Religion in Hungary
Christianity is the largest religion in Hungary, with Catholicism and Calvinism being its main denominations.
In the national census of 2022, 42.5% of the population identified themselves as Christians; 29.2% of Hungarians were adherents of Catholicism (27.5% following the Roman Rite, and 1.7% the Greek Rite), 9.8% of Calvinism, 1.8% of Lutheranism, 0.2% of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and 1.5% of other Christian denominations. 1.3% of the population identified themselves as adherents of other religions; minorities practising Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, the Baháʼí Faith, Taoism, Ősmagyar vallás and other Neopaganisms, and New Age, are present in the country. At the same time, 40.1% of the population did not answer, not identifying their beliefs or non-beliefs, while 16.1% identified themselves as not religious.
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. In the early years of the 1st century, the Celto-Illyrian western lands were incorporated into the region of Pannonia in the Roman Empire; the Roman military conquest of the region had already begun under Augustus, who in 12–9 BCE had pushed the Roman frontier to the riverbanks of the Danube, and by the year 20 CE the permanent military camp of Aquincum, located within the area which today is the city of Budapest, had been founded. The Celto-Illyrian people, among whom Celtic culture had become dominant, were partially Romanised under the Roman Empire; this was especially true for their upper classes, while the population as a whole preserved the original Celtic culture for long time even under Romanisation. Religiously, the Roman authorities built temples of the official Roman religion of the state, to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, but also Romano-Celtic temples which continued the cults of the pre-Roman Celtic religion. Mystery religions, focused on individual otherworldly salvation, originating from the southeastern provinces of the Roman Empire, also spread to Pannonia, including Greco-Roman-Iranian Mithraism, Greco-Roman-Egyptian Isis-Anubis-Serapis' mysteries, Greco-Roman-Semitic Judaism, and also Christianity from the 2nd century, and various places of worship of these faiths were built as well.
Roman Pannonia was periodically under attack by its eastern nomadic Scythian neighbours of the Great Plain, whom throughout the 2nd and 3rd century were joined by many Germanic nomads, and at the turn between the 4th and the 5th century by the Huns, a multiethnic confederation of nomadic tribes whose original core can probably be identified as the Xiongnu of the Chinese sources, who came from Inner Mongolia and the Gobi Desert and against whom the Chinese built the Great Wall, but by that time, and especially under their king Attila (c. 406–453), had absorbed many Germanic tribes, especially Goths. In 409, and then in 433 by general Flavius Aetius, the Romans yielded the lands of Pannonia to the Huns, who made them their central settlement; this marked the beginning of an ethnic transformation of the population of the region: as the Roman power waned, the local Celto-Romans, although their population shrank significantly, were not completely displaced by the newcomers, who culturally and linguistically absorbed them. Little is known about the religion of the Huns, apart that a winged griffin may have been their totemic animal-ancestor. 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. In 803, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne defeated the Avar rulers, and Pannonia became part of the officially Christian polity of the Carolingian Empire of the Franks, as the March of Pannonia, for the whole 9th century, while the Great Plain fell under the sphere of influence of the First Bulgarian Empire. According to some historical accounts, some Avar governors converted to Christianity once they were defeated by the Franks, but there is no trace of Christian elements in the large Avar cemeteries of the epoch.
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. 907), starting the ethnogenesis of the modern Hungarians. 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. Early scholarship compared it to Sumerian and Scythian religions. The conception of a supreme God, akin to the pan-Siberian Tengri (meaning "Heaven" or "God" in Turkic), has also been hypothesised. Some scholars, however, have disputed the identification of the Magyar-Hungarian shaman-like magicians, the táltoses, as shamans in the typical Siberian sense, and have found no clear evidence of shamanic rituals. Islamic historians of that period described the religion of the Magyar-Hungarians as based on astrotheology and the worship of natural forces and fire. Based on later prohibitions from Christian regulations, there is evidence that they practised sacrifices at holy groves and springs.
The evidence that Christianity was practised among the Hungarians before the 950s is weak. The question of the continuity of Christianity in the region since Roman times is unresolved; Christian places of worship that were built in the 3rd and 4th century in Transdanubia, the former Roman province of Pannonia, and under Carolingian rule in the 9th century, would have been rebuilt and reused by the Hungarians only in the 11th century. Some Christian communities of the pre-Hungarian populations of the regions, however, likely persisted under the newcomers, and Christian slaves, as well as trade with neighbouring Christianised Slavic and Germanic lands, probably made the Hungarians acquainted with Christianity. The first attested Hungarian converts to Christianity were the chieftains Bulcsú and Gyula, who adopted Eastern Christianity in the mid-10th century, followed by other local lords.
