In the early 1990s, almost 70% of young Poles regularly practised religion; today, less than 25% do. Among the whole population, the proportion regularly practising religion has also fallen significantly over that period, and now stands at 43%.
The findings are among those presented in a new report by CBOS, Poland’s state research agency, which looked at data on religious belief and practice from 1992 to this year.
CBOS found that, while religious attendance has dropped significantly – and especially rapidly in recent years amid the pandemic and revelations of child sex abuse in the Catholic church – religious belief has fallen relatively little, and remains very high.
In 1992, 94% of people in Poland professed themselves to be believers. This year, that figure still stood at 87%, with just over 12% of people describing themselves as non-believers.
Women tend to hold stronger religious beliefs than men, with CBOS noting that “the educational advancement of women and women’s protests against the tightening of the anti-abortion law did not cause a significantly faster decline in the level of their religious faith compared to that of men”.
The greatest declines in faith over the last three decades were recorded among highly educated people and those living in the largest cities, where the proportion of believers fell from 91% in 1992 to 72.5% this year.
Yet when it comes to practising religion – which in Poland nearly always means Christianity, and in particular Catholicism – the proportion who do so at least once a week fell from 69.5% in March 1992 to 43% in August 2021.
Almost one quarter (24%) now say they never practise. In big cities, only 27% practise regularly, while 41% never do so.
CBOS notes that the process of abandoning religious practice has accelerated since May 2020. During that period, the pandemic led to limits on the numbers allowed in churches (though, unlike in many other countries, places of worship never closed entirely in Poland).
Recent years have also seen a series of revelations relating to sex abuse by Catholic clergy and failings – or unwillingness – by the church hierarchy to deal with the issue. Mass protests against the near-total ban on abortion introduced last year have also directed anger against the church.
Those protests were supported in particular by young Poles, and CBOS finds that, among people aged 18-24, religious attendance fell from 69% in 1992 (roughly the same as among the general population) to 23% today (around half the level among society as a whole). Over one third of the young (36%) never practise religion.
“Changes in declarations of faith occur very unevenly between successive age cohorts,” concludes CBOS. “They are negligible in the grandparents’ generation (seniors and baby boomers), minimal in the parents’ generations (the ‘Solidarity’ generation and Generation X), significant in millennials, and extreme in the youngest cohort.”
Main image credit: Adrianna Bochenek/Agencja Wyborcza.pl
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
