Sociology's classics and distinguished sociologists or religion heralded a weakening of religion at the previous turn of century. Emil Durkheim's and Max Weber's concepts contain strong suggestions of a limitation of the importance of religion as traditional societies moved toward modernity. Sophisticated theories of secularization have kept on developing this train of thought. These provide the first context for reflection about religion in Poland. The past decades have brought theoretically and empirically strong arguments to contest this interpretation. The world today — as Peter Berger acknowledges, revoking his concepts of 30 years ago — is more religious than ever. Not the whole world, though — but almost the whole world. On a religious map of the world, Europe is an exception. While the world at large is highly religious, Europe is becoming secularized. This is the second context for our inquiry into Poland.

Poland is an exception from an exception. It belies any observation about Europe; it is a country to which apply neither the secularization theories nor ideas about the uniqueness of a secularized Europe. In a word, Poland is not secularized, not like France or England, or even like Italy, Spain, or Ireland, which has recently been subjected to strong secularization influences. What makes Poland so different from other countries? Is the Polish society not functionally differentiated, are the Poles opposed to individualization, are they exempt from rationalization? Do they differ from the rest of Europe? How and why do they differ?

In answering these questions, I will present some hypothetical explanations. To avoid misunderstandings, I want first to make it clear that, in the back of my reasoning, I use a specific notion for religion and religiosity. May I fall back here on my understanding of these concepts, without their further detailed elaboration? What I intend to do is to highlight what I mean by “religion” or “religiosity,” what realities stand behind these terms, and what semantic ranges I ascribe to them.

Religion is here understood as a socially objectivized answer to so-called ultimate questions, given in the form of a theory (doctrine, ideology, teaching), practice (ritual, worship, training), and community (collective forms of expression of doctrine and worship). Religion has a dimension of objective actuality; it exists externally of an individual as a particular set of symbols, meanings, institutionalized forms of behavior, and institutions as such. Such an understanding of religion as is proposed here is obviously rooted in the recognition that (pace much criticism) the notion of ultimate meanings may be what distinguishes between the religious and the nonreligious. At the top of the list of “ultimate meanings” is the problem of death which universally leads to questions about the meaning of life, regardless of history, ethnicity, culture, or language. A question about death inevitably entails a question about the meaning of life and it may be expected to involve the religious component of identity. Are then all answers to this question intrinsically religious? Not all. An answer may be considered religious — I agree here with the tradition represented by many thinkers from Emil Durkheim to Peter Berger to Rodney Stark — when it refers to reality: the sacrum (for Durkheim, the embodiment of the social), the nomos (for Berger, what is socially meaningful through religious references, the opposite of anomie), the supernatural (for Stark, the embodiment of what cannot be explained by laws of nature, physics, cause and effect).

By religiosity I will here understand the various forms and meanings in which is manifested the basic, subjective conviction that human life has a sense other than biological existence. Meanings are either culturally inherited or acquired in individual quests; they are expressible beliefs about the nature of man and the world, about purpose and destiny, moral principle, usually called doctrine, about worldview or ideology. Forms are actions that stem from beliefs; they are expressed in holding and displaying an attachment to symbols, in attendance in worship, in membership in a community.

In the awareness of the Poles as well as of the Roman Catholic Church (henceforth, usually, the Church), Catholicism is a religion uniquely tied up with Polishness. This coupling of religious and national identity is a permanent, usually unconscious combination producing a sense of belonging at once to the Polish nation and to Catholicism. Such awareness was especially reinforced through historical processes, including prominently the partitions of Poland, which erased Polish statehood for over 100 years. What is important in this respect is that political enmity toward the partitioners coincides with religious estrangement, whereby even in today's Poland, Germans are thought of as Protestants, and Russians (also Byelorussians and Ukrainians, lumped together under the blanket term of “Russkies”) as Orthodox.

Such Messianism proved functional also after 1989, at least from the Church's point of view, helping to mobilize opponents of the European Union. A pastoral letter from the Polish Episcopate read on Sunday, June 30, 1991, in the context of a year's experience with religion classes in schools, asked a question that would echo throughout Poland and elsewhere:

Echoed here is a belief about the special role given to Poland, the Polish people, held to be the Messiah of the nations, and Polish Catholicism with its Church, to play in the history of Europe and the world. This vision of a Christian country, as against desires for Poland to join the European Union, is contrasted with Western Europe considered “a land of corruption,” trying to make Poland dependent, offering no more than crippled family, contraception, abortion, “turning man into beast by only offering him easy work, good food, entertainment, and sex” (Glemp 1995). It may be said that “corrupt Europe” has replaced the previous external enemy, the Soviet Union, which seemed indispensable to continue one and the same historically determined form of religion.

