Religion and National Identity in Central and Eastern European Countries: Persisting and Evolving Links

Abstract

The article aims to offer a contribution to a better understanding of the mechanisms underpinning the intertwining of national and religious identity at the individual level in (some) European former communist and socialist countries. It starts by retracing from a historical perspective the place religion occupied during the regimes, then paying attention to how, once politicized and ethnicized by the hand of a new class of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, religion has become “the hallmark of nationhood.” This excursus allows us to better contextualize both the theoretical argument and findings. The intertwining of national and religious identity is investigated from two main theoretical sources. The first is the debate within sociology and political science on the different ideas of nationhood, while the second consists of socio-psychological models of intergroup relations. The empirical investigation is based on survey data from the European values study (EVS, 2017). A comparative approach is used which includes four countries having Catholic large majorities (Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, and Hungary) and, as a benchmark, Romania having an Orthodox majority. To test the hypotheses, a structural equation model is specified. The causal model seeks to unravel to what extent different conceptions of nationhood (ethno-religious vs. civil), together with national attachment, influence the intergenerational transmission of religious values and distrust of people of another religion/nationality. The research results are in line with the current European trends pointing in the direction of a stronger overlap between the religious and the national in tailoring collective identities.