Survey underscores continuing decline of religion in Hungary

Hungarians have become less religious in the past ten years according to a study done by pollster Fessel of Vienna involving 14 former socialist countries and reported in Wednesday's national daily Nepszabadsag.

Results of the current study were compared with one conducted in 1997, when over 20 percent of Hungarians qualified themselves as "very religious." The current figure was 15 percent.

The number of people who said they were regular churchgoers dropped from 26.5 percent to 19 percent in this same period.

Sociologist Miklos Tomka, who helped conduct the survey, reported that the proportion of people calling themselves religious and attending regular religious services had declined in all age groups.

Differences between urban and rural areas have all but disappeared as well. According to Tomka, the rural areas have caught up with the urban regions in secularity.

The study found Romania to have the highest proportion of religious people, followed by Poland and Moldova. The least religious countries of the region are the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the former East Germany, wrote Nepszabadsag.

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