The Communist period helped to emphasize the role of the Roman Catholic Church (present although it had long been) as a defender of Polishness and an advocate for the nation. After a short period of state independence in 1918–1939, Poland was subordinated to the Soviet Union, and this role continued until the fall of communism. In such historical and political realities, the Catholic Church in Poland has developed its own theology of the nation (Michel Reference Michel1995), one effect of which is sanctification of the concept and of any values it involves.Footnote ²

An important quality in Polish Catholicism, also resulting from the country's history, was a peculiar social experience of religion extending to non-religious areas, and in particular using religion in contesting the political situation. It was manifest in participation in religious life and in the Church's activities. The first of these aspects found expression in people religiously indifferent, even unbelieving, leftist in their convictions, but contesting the orthodoxy of the ruling communist party (called the “Polish United Workers' Party”). This became especially pronounced in the 1980s, after the suppression of Solidarity, when church attendance was considered a form of protest against political authority. The second, institutional aspect was expressed in the Church's extra-religious activities. The Church acted as a defender of human rights, helped legitimize resistance to state policies, and after the proclamation of martial law in December 1981 it supported persecuted Solidarity activists — churches were simply symbols of liberty, an enclave of truth which political censorship tried to enslave. The Church stood as a symbol of freedom, a hope for political independence and democratic life.

With the political system in the Polish People's Republic, the role of the Church was reinforced in ways similar to those existing in traditional societies. Communist ideologues, in trying to appropriate all spheres of life of the Poles, constructed a counter-ideology in which the chief actor, symbolically and politically, was the Church.

Thus, the Poles' historically formed associations with Catholicism have proved a lasting influence also under the recent systemic transformation. Not by accident, perhaps, since the partitions, losing and regaining independence, the insurrections — all those milestone events in Polish history combine to confirm the strength and value of this association. Perhaps the transformation since 1989 can be seen as another attempt in which the Church is a safeguard of stability.

The notion of civil religion, as it is well known, was introduced by Robert Bellah as he described the combination of belief in God with patriotic history and commonsensical beliefs observed in the United States. In the United States, civil religion is non-denominational. It assumes belief in a god who may have much in common with Yahweh and the Christian God, but is universal. He is not particularized in a way that would be exclusivist — on the contrary. As of late, so the literature tells us, there is talk of American Muslims — paradoxically after September 11 — being included in the country's community of civil religion (Burdziej Reference Burdziej2006).

In this respect, Polish Catholicism as a civil religion is missing some of those qualities. It is not as universal, and God in this form of Polish religion is denominational, strongly supported by worship of the Virgin Mary and the symbolism of the Częstochowa shrine. Still, a similar combination of history, politics, national values, and religious rituals is discernible. This particular complex of Catholicism and a national Church may be seen it terms of a civil religion, especially in regard to functions it play in social life (Borowik Reference Borowik1997,72), linked up with patriotism, historical memory, coincidence of religious, and national holidays. The same combination was expressed in symbolism, such as that comparing Poland to Christ martyred on the cross, or in the vicarious Messianism promising Poland a special role to fulfill in Europe and the world.

It seems certain that the Church and its members in Poland were largely instrumental in bringing about a civic society. Church pulpits, classrooms for religious instruction, cloister conference rooms were the venues for public debates concerning issues essential for national existence. It might even be said that civil society had an expression and manifestation in religious ritual: processions, pilgrimages, church attendance (including by non-believers), and attendance at masses said by the visiting pope. In this perspective, Catholic religiosity is an element of civil religion.

Civil religion may favor continuity in religious attitudes for the reason that it was a grassroot-formed and socially functional coupling of what was religious and secular, with a strong accent on politics. In history, religious legitimacy in politics is a well-known and popular mechanism. It seems that, historically, when it is naturally built from the bottom up, rather than as an institutionally enforced action, it is more long-lasting. Besides, it seems that this form of religion owes its longevity to a combination of the secular and the religious. A sacralization of national identity, statehood, national symbolism, and national holidays can be highly attractive to a society recently delivered from the trauma of totalitarianism. On the other hand, it may be equally attractive socially, especially to those — to quote Weber — not religious virtuosi, to see religion impregnated with a national-political message. Civil religion serves to integrate despite any divisions, political divisions included, and to bridge new gaps bred by economic development, structural transformations, and new elites arising. It may be said that just as prior to 1989 the society's overwhelming integration through Catholicism as civil religion was poised “against” (communism), so after 1989 it is functional “despite” (capitalism).

Norris and Inglehart (Reference Norris and Inglehart2006) in their analysis of research findings from more than 80 countries discovered a clear dependence between the level of social securityFootnote ³ and religiosity. With respect to post-communist countries, those authors formulated the following assumption: “In those parts of the region where the standard of living gradually improved, there should be a tendency toward a gradual erosion of religiousness in successive age cohorts, as is suggested by the traditional secularization theory.” On the other hand, deterioration in the standard of living and erosion of the welfare state, as has been seen in the past decade, would suggest an expectation of a short-lived rejuvenation of religiosity in low- and medium-income societies, especially among the weaker segments of the population (…) (Norris and Inglehart (Reference Norris and Inglehart2006, 173). In their conclusions, the authors state quite clearly that social security, political rights, and civic freedoms encourage secularization. Their well argued proposal suggests that the continuity of religious attitudes in Poland could be explained by a combination of the following factors: (1) A negligible percentage of high-income people, income being the basis of secure existence. In a religious and moral pluralism survey, highest earners, with more than 4,000 zł (zlotys) per month, showed the greatest number of those declaring non-religiousness (1 on the scale, 22.2%). Accepted declarations of 1–3 as self-defined non-religiousness or weak religiousness (perhaps bordering on religious indifference) suggest that among the richest they are 55.6%. In the group with incomes in the 2,400–2,800 zł range, it is 27.6%. The percentage decreases gradually to just above 7% in the 1,200–1,400 zł range and to 10.6% with the poorest, earning less than 400 zł per month, just slightly different from the average (9.9%).Footnote ⁴ This aspect may therefore be summed up thus: the income level differentiates between the intensity of the religious feelings of those questioned, but this applies especially to higher-income groups in the way that the higher the income, the greater the number of declared non-religiousness. A certain prognostication may be seen in this trend: the more well-off Poles there are the more religious indifference. At later stages, the religiosity of the middle classes in rich, predominantly Christian countries is stable at a fairly high level, less than for example the religiousness of laborers; (2) Polish society is aging. The elderly, such as pensioners, show a lower sense of security and are more religious than others. In the diverse religious traditions in different countries, ever since empirical research into religion has been done, it has always been the rule that religiosity is the greatest among the oldest in a population. This is explained in many different ways, including the existential prospect of approaching death. But an equally probable explanation involves the time budget: people not occupationally active have much free time, and religious practices involve the requirement to meet not only religious needs, but also social needs as they affirm a sense of belonging and community, and as such they are in themselves immediately rewarding.Footnote ⁵

This hypothesis obviously relates to the kind of society: more social security is available to the citizens of post-industrial states, i.e., those that successfully completed modernization. But it is not that modernization as such correlates in a linear way with decreased religiosity: it is that the features of modernized societies, such as are considered by Norris and Inglehart, demonstrably, and with very few exceptions, correlate with religiosity. And so, in countries which are technologically advanced, prosperous, whose citizens are well educated, enjoy good medical care and highly developed services — in such countries religion is declining. In rich countries, the decline is visible not only in religious practice, but also in belief in God and afterlife. But, interestingly enough, this does not entail a decline in thought about the meaning and purpose of life. On the contrary, in such countries the percentage of such “thoughtful” people is increasing, which Norris and Inglehart (Reference Norris and Inglehart2006, 123) interpret in terms of rising spirituality, paired with a decline in religious institutions. From this point of view, Polish society shows many qualities suggesting a lack of modernization; the economy is far from a post-industrial stage, most incomes are low, and services, including health, are a mess. The agriculture is traditional, and the urban classes are still young, largely first- or second-generation descendants of the post-World War II social advancement. Those “new” city dwellers still hold in their memories and personal resources a picture of rural or small-town religiousness. The historical research projects by Władysław Piwowarski in Puławy (Reference Piwowarski1971) and by Hieronim Kubiak in Huta (1972) showed a strong link between religious patterns and a person's place of origin. It seems that the link still continues.

My own biographical research reveals a peculiar model of religious socialization in the family which is predominantly socialization through action. It begins very early and religious action — such as prayers, kneeling, church attendance — is regularly repeated. Action precedes reflection about it; it is long-lasting for it is ingrained as a kind of “social instinct” with a strong element of social control and self-control. In such circumstances, religion is taken for granted, no questions asked, no need to ponder. It has qualities which Husserl described as a natural attitude. In Poland, being a religious Catholic is as obvious as brushing teeth, washing hands, having bread for breakfast.

