Religion in Belarus

The legacy of the state atheism of the Soviet era is apparent in the fact that a proportion of Belarusians (especially in the east part of the country) are not religious.

The Wilno episcopate was created one and a half years after the Union of Krewo; it received a lot of land from the Lithuanian dukes.

However, despite these ties, Archbishop Sviontak, who had been a prisoner in the Soviet camps and a pastor in Pinsk for many years, prohibited the display of Polish national symbols in Catholic churches in Belarus.

Attempts to introduce the Belarusian language into religious life, including the liturgy, also have not met wide success because of the cultural predominance of Russians and Poles in their respective churches, as well as the low usage of the Belarusian language in everyday life.

[3] To a certain extent, the 1991 declaration of Belarus's independence and the 1990 law making Belarusian an official language of the republic have generated a new attitude toward the Orthodox and Catholic churches.

The modest growth of the Greek Catholic Church was accompanied by heated public debates of both a theological and a political character.

[3] In 1993 one Belarusian publication reported the numbers of religious communities as follows: 787 Orthodox, 305 Catholic, 170 Pentecostal, 141 Baptist, 26 Old Believer, 17 Seventh-Day Adventist, 9 Apostolic Christian, 8 Greek Catholic, 8 New Apostolic, 8 Muslim, 7 Jewish, and 15 other religious groups.

[3] A 2015 Pew Research Center survey based on a sample of 1000 people found that 94% of them declared to be Christians, 3% to be irreligious—a category which includes atheists, agnostics and those who described their religion as "nothing in particular", while 3% belonged to other faiths.

[5] Although the Russian Orthodox Church was devastated during World War II[citation needed] and continued to decline until the early 1980s because of government policies, it underwent a small revival with the onset of perestroika and the celebration in 1988 of the 1,000- year anniversary of Christianity in Russia.

As of 2003, there have been two Belarusian Greek Catholic parishes in each of the following cities - Minsk, Polatsk and Vitsebsk; and only one in Brest, Hrodna, Mahiliou, Maladziechna and Lida.

Before World War II, the number of Protestants in Belarus was quite low in comparison with other Christians, but they have shown growth since then.

[3] The first Jewish communities appeared in Belarus at the end of the 14th century and continued to increase until the genocide of World War II.

Mainly urban residents, the country's nearly 1.3 million Jews in 1914 accounted for 50 to 60 percent of the population in cities and towns.

Some of these Tatars are descendants of emigrants and prisoners of war who settled in Belarus, from the Volga Region, after the 11th century.