Church attendance and religious change inEastern Europe (1990-2015)

Eastern Europe is one of the areas where the debate on religious change and individual-level secularization has been recently more intense. The attempt to explain religious developments in this part of Europe has brought to a fierce competition among the main theories of religious change (secularization, individualization and market theory). An additional source of interest for Eastern European countries stems from their heterogeneity, in both religious (e.g. the Catholic rather than the Orthodox tradition) and historical terms (starting from the intensity of the Soviet regime's grip). Finally, literature analysis highlights some inconsistencies among the different authors in assessing church attendance trends, see for example the recent contributions by Brenner (2016), van Ingen and Moor (2015) and Burkimsher (2014): such discrepancies give room to new contributions. The paper aims to contribute to the debate on religious change in Eastern Europe focusing on estimates of church attendance trends for the past twenty-five years. The research design considers more studies simultaneously to enlarge the observation window and get more reliable estimates. To this end, we consider the following comparative and repeated cross-sectional surveys: Eurobarometer (various series), European Social Survey (ESS), European Values Study (EVS), the World Values Survey (WVS), International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Church attendance is available in all these studies and, despite some relevant criticisms, continues to be a key indicator of religious change. At the end of the paper the trends detected for Eastern Europe will be compared to those in Western countries in order to highlight differences and similarities.