ABSTRACT
With the breakdown of communism, the region of Central and Eastern Europe offers a unique possibility to re-examine some approaches that have been discussed among sociologists of religion for Western Europe and North America. For example, focussing on the development of church adherence and religiousness after the breakdown of communism could shed some new light on the question whether Europe or the US are exceptional cases (cf. Tiryakian 1993; Lipset 1996; Swatos/Olson 1999; Davie 2000) or on the secularization-rational choice controversy (cf. Young 1996; Bruce 1999). Broadening the scope and taking post-communist Eastern Europe into account, however, does not merely mean to increase the number of cases. What distinguishes this region from the Western world, is the fact that over a period of 40 years (or even longer), religion has been seriously threatened by the political regime. During communism, almost all public religious activities were suppressed, resulting in the disappearance of any form of public religion. Religion had been forced into the private sphere. The general question related to this scenario is how religion can survive without any public communication and with very limited opportunities for the collective practice of rituals. Thus, it would be interesting to analyze, whether and how religion could resist during the period before 1989/90 in different countries and how the things have changed after the end of the repression.
