DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/2065.185.2024.3.10 

Abstract: The 2022 census is the fourth since the fall of communism to include a question on religious affiliation. In the East Central European region, the number of people belonging to a particular denomination has been falling since the 1990s. Both the proportion of unaffiliated respondents and the proportion of non-respondents in society have changed steadily. The evolution of these three categories provides an opportunity to predict, validate, and interpret changes in religion in the 2022 Hungarian census. Using data from four countries in the region (Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, and Slovakia) for the period 1991–2021, we conducted a time series analysis and estimated the evolution of the data for Hungary. A total of four scenarios were constructed. We validated our results with data from the other countries and found that the estimates based on thirty years of international data are the most accurate in these four countries. Based on Hungary’s 2022 census data, estimates based on thirty and twenty years of international data were found to be the most accurate. We also estimated the number of adherents of the four largest churches in the country. Our results show that membership in the Roman Catholic Church has declined more than expected. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5937/gp27-42461 

Abstract: In this recent study, we analyse the religious diversity of Central and Eastern Europe, from the Balkans up to the Baltic region. This region has many religious confessions, without claiming completeness, Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, Orthodox, Islam, Hussite and many people without any religion. The recent spatial distribution of the religious confessions has been shaped by different drivers across Central and Eastern Europe. We chose a quantitative method to visually interpret the pluralism of the religious confessions and we selected diversity indices. We calculated the diversity of the religious confessions and ethnicities in a very detailed resolution, at municipality level of each country, based on population census data of 2011. We found statistically significant relationship between the diversity of religious confessions and the diversity of ethnicities. We have also shown that near the national borders, the religious pluralism is higher than in another areas. There is statistically significant connection between the former national borders (1900s and 1930s) and the religiously plural areas. The results of this study provide the evidence of the spatial distribution of borderline syndrome and serves as a good basis for further research (theoretical and statistical) of the religion pluralism in Central-Eastern Europe.