The aim of this paper is to analyse the current situation of religion in Central and Eastern Europe. The main question is whether the transformation processes in the former Communist countries are following lines of development comparable to those in the West, or whether completely new patterns of development will emerge in these countries. In order to show how church and religion developed in Central and Eastern Europe different religious dimensions are separated and the interconnections between them examined. The four religious dimensions distinguished are personal religiousness, personal church adherence, impersonal church adherence and occultism . The author concludes that the situation of church and religion in Central and Eastern Europe has undergone a dramatic change since the end of the Soviet Empire. At this point of time it cannot be said whether or not processes of a growing differentiation between the distinguished religious dimensions are taking place as they are doing in Western Europe.

Sociology Of Religion, Secularisation, Individualisation, Central And Eastern Europe, Church And Religion
This content is only available as a PDF.
Copyright Taylor & Francis
2001
Taylor & Francis
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the use is non-commercial and the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode.