Abstract
This article draws from interviews with 67 nonreligious millennials across six countries in 25 European towns and cities, part of a research programme Understanding Unbelief This research was made possible through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation (JTF grant ID#60624 based at the University of Kent). which aims at mapping the global diversity of nonreligion. We contribute to this by examining the diversity of beliefs amongst nonreligious millennials across a range of societies from North West to South Central Europe. We examine how they find and make meaning in their lives and how they deal with death and other existential issues. We further investigate how social and political context and the laws and practices regulating nonreligion shape emergent nonreligious forms, using the example of Poland, and build on the Polish case to examine nonreligious identity building, social activism and institution formation. Finally, we step back to our international comparisons to propose an explanation of the conditions shaping nonreligious identity and group formation.
Keywords
- Nonreligion
- Nonreligious
- Politics of religion
- Identity politics
- Religious diversity
- Multiculturalism
- Publicisation
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1 Introduction
This chapter addresses the questions, ‘How can nonreligion be defined or best understood, how can those who say they have “no religion” be more fully represented in studies which examine how people face existential challenges in their day-to-day lives and under what conditions do nonreligious collective identities become mobilised?’ We address them by presenting evidence of the diversity of beliefs and practices found amongst young self-identified nonreligious people in six European countries. In addressing the first question, we will highlight how religion and nonreligion can be fruitfully approached relationally, both as mutually constituted conceptual fields (Quack 2014) and as situated on a continuum of responses to existential challenges (Lee 2015). In addressing the second question, we will argue that the categories of myth and storytelling, drawn from literary studies and philosophy, are useful for understanding processes of meaning-making amongst the nonreligious, as is the category of ritual action as developed in anthropology and religious studies.
To answer the third question, we examine how the sociocultural and religious backdrop of different countries affects the regulation and representation of nonreligion in law and policymaking, in turn impacting on the lives of nonreligious young people. This is done by considering the case of nonreligion in Poland, which has a historically recent experience of communist religion-state policy coupled with high levels of mobilisation of Catholicism as a resistance identity against Communist domination. This legacy directly impacts on the childhood memories of our oldest participants and on the sociopolitical context of all Poles. Different dimensions of nonreligious action, from formally leaving the Catholic church to supporting the right of women to make reproductive health choices, are analysed.
The Polish case is also used to introduce examples of institutional innovation amongst the nonreligious in our study, partly to resist state and populist religion-inflected incursions on personal freedoms, but also to forge new nonreligious public identities through new events and traditions. This allows us to propose a theoretical reading of the conditions under which nonreligion tends to become ‘publicised’, that is, publicly visible, self-aware and organised, an account which includes consideration of the roles of changes in communicative conditions, in particular network formation and sharing, including not just information but affect, via social media (Herbert 2011).
Our theory can allow a better understanding of two different positions. On the one hand, secularisation theorists highlight declining religious belief and affiliation (Voas and Crockett 2005) but miss the relocation of existential engagement to networks and affective practices. On the other hand, advocates of the ‘affective’ and ‘subjective’ turns (Sointu and Woodhead 2008) observe this relocation and show how it articulates with contemporary renegotiations of gender roles and narratives of ‘expressive selfhood’ in late modern societies (ibid.: 259) but miss how this is facilitated by changes in communicative conditions. We believe our conceptualisation can make sense of both perspectives and illuminate the missing communicative dimension in these accounts.
Bringing together these results allows us to affirm that the nonreligious field constitutes a significant area of enquiry for understanding how young Europeans see their place in the world, relate with others and become motivated to mobilise on social and political issues.
2 Defining or Situating Nonreligion
This section addresses the question of how to define nonreligion – or more precisely, given our preference for a relational rather than substantive definition, situating nonreligion. The field of nonreligious studies has expanded and institutionalised rapidly in the last decade (Bullivant 2020), so we will locate our position in relation to this developing literature. However, we will start, as we did in formulating our project and as much of the literature does, from the observation that the proportion of people who respond in the negative to survey questions (such as ‘Do you belong to a particular religion or denomination? No’ [European Social Survey, ESS] and ‘How important is religion in your life? Not at all’ [European Values Survey, EVS]) across Europe continues to grow steadily and in the case of the former question now accounts for a majority of responses in many European countries, including Norway and Sweden, despite high levels of membership of the Lutheran Church (ESS 2018).
Digging into this data a little further, it soon becomes apparent that this sense of not belonging to a particular religion or not rating religion as at all important in one’s life does not necessarily entail the adoption of an atheistic or materialist outlook; rates of belief in God are much higher than ratings of the importance of religion (EVS 2019), and people who do not believe in God often believe nonetheless in some sense of immanent justice (e.g., answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘confident that justice always prevails over injustice’, ESS 2018).
