Religion in Estonia

Other Christian groups, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Methodists, Seventh-day Adventists, and Russian Old Believers, collectively constitute 1.1 percent of the population.

[7] According to Ringo Ringvee, "religion has never played an important role on the political or ideological battlefield" and the "tendencies that prevailed in the late 1930s for closer relations between the state and Lutheran church were ended with the Soviet occupation in 1940".

[3][8] Before the Second World War, Estonia was approximately 80 percent Protestant and overwhelmingly Lutheran, partly because of historic Swedish rule.

According to the University of Tartu, irreligious Estonians are not necessarily atheists; instead, the 2010s have witnessed a growth of Neopagan, Buddhist and Hindu beliefs among those who declare themselves to be "not religious".

Robert T. Francoeur and Raymond J. Noonan write that "In 1925, the church was separated from the state, but religious instruction remained in the schools and clergymen were trained at the Faculty of Theology at Tartu University.

Work with children, youth, publishing, and so on, was banned, church property was nationalized, and the Faculty of Theology was closed.

"[11] Aldis Purs, a professor of history at the University of Toronto writes that in Estonia, as well as Latvia, some evangelical Christian clergy attempted to resist the Soviet policy of state atheism by engaging in anti-regime activities such as Bible smuggling.

[citation needed] Christian religious workers don't have a large social role in most towns.

[15] The communication and cooperation between the believers of the two Orthodox communities in Estonia is a social practice and occurs at the individual level.

[15] A research by Tom Esslemon in 2011[16] revealed that fewer than one in five Estonians claim that religion plays an important role in their lives.

In the later part of the 1960s, the activities of the Finnish missionaries brought charismatic Pentecostal revival in the evangelical Christian Churches and the Baptist in Tallinn.

[18] The 2011 population census of Estonia puts the total number of people belonging to Charismatic and Pentecostal Churches to about 5,256.

[18] Less than a third of the population define themselves as believers; of those most are Eastern Orthodox, predominantly, but not exclusively, among the Slavic minorities, or Lutheran.