This is well reflected in the two passages quoted below from an interview with M., a 22-year old female ethnology student, made in 1999. She had this to say:

In another part of the same interview, a sort of justification is given, explaining to some extent the absence of a need for religious reflection demonstrated above:

It would be erroneous to think that later, when the children grow older, parents can discuss with them divinities or offer a religious justification for ethical rules. Biographic interviews with young people reveal a “great silence” in this matter. All the while, emphasis is placed on religious practice, typically meaning attendance in religious service. As one female respondent, 21-year-old Marta, a biology student, put it: “Mom is sometimes angry. Do I need a reason not to go to church?”Footnote ⁷

Another Marta, a 20-year-old student of applied psychology, born in a village, protests against her age-mates' habits in her own village:

At the same time — since an unthinking socialization for religion is predominant — religion is not questioned by reasoning or by theological, or quasi-theological, disputes. Doctrinal issues are of no interest to the Poles; they do not arouse disputes, nor do they form schools of thought. It seems that the ritual, the participation in the religious life of the community is a value unto itself. In all appearances, it looks as though action, or ritual, is not necessarily linked with faith, even less necessarily with Catholic morality.

This autonomous status of the ritual is seen in the high ratings of religious practice, unchanged over the past decades in Polish adult population. It is particularly interesting considering that in most European countries such ratings are much lower. They are lower even in those countries in which, as in Poland, Catholicism traditionally predominates. For example, in Italy, the proportion of regular Sunday churchgoers is 31% (Pace Reference Pace1998, 129). Similarly, in Spain, where 86% of the people declared themselves Catholic in 1984, 31% attended the Sunday church service regularly (Pèrez-Díaz 1996, 194). In the United States, considered equally religious as Poland, 40% attended the mass weekly in 1984 (Greeley Reference Greeley1989, 43). The comparative lists quoted by Norris and Inglehart also show an interesting context. For example, in Ireland between 1981 and 2001, the percentage of those regularly worshiping (once a week or more often) fell by 17%, in Spain by 15%, in Belgium and the Netherlands by 12% (Greeley Reference Greeley1989, 122).Footnote ⁹ In Poland, in 2000, in a European Values Study survey, regular practice was declared by 58.9% (Marody Reference Marody, Marody and Jasińska-Kania2002, 147).Footnote ¹⁰

Nearly all respondents, about 90%, consider as very important religious ceremonies associated with baptism, wedding, and funeral. Moreover, certain qualities in declared practice suggest that such religious practice is seen by Poles as more essential to their identification with Catholicism than faith. What permits this conclusion? Among other things, it is that, in Poland, the percentage of those not practicing is generally lower than that of the non-religious.

Membership in a religious community requires not only a display of such membership through prescribed forms of behavior like prayer or attendance at the Sunday mass, but also the sharing of certain convictions relating to — as we stated in the definition of religiousness — the nature of man and the world, the ultimate sense and purpose, moral principles.

An increasingly selective approach to belief and morality may be described in various ways. Piwowarski (1983) once spoke of people in this group as unconscious heretics. Mariański (Reference Mariański2004, 115) calls departure from orthodoxy a deinstitutionalization of religion. This author follows Thomas Luckmann in calling it the privatization of religion (Borowik Reference Borowik1997). Regardless of what we call the process, it boils down to a selective acceptance of dogmas (such as belief in God — yes, in the devil and hell — no), ethical rules (marital faithfulness — yes; prohibition of extramarital sex — no; artificial contraception in its many forms — acceptable; divorce — permissible), and also to a distancing from the Catholic Church and resentment of its political influence.

Privatization of religion in Poland seems paradoxical: it co-exists with a strong social expression of institutional, church-based religiousness, supported on the three pillars mentioned above. Considering available data, this hypothesis may assume that further privatization continues in several parallel areas.

On the one hand, it is in the area of morality, that is, not so much in disappearance or decay of morality as in sidelining the Church as an institution authoritative especially in broadly understood mores. As Marody (Reference Marody, Marody and Jasińska-Kania2002, 153) stresses, the declining confidence in the Church in 1990–1999 applied mainly to the faith that it could offer appropriate answers to questions about family life (a 20% drop), moral problems, needs of an individual (13%), and social and political problems (8%).