Such evidence suggests that in many European societies, many people – more in the younger age groups – consider themselves nonreligious yet are not atheists. As Woodhead describes this population in the British context,
a really crucial point is that ‘no-religion’ does not simply equate to ‘secular’ and ‘atheist’. Whilst only 16 % of nones believe in God, most are indifferent about the issue of God’s existence, rather than certain about his non-existence. Similarly, just 7 % of the population say they are influenced by humanism or secularism (43) … a large and growing number of people now think of themselves as having ‘no religion’, for by this they mean the packaged, dogmatic religions of modern societies. They are rejecting something very particular… They do not necessarily become atheists, or abandon the belief that there are things beyond this life which give it meaning. (2016: 45)
In facing existential challenges in their lives, such people draw neither on the structured teachings of religious institutions nor their humanist and atheist equivalents but rather on a variety of sources of knowledge, opinions and beliefs in ways that are not necessarily well captured by individualist or consumerist metaphors such as ‘pick n’ mix’ (ibid.). For in addition to their family and peer group resources and individual enquiries, they may reach out in various ways, including via social media platforms, to like-minded others, for discussion, sharing and support. This, then, was the basis of our idea for the project ‘Reaching for a New Sense of Connection’ from which the evidence presented in this paper draws – ‘connection’ in the dual sense of meaningful connection in and with life and the universe without any formal religious affiliation and in the sense of social connection with others sharing a similar approach.
How then does this approach relate to the developing field of nonreligious studies and to understandings of nonreligion within it?
First, it should be noted that there is as yet no definitive consensus on how to define the term or field of nonreligion; as a recent review comments,
scholars studying religion’s other have yet to reach universal agreement as concepts old and new continue to take shape in their collective thinking. (Smith and Cragan 2019: 321)
Nonetheless, there does seem to be some emerging consensus on four features, all of which resonate with our own approach. First is that the nonreligious is a larger category than atheism (itself diverse) because it includes both some who consider themselves atheists and others who hold a range of metaphysical views or express uncertainty in this area. This is both apparent in surveys, where, as we have seen, more people say they have no religion and then declare themselves atheists (Woodhead 2016), but also comes through in qualitative work, where, as Lee states,
respondents use generic nonreligious categories to identify with substantive nonreligious and spiritual cultures more commonly than scholars and even respondents themselves appreciate. (2014: 467)
Second, it is a less inclusive category than everything not religious (Quack 2014: 441). Rather, it includes only phenomena that are defined relationally to religion rather than those that are not related to religion at all (‘areligious’; ibid.: 446). Third is that it is a term that is more effectively defined relationally – in relation to other concepts, especially to religion (inspired by Bourdieu’s (1971) field theory approach) – than substantively, as its meaning may shift as the meaning of religion shifts within and across cultural fields. As Lee states in an early contribution (relative to the recency of intensive work on nonreligion), nonreligion is ‘[s]omething which is defined primarily by the way it differs from religion’ (2011: 2, emphasis in original).
However, Quack argues that a relationship of difference to religion is too narrow to define the scope of nonreligion; rather, a number of other possible relationships, including mirroring or imitation, also constitute forms of nonreligion. Thus, he argues, whereas rationalists (or, one might add, atheists) tend to define themselves through their difference to religion,
the primary feature of many humanist groups in Europe is not how they ‘differ’ from religion but how they ‘mirror’ religious offers (for example life-cycle rituals, youth work, hospice work). (2014: 447, emphasis added)
An advantage of defining nonreligion in relation to the religious field is, thus, that this enables a range of possible relationships to religion to be considered (as well as a range of possible meanings of religion). Nonreligion, then, may be understood in relation to how religion is understood in a particular context. Quack acknowledges that this approach may cause difficulties in cultural and historical circumstances where it is difficult to clearly distinguish a religious field from other social fields:
The very idea to distinguish (sic) different ‘fields’ implies to accept (sic) prior judgments about ‘religion’ and can itself be analysed as a product of secularisation processes, as premised on a particular conceptualisation of ‘religion’ with a genealogy that some call ‘protestant’ (Mahmood 2006: 843–844) or ‘modern’ (Asad 2003: particularly 1–8). (Quack 2014: 454)
However, we contend that these concerns have little force in contemporary Europe, where both the Protestant Reformation and various dimensions of modernity have had long-standing and deep influence (Therborn 2000) (the latter projected eastwards by the imposition of Communist ideologies and institutions), such that the differentiation of a religious field is a commonplace emic conceptual category, albeit with different meanings in different contexts. At any rate, as we shall explain in the next section, our method of sampling meant we interviewed young people who each identified themselves as nonreligious and in the narratives they articulated in interviews positioned themselves in relation to religion (both in rejection of and as different from religion, as well as mirroring) in one or sometimes several ways.
But before turning to sampling, we note and welcome a fourth development in discussions on the emerging field of nonreligious studies – the recognition that while nonreligion is defined in relation to and as distinct from its religious other, nonetheless, the activities of individuals and groups across the spheres of cognition, emotion and action categorised as religious and nonreligious share substantial similarities. Hence, as Smith and Cragan (2019:321) argue,
a small but growing number of influential scholars are suggesting that we move away from the religious/nonreligious terminology entirely and instead describe the sociology of religion and nonreligion as the sociology of existential cultures.
This is useful because the notion of ‘existential cultures’ (Lee, 2015) brings us back to the animating concerns of the project – an attempt to understand how the substantial proportion of European young people who don’t identify with a religion nonetheless make sense of the existential challenges they face – and reach out to or make common cause with others in so doing. This may seem a contradictory position, having made so much of nonreligion being defined as other than religion; yet such a position well mirrors our findings in the field – our interviewees both distinguished their beliefs and practices clearly from those they identified as religious yet also expressed responses to existential challenges which appealed to a sense of moral order or (in some cases) non-material connection which in many ways resemble religious responses.
In other words, while the nonreligious and religious are dialogically constructed categories, they are not necessarily (and certainly not for all nonreligious) opposites; rather, they are entangled in people’s attempts to make sense of and relate to the world. Non-materialist beliefs in reincarnation, karma, fate, meaningful coincidences, life after death and the efficacy of magic, fortune telling, luck and charms were found amongst more than a third of our interviewees. On this basis and that of supporting survey evidence (below), we suggest that religion and nonreligion are best viewed as situated on a continuum of belief from religious to nonreligious (or vice versa) rather than as discrete phenomena and entail similar psychological and social processes, for example, playing an important role in the individual’s search for existential meaning. The categories of myth and storytelling, drawn from literary studies and philosophy, are also useful for understanding this process of meaning-making, and we draw on some resources which enable this understanding.
So to use Quack’s words, we see our project as an attempt to document and understand better ‘religious-nonreligious entanglements in the contemporary world and the heterogeneity of nonreligious ways of being in the world they produce’ (2014: 442).
3 Research Design, Sampling and Analysis
The article reflects on fieldwork conducted across 25 cities and towns in six countries: the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Poland and Romania. We conducted 67 (42 males and 25 females) semi-structured interviews with self-identified nonreligious millennials (Generation Y) born from 1982 to 1999, making them between 19 and 37 years old when interviewed. We feature 3 of the 11 European countries where a majority of young people (under 30) claim no religion (the UK 72%, Netherlands 74%, Norway 57%, ESS 2016) but also include cases where nonreligion is less common (Poland 6.6% and Romania under 30 5.2% ‘religion not important at all’; World Values Survey [WVS]).
We selected this sample to obtain a sense of the range of conditions faced by the nonreligious across Europe. Other dimensions of difference include post-Communist societies with contrasting levels of religious participation (Eastern Germany (high), Poland (high), Romania (high)) and locations with strong pressures to religious conformity (both in the majority culture, e.g., Poland, Romania and minority subcultures, e.g., Hindu and Muslim heritage) and with lower religious socialising pressures (e.g., Eastern Germany, Netherlands) and with strong welfare states (e.g., Norway, Netherlands) and in less secure contexts (e.g., Romania, Poland). In terms of religious traditions, we interviewed in mixed Christian heritage environments (the UK, Netherlands, Germany) and with different majority religious heritages: Protestant (Norway), Catholic (Poland), and Orthodox (Romania).
Participants were found using social media keyword searches and snowballing (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Reddit). Such searches yield substantially different results in terms of nonreligion’s relation to religion in different contexts. For example, in Poland, the organisations located tended to be defined in opposition to organised religion or the political mobilisation of religion, including the Narodowa Apostazja (National Apostasy) Facebook group created as an online movement against clericalisation in Poland and the tightening of the abortion law, the Kazimierz Lyszczynski Foundation which promotes a secular state and ethics and Liberté! which advocates an open society and liberal culture in Poland. In contrast, in Norway and the UK, this method identified organisations characterised more by a mirroring relationship to religion – the Norwegian Humanists (Human-Etisk Forbund) and Humanists UK. As we used key terms translated from the English by native speakers and searched across four widely used platforms, we suggest that this difference reflects natural language use in these contexts rather than a sampling error or artefact of our method: Nonreligion does have a more antagonistic relationship to religion in Poland than in the UK or Norway.
Nonetheless, because we located interviewees identified by their posting on social media platforms, there is a sample bias in terms of the level of engagement compared with, say, a random sample of people who responded that religion has no importance in their lives in the European Values Survey. Our sample mostly comprises ‘engaged nonreligious’, that is, those who are active in an overtly nonreligious organisation or social network. This purposive sampling was used because we wished to investigate how and why nonreligious reach out to one another and the kinds of organisations and networks they form when they do so. In seeking answers to this question, we asked participants about their lived experience of being nonreligious, what beliefs they share, what values they hold and how they construct meaning in their lives.
4 Nonreligious Responses to Existential Challenges: Ritual, Magic, Myth and Meaning-Making
More than a third (34%) of all participants (more in Poland and Romania) held a diverse set of non-materialist beliefs characterised in the literature as ‘PSMS’ – paranormal, supernatural, magical and superstitious (Lindeman and Aarnio 2007). While our sample is not representative, this distribution is consistent with survey evidence (e.g., the European Values Survey 2014) which shows that amongst those stating religion has ‘no importance’ for them, a high proportion express belief in a ‘spirit of life force’, see, for instance, 33% in Poland and 42% in the Netherlands. Our participants tended to express PSMS beliefs, especially concerning fate, destiny and human/cosmic interconnectedness when recounting times of anxiety, threat or existential challenges, and held such beliefs (often experienced in tension, sometimes not) alongside a generally secular-materialist outlook, understanding secular as ‘that which is primarily or majorly concerned with this world’ (Bullivant and Lee 2016) and materialism as ‘the view that the world is composed entirely of matter and the forces and energy into which matter is physically transferable’ (Blackburn 2008).
4.1 Nonreligious Use of Ritual
For example, Daniela, a 34-year-old woman from Romania recounted that when she is ‘terrified’ or dealing with loss, she will still pray but has internalised the process to pray to herself rather than a supernatural power. Daniela stated:
I did go to church twice when people who I knew died. For some reason in times of distress, I decided, ‘Okay, if there is a superior entity, maybe I’ll just light candles for them, maybe it will help them’. And that was my whole rationing [sic] for doing that, because I didn’t know exactly how to cope with it… even at the point of lighting a candle I could say at the same time ‘I don’t believe in God’, but still, what I was doing was very hypocritical for me.
Daniela was one of several participants to express discomfort or tension at the perceived inconsistency of performing a religious ritual (or other practice articulating a PSMS belief) while rejecting religion, but we also found PSMS thinking without this tension. For Daniela, this ambivalence existed as she processed the experience which she recognised, but the hangover of religion and perhaps more importantly the structure of religion and ritual remain. Lee (2015, p. 5) asks, ‘To what extent are rituals and practices used by secular people?’ Lee questions if these rituals are developed in contradistinction to religious cultures. So are they substantially, meaningfully nonreligious or are they insubstantially areligious, post-religious or secular? In the case of Daniela in Romania, the prominence of the church means that the church still has the monopoly over rituals, and in this case, the answer to Lee’s question is post-Christian. Zuckerman (2014) identifies that the ‘beauty’ of being secular is that rituals do not bind you; it is ultimately a choice if you participate and you can contemplate which rituals to pick and choose or create new ones. However, picking new ones over pre-packaged ones disrupts intergenerational continuities (which may be highly valued for nonreligious reasons) and requires a lot of work. While Daniela experienced this as being contradictory and hypocritical – the reality of the experience and the fact of not having the secular tools to deal with grief – revisiting religious rituals can be seen as a rational and ethically consistent decision.
4.2 Nonreligious Magical Thinking
Further exploration of PSMS beliefs shows that they tend to come to the fore when people are dealing with difficult situations or facing existential challenges. In these situations, and in addressing our questions about belief in life after death and the basis of their moral thinking, our respondents sometimes turned to ritual practices, storytelling and myths to articulate their existential beliefs, which enabled them to articulate more complex and subtle positions than rationalist or scientific resources appear to allow.
In Eastern Germany, one does not find the same familial and societal pressure for religious conformity as in Romania or Poland. In Germany as a whole, Bullivant’s (2018) report on young people (16–29), which uses the European Social Survey, finds that 45% of young Germans identify with no religion. However, in Eastern Germany, the ISSP found in 2008 that only 2.5% of East Germans are certain of or have always believed in God (Smith 2013). Our Eastern German participants were drawn from Leipzig in East Germany, the most populous city in Saxony. All but one of the Eastern German participants grew up in a nonreligious family, where atheism was the norm and religion rarely discussed, except in admiration of religious architecture. Yet certain cultural practices relating to magic and divination still persist, such as the Germanic tradition of Bleigießen (lead pouring), where the ‘shape’ of the year to come is discerned in the shape made by molten lead poured into water, which was described to us by one of our interviewees.Footnote 1
This occurrence of PSMS thinking amongst second- and third-generation atheists in largely post-religious Leipzig suggests to us that dominant materialist-rationalist modes of thought lack resources (which religion has traditionally provided) for certain kinds of meaning-making to address existential questions. These are especially narrative and symbolic resources. For example, the questions ‘Why has this accident/illness/misfortune happened to me?’, ‘What meaning can my life have after my death, or my connection to a loved one have after their death?’ or ‘What will happen to me this year?’ as addressed through Bleigießen cannot be answered in a satisfying way within a scientific framework, and rituals like lighting candles for the dead or Bleigießen can help to fill that meaning gap and address emotional needs.
4.3 Nonreligious Meaning-Making Through Storytelling and Myth
Other important mechanisms for articulating meaning are storytelling and the use of myth. Stacey (2017, 2018) employs myths as a concept to illuminate how both religious and nonreligious people imagine solidarity, thus overcoming the religious/secular binary in his description. Stacey’s framework is useful more broadly to understand how the stories we tell construct our world view and fits with our suggestion that religious and nonreligious beliefs are better seen as situated on a continuum. The stories nonreligious millennials recount can offer insights into what is important for them and how they construct meaning in their lives, and this is sometimes through popular culture. For example, when thinking about death, Shane, a 31-year-old man from London who grew up Baptist, told us:
One of the reasons I love movies is they let me be superstitious. There was a movie that came out called Coco…. It’s …[about] how you affect people and how they’re going to remember you.
Here, Shane discusses how Coco allows him to think about the afterlife in a way that makes sense in secular-materialist terms. In the film, Miguel accidentally crosses over to the land of the dead, where you live on for as long as you are remembered. This 2017 Pixar animation was also mentioned by other participants as it constructs an afterlife framed as a secular form of remembrance. Shane continued:
And I want my life, not because I believe in the afterlife or because I [want] people to … remember me. But [because I want to have] made a difference in someone’s life. I’m not going to say I will achieve that, but that is just an awesome feeling. You die in peace because you feel… People like David Attenborough. How many lives does he reach?
Shane’s reference to popular culture enables him to articulate his own beliefs about living a worthwhile life through what he (and other participants) referred to as a ‘don’t be a dick’ philosophy – essentially, treating others in the way you would like to be treated and, in the process, hoping to make a difference in people’s lives.
During the interview, a question about the basis of morality – ‘How do you know things are the right or wrong thing to do?’ – as well as questions on meaning-making and purpose were often questions participants found the most difficult to answer. Anna’s (31-year-old from Łódź) answer resonates with Stacey’s (2017, 2018) account of how storytelling can help people to articulate existential beliefs that are difficult to express in propositional terms. Anna discusses a Russian book when asked about existential questions, that is, meaning of life or life after death. She goes on to say that according to this book, once you die, you receive what you believe in. This book resonated with Anna, and she stated that she ‘just believe[s] that it would be this way’. Such beliefs are influenced by books and popular culture and appear fluid and likely to be revised; Anna was also exploring different dimensions and multiverse theory.
