Religion in Hungary

[1] 1.3% of the population identified themselves as adherents of other religions;[1] minorities practising Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, the Baháʼí Faith, Taoism, Ősmagyar vallás and other Neopaganisms, and New Age, are present in the country.

[1] In antiquity, the lands of the Carpathian Basin covered by the contemporary state of Hungary were inhabited by sedentary tribes of Celts and Illyrians (the Pannonians) in the parts west of the river Danube — the region of Transdanubia —, and by nomadic tribes of Scytho-Siberians (the Iazyges) in the parts east of the Danube — the Great Plain —, with varying degrees of relations with each others.

[9] Between the 6th and the 8th century, the regions of Pannonia and the Great Plain were dominated first by the Germanic Gepids and then by the Avars, a multiethnic alliance of nomadic tribes akin to the Huns, who brought other totemisms and the theme of the many-layered world tree which reaches the utmost sky, which together with earlier Hunnic beliefs would have continued in the beliefs of the later Hungarians; the regions were also settled by significant communities of Slavs.

[11] By the end of the 9th century, a federation of Finno-Ugric-speaking people, the Magyar tribes, began to settle in the Great Plain and Pannonia led by the holy sovereign Árpád (895–c.

[12] The original Pagan religion of the Magyars-Hungarians has been reconstructed as animistic and shamanic by scholars, and it has been hypothesised that it was similar to Siberian shamanism-Tengrism, on the basis of analogies, linguistic evidence, modern folklore and archaeological data.

[24] Stephen I (c. 975–1038), the first sovereign who assumed the title of King of Hungary, adopted Catholicism and laid the foundations of the Catholic Church among the Hungarian people by establishing ten dioceses.

[24] A deep change in the country's religious composition took place during the 16th century, when Protestantism was quickly adopted by a majority of the Hungarians, especially in the forms at first of Lutheranism from Germany and shortly afterwards of Calvinism (Reformed Christianity) from Switzerland.

[32] The Hungarian Reformed Church became the symbol of national culture, since it popularised the Bible in the vernacular language and contributed to the education of the population through its school system.

The sway of the Habsburg state was also strong on the internal affairs of the Catholic Church, especially during the period of the enlightened absolutism of Josephinism in the 18th century — i.e. the imperial rule of Joseph II, 1765–1790 —, when, for instance, contemplative religious orders were dissolved.

[33] At the end of the 18th century, the Calvinist and Lutheran religions regained complete freedom to be practised, although their legal status remained far from being equal to that of the Catholic Church.

[33] The legislation issued in the period of the 1848 Revolution, which took place against the Habsburg dynasty, declared the equality of all accepted religions in Hungary, which included all the historical Christian denominations but excluded Judaism.

[33] According to 1890 laws, religions in Hungary were distinguished between "incorporated" ones — namely Catholicism, Calvinism, Lutheranism, Orthodox Christianity, Unitarianism and Judaism —, whose representatives held seats in the upper house of the Parliament, and "recognised" ones, which had fewer rights.

[33] After the end of World War I and the Treaty of Trianon in 1920, national conservative forces came to dominate the political and cultural life of the Kingdom of Hungary, and they rescinded some of the liberal legislation of the foregoing period.

[33] During World War II, Hungary was occupied by Nazi German forces in March 1944, and in the following few months three-fourths of Hungarian Jewry were deported to concentration camps and killed in the Holocaust.

[34] Between 1948 and 1949, the leaders of all the major churches who had not been arrested, including the Catholic Bishops' Conference, signed agreements with the government, acknowledging the emerging Communist power.

[35] In the 1960s, state pressure began to relax, and in 1964 the Holy See of the Catholic Church in Rome signed an agreement with the Hungarian government to define the procedure to be followed in the appointment of bishops, the oath of the clergy on the state's constitution, and the postgraduate education of the Hungarian clergy at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy in Rome; the competence of the Holy See in matters of religion was also acknowledged in the document.

[35] Since the 1990s and throughout the early 21st century, Hungary has become more religiously diverse; all the major world religions, and both domestic and international new religious movements, can be found in the country nowadays — apart from historical and new denominations of Christianity and Judaism, the country has seen the rise of movements and organisations of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, the Baháʼí Faith, Taoism, Ősmagyar vallás and other Neopaganisms, and New Age.

[44] Before World War II, in some rural areas certain persons were still considered táltoses, i.e. indigenous Hungarian shaman-magicians, by the local communities,[45] and around the mid-1980s a neo-táltos movement began to emerge, with links to international neoshamanism.

[46] On 15 March 2012, the National Assembly of Hungary gave a Tuvan Tengrist shaman, Ojun Adigzi See-Oglu, the permission to perform a veneration ritual and cleansing ceremony on the Holy Crown of the Hungarian kings, an object which holds both Pagan and Christian meanings, at the Hungarian Parliament Building; Ojun was assisted by Éva Kanalas, a táltos, and folk singer, who sang Csángó folk religious songs during the ritual.

[47] The scholars Zoltán Ádám and András Bozóki identify a Pagan-Christian mixed character in the 2011–2012 Constitution, as a reflection of the eclectic reference to both Christianity and ethnic Paganism which has been a feature of the political discourse of the right-wing Fidesz party and its leader Viktor Orbán, the governing forces in the 2010s.

[49] According to Ádám Kolozsi, said syncretic, "heterogeneous mixture of Christian and Pagan elements", is part of a "wider spiritual discourse of contemporary Hungarian nationalism".

[52] According to László Kürti, such syncretism, present among the people and promoted by the governmental elite, would be coalescing into a new civil Hungarian religion with neoshamanism at its core.

Using both political and apologetic efforts, most of the high nobility composing the Diet was already predominantly Catholic by the 1640s, a process consolidated as the new reconquered estates were granted to the converted aristocracy, who supported in Counter-Reformation.

Despite this, the lower nobility, the town burghers and the common people still retained a largely Protestant – especially Calvinist – identity, opposing the Catholic German-likeness of the Habsburg courtly politics.

Allied with the Constitutional Rights enforced by the nobility and the military pressure of the Protestant Principality of Transylvania on the eastern border, the Catholic Counter-Reformation achieved partial results compared to the other Habsburg possessions, such as Bohemia and Austria, where Catholicism was restored to the status of the sole religion of the realm.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was legally recognized in Hungary in June 1988 and its first meetinghouse in the country was dedicated in October of the following year by President Thomas S. Monson.

[1] Some Hungarian Jews were able to escape the Holocaust during World War II, but most (perhaps 550,000)[59] either were deported to concentration camps, from which the majority did not return, or were murdered by the Arrow Cross fascists.

[70] Apart from taltosism (táltosság), which is a common denominator of the various streams of Ősmagyar vallás, supported by the experiences and the work of various táltoses, strengthened since the 1980s by studies on the subject by Mihály Hoppál, who also invited Michael Harner and introduced core shamanism to Hungary, other sources that have contributed to the development of the movement have been the legacy of Hungarian Turanism, which arose between the two 20th-century World Wars and ascribed the ancient Sumerians, Scythians, and Huns, seen as ancestors of the Hungarians, to the same "Turanian macro-ethnicity", i.e. Uralo-Altaic, Uralic or Finno-Ugric-speaking peoples, and the spread of various forms of esotericism and New Age in the last decades of the Communist Block and in the 1990s.

Some of these churches cultivate connections with the Traditionalist School and the Nouvelle Droite of Alain de Benoist, which promotes a Europe-wide return to indigenous Paganism.