Analysing patterns of religious participation in post-communist Eastern Europe

It is generally thought that processes of modernization generic to industri alized societies have resulted in a process of secularization with respect to conventional religious participation and observance in most Western coun tries. It is not at all clear, however, whether the post-communist societie s of Eastern Europe have followed this pattern. In this we paper we examine whether levels of religiosity in ten post-communist societies - five gener ally Catholic in orientation and five Orthodox - are consistent with secula rization theory, or whether instead they display, as some have suggested, t he impact of seven decades of atheistic communism followed by a recent resu rgence among the young. For this purpose we examine denominational membersh ip and church attendance using descriptive and multivariate analysis of lar ge-scale national sample surveys conducted in the mid-1990s. We find that a ge and educational differences in participation rates follow patterns expec ted on the basis of secularization theory with no evidence of resurgence am ong younger groups. Also, however, Catholic participation rates are signifi cantly higher than Orthodox ones, indicating the importance of denomination in understanding patterns of religiosity in the post-communist context.