Cristina – a 24-year-old Romanian woman living in London – also shows the importance of storytelling in nonreligious grappling with existential questions. While on a survey instrument, Cristina would show up as not believing in life after death or agnostic on the question, yet her response suggests a depth and subtlety of engagement inadequately reflected by those categories:
I feel like there’s no satisfactory answer to this [‘What do you think happens to us when we die?’]. …[T]he way I try to imagine it, I don’t know if you know this novel called Flatlands? So… the characters in the novels are geometric figures in 2-Ds like triangles or squares or circles… they only see lines… and then he sees his entire flat map world from above. And he understands that there is life outside his own dimension. But then when he goes back, he starts preaching this, and people are like, fuck off, this doesn’t make sense. There’s just the flat map. There’s not more than that. So I think similarly speaking, we’re like 3-D people or just meant to think in a certain way, and we can’t really explain these things with the current knowledge.
Together, these three dimensions – the use of ritual, magical thinking and meaning-making through stories – illustrate the complexity of nonreligious approaches to existential challenges. Young people who position themselves as nonreligious nonetheless draw on a range of resources including these dimensions and elements of PSMS thinking when grappling with challenges that rationalist and scientific discourses appear to lack resources to address.
Added to the other elements mentioned, this evidence also supports our suggestion that the phenomenon of ‘nones’ can best be grasped by seeing their range of beliefs and outlooks as situated on a continuum with those identifying as religious, with an overlap both in the field of PSMS beliefs – which manifest even in cultures with materialist-atheist norms (e.g., in Leipzig) – and in the field of meaning-making through storytelling and myth (as also identified by Stacey 2017, 2018). Furthermore, to make sense of these beliefs and meaning-making strategies, we have shown that interdisciplinary work is required, including drawing resources from the field of the study of religion (e.g., of ritual) but also from psychology (PSMS categorisation of beliefs) and literary studies (e.g., storytelling, myth-making). Such an interdisciplinary approach is also valuable for understanding the public manifestations and social aspects of nonreligion, which we will now examine through the case of Poland. This case will be used to demonstrate the importance of understanding the social, cultural and political context which shapes nonreligious mobilisation and group formation.
5 The Polish Case
5.1 Being Nonreligious in Poland: Loyalty, Apostasy and Activism
Bullock and Bullivant (2021) report from the ESS (2016) that only 16% of Polish young people (aged between 16 and 29) identify as having no religion. This contrasts with their neighbours to the south (Czech Republic) and west (East Germany) which have very high levels of nonreligion, and, as Bullivant (2018) notes, not only does Poland ‘have a very high proportion of Catholic affiliates, but the Poles exhibit remarkably high levels of actual practice: almost half attend Mass at least weekly, and only 3% never attend’. Thus, regular Catholic ritual practice and identification remains an aspect of shared social life in Poland.
5.2 Catholicism and Polish National Identity
This strength of support for Catholicism in Poland needs to be understood in the context of a distinctive national history. Partitioned between Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia for the long nineteenth century (1772–1918), the Polish language and the Catholic Church (PCC) became the twin pillars of national identity. Occupied by Nazi Germany (1939–1945), Poland emerged devastated from World War II, shorn of its religious diversity (Jews lost to the Holocaust and emigration, German-speaking Lutherans fled west ahead of the Red Army) and with a Communist regime under Soviet influence which suppressed Polish hopes for sovereignty. In this context with a 96% Catholic population and political dissent stifled, the PCC became both the institutional and symbolic centre of independent Polish national identity.
A key symbol of this is an icon of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, which toured Polish parishes in a decade-long tour from 1956 to 1966, in what became a rival celebration to state commemoration of the millennium of Polish nationhood in 1966. This cultural frame was tapped into by the solidarity-independent union movement, as it began its 9-year struggle for Polish independence (Osa 1997: 352). This history helps to make sense of some reactions to the use in 2019 of the Black Madonna (surrounded by a rainbow halo; see Fig. 1) by an LGBT rights activist to protest the treatment of LGBT people in Polish society. Gazeta Polska, the source of the photograph below, branded the wild posting of the image an act of ‘homoterrorism’.
The role as the symbolic dynamo of opposition in the Communist period placed the PCC in a powerful position in shaping the post-Communist settlement in 1989. But a role which had proved effective in opposition was less suited to functioning in a democracy, especially the liberal form of democracy defined by the protection of individual rights and minority rights. The PCC used its powerful position and popular support to embed itself in state institutions such as education (especially religious education) and to push through legal change (including increasing restrictions on abortion). In the early 1990s, this led to clashes with the Ombudsman for Citizen’s rights, who repeatedly warned of the emergence of ‘denominational’ or ‘parachurch’ state in Poland (Pawlik 1995: 34).
Other elements in Polish Catholicism wanted to move further towards Catholic cultural dominance. The 1990s also saw the birth of the Radio Maryja Group, a media empire which, across multiple platforms, has pushed for an exclusivist Polish nationalism rooted in popular Catholicism (Fras 2009: 34). Opposed to this (and read by two of the fathers of our Polish participants) was Nie [No], a politically left-leaning magazine very critical of religion, especially Catholicism, first published in Warsaw in 1990. But religious nationalism has become part of the dominant media frame media, not least Radio Maryja, which has played a key role in propagating and maintaining a populist, socially conservative discourse in Poland, in particular in the field of gender relations and female autonomy (Marcianak 2009: 173).