Rapid change is seen in the patterns of life of young people and in values applying to sexuality, marriage, and children. Still unchanged, at the top of the list of values are love and starting a happy family, but — as Krystyna Slany's research shows — cohabitation and “living apart but together” unions are quite typical among the young (Slany Reference Slany2002). What seems even more important, the parents’ generation seems to accept these new patterns readily, pragmatically adjusting to their children's arguments, mostly economic in nature, that starting a family involves proper prior preparation, gainful employment, and financial security. Among the young, beliefs are quickly becoming liberal. As an important illustration of this, here is a handful of data from a broad, up-to-date research by Zaręba (2008, 336): 20% of young people accept homosexual unions, while a third choose the “hard to say” answer. In 2005, “58.9% students believed sex before Church wedding was acceptable, with only 9.2% saying it was ‘unacceptable’” (Zaręba 2008, 287). Twenty-one per cent of young people see divorce as acceptable, and 42.4% say that “it depends” (Zaręba 2008, 303). Contraception is considered unacceptable by 6.7% of the young (Zaręba 2008, 310). A brief comment is due here: according to the concordat, in Poland a church wedding entails certain legal consequences, and it is overwhelmingly taken, instead of a civil ceremony. Because of that, what sociologists once celebrated as a distinction between “sex before church wedding” and “sex between civil ceremony and church wedding” has lost its meaning. It should rather be to respondents to whom to put questions about the meaning of sacramental wedding for acceptance of premarital sex. From this stems an additional conclusion whereby, if this interpretive path is correct, about one in 10 young people believe premarital sexual unions are improper or unacceptable, a result similar to that for contraception. It may be said that this part of the Church teaching failed, with perhaps only retirees of either sex more likely than the young to support Church principles.

On the other hand, in Poland, too, we see a religious eclecticism. The religiosity of a great many Poles, especially those better educated and living in big cities has many “self-made” qualities. Practice is kept, sometimes for the peace of mind, of church attendance, ritualistic celebration of major yearly or family-centered feasts such as Christmas or Easter, belief in God is maintained, but at the same time searches are made for various magical, new-age-related answers, without a sense of any striking contradiction (Grotowska Reference Grotowska1999; Kubiak Reference Kubiak2005; Hall Reference Hall2007). Practicing yoga can be reconciled with prayer, belief in reincarnation with faith in resurrection, and belief that Jesus performed miracles with credence that miracles can be worked by a pagan talisman suspended from the neck.

Additionally, it seems important that religiously indifferent people in Poland are few — quite a convincing opinion is voiced by Steve Bruce, who believes that the secularization of religion amounts to progressive indifference to religious truths (Bruce Reference Bruce2002). This, too, suggests that religiosity, including in its privatized form as outlined here, is socially functional and it is not by accident that this privatized form is somehow legitimized by a traditional reference to Catholic membership and irregular or occasional participation in the Church's official religious life.

With respect to some Catholics in Poland, a reverse paraphrase may apply of Grace Davie's famous phrase descriptive of Western European religious attitudes as “believing without belonging.” In Poland, things can be viewed as the opposite — privatization continues under the umbrella of formalized membership in the Catholic Church, socialization of children in this tradition without a necessary experience of faith. Briefly put, it is “belonging without believing.”

SOME FINAL REMARKS

In the essential absence of religious change or potentially explanatory hypotheses to explain it, a conclusion may well mention what is a harbinger of change, contrary to the established and dominating permanence mentioned above.

First — change in mores as mentioned under the privatization hypothesis seems highly significant, including the inter-generational agreement about a liberal attitude toward starting a family, sexual relations, contraceptives, etc. Not impossibly, at some point the present high level of declared religiosity, as a cover for a real lack of religious faith, will be disposed of in transformation as redundant ballast serving no purpose, unlike what it serves today, which is social conformity. In such a case, Catholic membership in Poland would be reduced by up to 30% of self-proclaimed Catholics, making Polish religiosity similar to that of other predominantly Catholic countries like Italy, Spain, and Ireland, and Poland would no longer be as “exception from an exception.”

Are there any other indications suggesting such a turn of events — of course in a longer perspective? An answer should be in the affirmative: yes, such indications are there. The drop in priestly and monastic vocations, the departure from religion of a large number of the great many Poles emigrating to Western Europe for better pay, young people's criticism of the form in which religious teaching is given, and the growing resentment of Catholic orthodoxy among junior high school pupils. An elaboration of these issues may be the subject of another paper, this time devoted to hypotheses about potential changes in Polish religiousness.