of empirical evidence for these processes. However, a number of representative surveys have been conducted in the past year, using a separate religious block to study religion along several dimensions in Hungary (EVS 2017/18, “Religious Change in Hungary” project). In the light of the results of these recent studies, the paper seeks to answer the question of how trends and mechanisms of religious change continued in Hungary after 2010. According the results of the empirical analysis, certain trends did not change. The proportion of denominational membership continued to decline, while the proportion of believers in certain Christian and non-Christian doctrines increased. At the same time, other trends have stopped, or even seem to be reversing. This includes the proportion of believers in God, which has declined very little compared to previous growth, and the proportion of regular churchgoers, which in turn has increased slightly. Besides ongoing secularization and religious individualization processes, the socio-political changes that have characterized Hungary over the past decade may have affected the development of religiosity, too.
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Rosta, G. (2020). Hungary—Continuing and Changing Trends and Mechanisms of Religious Change. In: Demmrich, S., Riegel, U. (eds) Religiosity in East and West. Veröffentlichungen der Sektion Religionssoziologie der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-31035-6_6
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