Its director Rydzyk actively participated in the creation of an ultranationalist political party, the League of Polish Families in 1999, and later switched his allegiance to the more electorally successful PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, Law and Justice Party), which led the ruling coalition from 2005 to 2009 and has formed a majority government in Poland since 2015. Under this regime, there have been further attacks on the independence of the judiciary and attempts from civil society groups to further tighten the abortion laws, leading to large-scale opposition mobilisation by a range of feminist and human rights groups, in which women have played a leading role (Hall 2019).
This background sets the scene for examining the experience of nonreligious millennials in Poland and for making sense of why some of the symbolic protest tools, some of them have adopted, have proved so controversial. First, we consider the issue of apostasy.
5.3 Leaving the Polish Catholic Church
One reason Poland has a ‘very high proportion of Catholic affiliates’ is due to the difficulties involved in disaffiliation – in becoming ‘apostate’. When we asked Anna, a participant we met in Warsaw, what impact she felt religion had on her life, she told us that it was having an impact, and Anna was in the process of ‘finally’ getting her apostasy papers. Anna felt that the high numbers of Catholics in Poland in official statistics do not reflect active religiosity. Anna’s experience was that being baptised into the tradition made it very difficult to exit the church. She believed that the church’s political influence, especially regarding anti-abortion, impacts on her life and her affiliation (not through choice) with Catholicism.
We followed up with Anna after returning to London to see how the process went. She described the experience whereby she had to go to the parish where she was baptised to acquire her baptism certificate and then bring it to the parish where she currently lives and deliver it with a statement of will to leave (in three copies) along with her certificate. Anna explained that the parish sent it to the curia to make an annotation in the baptism books.
And this is it, ‘Dobby is free’. However, usually, they try to discourage people trying to get apostasy. I was asked in my parish today why I wanted to hand in my apostasy request and what caused me to lose my belief. Seems that everything went fine, though at every stage, they tried … to make me change my mind.
Anna describes the apostasy process as an unpleasant ordeal through her analogy with ‘Dobby’ (a house elf from the Harry Potter books who serves a cruel wizarding family) being freed; she views her experience of Catholicism to be oppressive while framing herself as ‘Dobby’ representing freedom and choice. Not all of the Polish participants had gone through this apostasy process because of the bureaucracy involved, the ordeal of questioning by the authorities and family pressures to remain. When we asked another participant (Monika, a 26-year-old woman from Warsaw) if she had officially left the church, she told us:
No. No, it’s too much hassle. You need to have, as far as I know, three or four witnesses to this, and so many papers. I also have a goddaughter, so I can’t really do that until she has communion and so on or at least I shouldn’t. But if I get properly angry with the church at one point, I might consider it.
Monika, like other Polish participants, remarked that if it was organised like Germany where you pay tax to the church of which you are a member, she would leave immediately. The principal reason she had not left was the perceived difficulty of the apostasy process. In fact, under European Council pressure, procedures were somewhat ‘relaxed’ in 2016 by abolishing the obligation to appear in the presence of two witnesses and undertake a two-day visit to the parish priest. When we asked Monika what being a godparent meant to her, she replied, ‘Nothing, really’. She went on to tell us that her godchild’s parents are not religious either, but
she just baptised her children because her family wanted her to. … I would say she does what she thinks should happen like chronologically, I would say. Like when the baby’s born, they’re baptised, and then eight years later or nine years later, there’s communion.
Thus, we see strong social pressure to follow religious traditions remains, often coming from older generations. If you do not conform, Basia told us how people can feel ‘marked somehow socially’ because ‘you were signed in [to Catholicism] as a baby, usually, when you were baptised, like 95% of people are baptised, it’s like everyone you ask’. If you avoid religious traditions and practices, we were told ‘it’s like you’re letting down the people you love’, while Monika related how her ‘grandma would be really mad if she finds out … she’s old and she has a weak heart, so I don’t want to risk anything’.Footnote 2 Trzebiatowska (2018b: 5) found in her study of Polish women atheists that women in particular were warned by family members not to raise children to follow their atheist identity around relatives because they would get upset, and thus,
women have mastered operating in their cultural field to such extent that their ability to steer clear of trouble may not even be fully conscious… Both strategies [dismissing as a phase and coaching by the family to keep quiet] amount to ignoring, silencing, and trivialising the female experience… this policing of women’s atheist sentiments is often carried out by other women for the good of the family or community. (ibid.: 9)
However, despite these pressures and there being a great public presence of religion in Poland, our interviews suggest nonreligion is much more prevalent amongst Polish millennials than recent surveys suggest because of the high level of disillusionment amongst currently nominal believers. Indeed, resentment of Catholic dominance, and especially of clerical corruption and hypocrisy, is commonplace – for reasons detailed by Monika:
There is so much hypocrisy and lies, especially now in Poland that the church tries to force the politicians to pass some laws against abortion… I feel like, especially right now, there are so many people that are really angry with it, with them, so I hear a lot more about it than I used to. There are many people that want to leave church.
Trzebiatowska (2018a) found that some women were concerned by religious intrusion in the public sphere, especially in politics and education, and we found this too. When asked about the afterlife, Anna wished she could find herself in Valhalla because it was comforting for her to think that the Valkyries are female and stated that in Poland, feminism is not a popular idea. And Monika, another participant, went on to say that when religion was discussed with her friends or peers, it would often be in relation to ‘how stupid some of the church ideas towards politics [are]. We discuss that a lot’. When we asked Monika to elaborate how religion impacts upon her life, she remarked,
Well, now that church is getting more and more involved with politics… Recently, there were some huge protests about the abortion ban. The church wanted politicians to pass this law. There were some huge protests around here, so I mean, if this passed, that would affect my life a lot, like other people in Poland. It could mean that the church would say, ‘Well, we can now do anything. If we can make politicians pass the law we want’, then it would start to affect my life a lot.
Therefore, Monika’s nonreligious identity comes to the forefront when it is mobilised by political challenges, and there are strong voices coming from the nonreligious in Poland about challenging cultural religious practices to limit the influence of religion in social and political life. Thus, Ty and Tegan, a couple in their mid-30s from Warsaw, expressed how ‘we have to be the wind of change’ – referring to younger nonreligious Poles. It is to the growth of nonreligious activism in Poland that we now turn.
5.4 Tradition, Activism and Institution-Building Amongst the Nonreligious in Poland
What I realised during the black protests is that there’s a group of people in Poland who need a speaker, who need somebody to speak their mind, to say we are against this and that and we can break our contract with the church. (Basia, a lady in her early 30s from Wrocław)
The election of the PiS government, the sharp right turn in Polish politics and the weakness of the centre-left has galvanised new opposition movements in Poland, including both inclusive groups in which nonreligious have played a prominent role alongside religious participants (e.g., feminist movements) and other movements which are explicitly and securely nonreligious. While these movements have become more prominent since 2016, they stem from an earlier period. In the wake of the first PiS-led administration (2005–2007) and inspired by the international ‘Out Campaign’ for atheists to publicly declare their position led by British God Delusion author Richard Dawkins, the Internet-based List of Internet Atheists and Agnostics was established in 2007, followed by the online group Internet Photo Atheists in 2009.
In response to the 2012 formation of a Parliamentary Group for Prevention of Atheism in Poland, actions were launched by the Polish Association of Rationalists in 2012 under the slogan ‘If you don’t believe you are not alone’. This was followed in 2013 by an Atheists’ March in Warsaw, which commemorated the ‘martyrdom’ of the ‘first Polish Atheist’ Kazimierz Łyszczyński in 1689. Subsequently, an annual event nominating and celebrating the ‘Biggest Atheist in Poland’ recognising individuals, organisations and institutions for counteraction against discrimination based on belief has been held as well as ‘atheist picnics’ (Lyszczynski.com.pl. 2019 and Bullock and Bullivant 2021).
5.4.1 Activism on Apostasy
As previously stated, social pressures and bureaucratic processes make leaving the Catholic church in Poland difficult despite recent relaxation of the rules. Several of our respondents spoke of their desire to leave but said that the effort required had prevented them. However, one respondent, Basia, who had apostatised a decade before, spoke of an event which spurred her to start an organisation to help others to make the step. Speaking in the context of the contentious abortion debate in Poland, she recounted,
There was a priest in Poland who said that everybody who is somehow … supporting abortion should be excommunicated, like thrown out of the church officially. It was supposed to scare us, … [but] in fact, people said okay, good, because we want to leave you anyway. … But the church is making it as difficult as they can. So people resign, [but] people get scared… they feel the pressure. Then I said, okay, so if anybody wants to leave the church, after this priest said [that]. No problem. I did it already. So come to me. I will help you. We made an event on Facebook and a fan page on Facebook, and it grew… I mean, we never expected that many replies, this feedback that we got. And the journalists started, the newspapers started calling us. ‘Tell us more about your action’. Well, it was just an idea. They want to throw us out? Cool. That’s what we want. Let’s go, yeah? We will help them. We will bring them the papers ourselves so it’s easier for them. (Basia)
Social networks like Basia’s Facebook group give nonreligious the opportunity to connect on other issues that may concern them.
5.4.2 Pro-choice Activism on Abortion
One major issue in recent years has been the proposal to further tighten Poland’s already strict abortion laws to ban abortion in all circumstances. Despite a total ban only being supported by 7% of the population, the Parliamentary arithmetic after the 2015 landslide for the PiS meant that with government backing a proposal by the private Catholic foundation, the Ordo Iuris Institute could have become law. This set the scene for one of the most striking confrontations of recent Polish history:
On October 3, 2016, cities across Poland were seized by massive demonstrations against new proposals for a total abortion ban in the country. These proposals, first drafted by the Ordo Iuris Institute, a reactionary Catholic foundation, were designed to deny all access to abortion, with no exceptions. The conservative government of the Law and Justice party (PiS), along with the Roman Catholic Church, fully supported the idea. But the women’s rights movement that spontaneously emerged in opposition forced ruling-party members in Parliament to abandon the project. (Szelegieniec 2018: 45)
This victory of the ‘Black Friday Protests’ – so-called because of the dark clothes worn by many protesters – was particularly remarkable given the relative weakness of feminist and women’s rights movements in Poland since the 1990s (Hall 2019). The movement was enabled by the same online-offline interplay we have seen had enabled the development of organised atheist and apostasy-enabling movements – and again involved significant participation by nonreligious activists. Survey data from 2016 shows that nonreligious have amongst the highest support for pro-choice positions in the abortion debate in Poland:
Support for abortion was strongest among groups with left-wing political sympathies (73 percent to 91 percent) and the non-religious (81 percent to 94 percent). (Szelegieniec 2018: 50)
And this was reflected in strong support for the Black Protests:
In general, 58 percent of Poles said they supported the protests, while 26 percent opposed them. Politically, the strongest support came from people who identified as left-wing (76 percent) and nonreligious (78 percent). (ibid.: 55)
Some nonreligious also had prominent leadership roles within the Black Protest movement. Basia, for example, helped to organise both the Black Protests and the Women’s Strike that followed in 2017. Indeed, it was in the context of organising for the Black Protests that she first developed a sense that a stronger voice was needed for people who wanted to opt out of church control, and hence, she developed her Facebook group to enable people to apostasise:
Step by step and slowly, it’s turned to the last focus on the abortion thing, because the topic is returning on and on, because once it is stopped, then the government tries again, because they are full of religious fanatics, and they are supported very strongly by the religious politics, and they give them money openly as well, which also makes the people… I mean, the opposition is getting more and more anticlerical.
Another focus for nonreligious activism has been the film Kler (Clergy) directed by Wojciech Smarzowski (2018). This follows three Catholic priests and tackles issues surrounding abortion, blackmail, alcoholism and child sexual abuse amongst the clergy. It was released in Poland on 28 September 2018, and many of our nonreligious participants watched the film within the opening week. The film broke the country’s opening weekend box office record with 935,000 admissions (previously held by Fifty Shades of Grey). The film has since sparked hundreds of abuse allegations against clergy. One participant, Aleksander, a 30-year-old man from Krakow, told us how a map created by the ‘Do Not Be Afraid’ foundation saw a spike in the reports of child molestation by Polish priests after the film’s release (Flis 2018). Aleksander went on to explain how the film had ignited conversations around Catholicism and corruption, and if these follow the pattern of public revelations of clerical abuse in Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s, it may lead to a rapid disengagement of Poles from Catholicism. However, Irish Catholicism lacked a populist political party similar to PiS, whose existence and support base suggest this process in Poland may be even more fiercely contested, which in turn may trigger the formation of stronger nonreligious movements and institutions.
In Poland then, adverse social and political conditions have stimulated creative and active responses from the nonreligious, closely intertwined with political activism, producing initiatives like the atheist Internet list and the apostasy support Facebook group, developing symbiotically with political engagement like the Black Protests and building on media opportunities like the film Kler.
6 Discussion
Stepping back from Poland to the comparative context, while similar clericalisation of society has occurred in post-Communist Romania, collective organisation of nonreligion and the prominent involvement of the nonreligious in political protest have not developed to the same extent. One reason for this may be that populist politicians have not sought to make changes in a way that has impinged on women’s autonomy as in Poland, thus giving the nonreligious a popular rallying point. Another explanation may be that the stronger tradition of civil society organisation in Poland, which extends back to and beyond the solidarity movement (Kubik 1994), shapes contemporary nonreligious organisation. However, recent work on new feminist activists in Poland suggests low awareness of these traditions, so if newer movements do draw on them, the influence would appear not to be a conscious one (Hall 2019).
Looking more broadly, it seems that the public visibility of religion, religion’s ‘publicisation’, shaped by the available media and their use by religious and other actors in representing religion (Herbert 2011), is one factor which influences the extent of nonreligious mobilisation and distinct identity formation across several of our cases. In particular, the availability of social media platforms and the transnational as well as national networks they permit have been critical in enabling the formation, mobilisation and durability of nonreligious networks.
This reading of nonreligious identities and organisational developments as creating competition (antagonistic or positively framed) with religious institutions and claims on public space would seem to fit best with some kind of a market model, though a culturally, socially and politically embedded understanding of markets rather than the abstracted and individualistic ‘rational choice’ models favoured by the main exponents of market views of religious vitality (Iannaccone et al. 2011). In short, we suggest that nonreligious identity tends to become secure, and nonreligious groups to develop where nonreligion is in public competition with religion, whether for existential meaning or public space. Where religious competition is largely absent (as in Eastern Germany), nonreligious public identity and group formation are less marked. Likewise, where the religious field is broadly welcoming to nonreligious actors (the Norwegian state’s funding of humanist organisations on the same basis as the Lutheran Church), mirroring nonreligious formations may successfully form, but the level of mobilisation seems to be less, based on our sample. The extent of civil society formation within the existing social field is also likely to shape the development of nonreligious group formation as the comparison between Poland and Romania suggests.
7 Conclusion
We have argued for a relational understanding of nonreligion as constructed in negotiation with conceptualisations of the religious field, which vary across Europe but are differentiated from other social fields. We have shown that nonreligious young Europeans are eclectic in the resources they draw on to make sense of existential challenges and demonstrate subtlety and moral seriousness in their responses. The latter is particularly evident in the convictions and determination with which they have developed organised responses to religion-based authoritarian oppression in Poland, a case study which has allowed us to identify some of the conditions – competitive, communicative and the configuration of civil society – under which nonreligious identities become collective and politically mobilised.
Notes
- 1.
Lead is melted on a spoon over a burning candle, you the drop it into cold water and the shape it creates is interpreted as announcing what the New Year will bring.
- 2.
A theme also found in Turpin’s Understanding Unbelief project focusing on Catholic Ireland.
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Herbert, D., Bullock, J. (2022). The Diversity of Nonreligion: Meaning-Making, Activism and Towards a Theory of Nonreligious Identity and Group Formation. In: Zwilling, AL., Årsheim, H. (eds) Nonreligion in Late Modern Societies. Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92395-2_9
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