Medieval Hungarian chronicles incorporated many Pagan myths, and transmitted them into the folklore; these include the myth of the brothers Hunor and Magor led by a divine stag to new lands, and the myth of the divine origins of the House of Árpád — the dynasty to which all the great princes of the Magyar tribes and later kings of Hungary from the 9th to the early 14th century belonged —, according to which the Árpád's forefather Ügyek was born from the union of a mortal woman, Emese, with the Turul, a divine bird of the Hungarian indigenous religion. The presence of various Turkic tribal groups in medieval Hungary, such as the Pechenegs and Kipchaks, further contributed to the religious landscape of the region. The religious practices of these Turkic communities were diverse, with Islam and Tengrism being prominent amongst the Pechenegs.
Hungary emerged to statehood at the turn between the 1st and the 2nd millennium, when the federation of the Magyar tribes was reformed into the Kingdom of Hungary, and Western Christianity, specifically Roman Catholicism, was chosen as the state religion. Although the Kingdom of Hungary was undoubtedly shapen by Western Christianity, minorities of Eastern Christianity, specifically Eastern Orthodox Christianity, continued to be present throughout the nation's history. 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. Stephen started a program of Christianisation of his subjects, which at first met the resistance of Pagans and took place at least in part through coercion, through a system of legislative prohibitions of Paganism, Christianising regulations, and penalties for their violations. Within the 12th century, Paganism had been more or less eradicated and was portrayed in a dark light in historical records, although, in the late 13th century, ancient myths were reclaimed to give the ruling dynasty and the people glorious origins. Thenceforth, the principle of "patronate" of the state towards religions, or earlier royal care of spiritual matters, remained firm up throughout the 20th century.
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. The Protestant Reformation began to spread into Hungary from historical Upper Hungary (which included Northern Hungary but also areas which today are in Slovakia), originally as unclear eclectic theologies brought in the 1520s and 1530s by German itinerant preachers, which in the 1540s stabilised along the lines of the doctrine of Lutheranism, with minorities professing Anabaptism. Protestantism reached Hungary when the Catholic kingdom was in struggle with the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the central power was weak, since the Hungarian throne was contended between Ferdinand I of the Austrian House of Habsburg, the house which also held the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Hungarian aristocrat John Zápolya (1487–1540). In 1526, after the Battle of Mohács, large portions of southern and eastern Hungary, including Southern Transdanubia and the whole Great Plain, were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.[29] At the same time, the Hungarians of Transylvania further east, who had not fallen under the domains of either the Kingdom of Hungary or the Ottoman Empire, came under the rule of John Zápolya, who proclaimed himself the legitimate king, while the throne of the western main kingdom was claimed by Ferdinand I; while, at first, the latter tolerated Lutherans, Zápolya presented himself as a preserver of Catholicism. Transylvanian Hungarians were, however, the first among whom Calvinism and Unitarianism (a nontrinitarian doctrine) took root — first introduced among local Transylvanian Saxons — and, given that Lutheranism became increasingly associated with ethnic Germans throughout all the Hungarian lands, Calvinism became the most successful Protestant doctrine among ethnic Hungarians, first in Transylvania, abetted by the support of the son of Jon Zápolya, King John Sigismund Zápolya (1540–1571; with whose abdication in 1570 also Transylvanian Hungarians came under the Habsburgs), himself a Unitarian convert, and soon afterwards also in Ottoman Hungary. Important Calvinist reformers were Márton Kálmáncsehi (1500–1550) and Péter Melius Juhász (1532–1572), the latter of whom made the Bible and other religious writings available in the Hungarian language and made Debrecen in the Great Plain the centre of Hungarian Calvinism, the "Hungarian Geneva" or the second "Calvinist Rome". Calvinism flourished in Ottoman Hungary, thanks to the tolerant Ottoman policies on religions, and was even supported by the Ottomans themselves against Catholicism because of its independent communal organisation and strict discipline, which were appreciated by the Ottoman administration. Calvinism also spread to the eastern parts of Upper Hungary, already penetrated by the Lutheran doctrine. Even in the western Kingdom of Hungary, where Catholicism had survived while elsewhere it had become residual, the nobility supported Lutheranism. 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.
While the Protestant Reformation was spreading rapidly throughout Europe, the House of Habsburg, which also held the throne of the Kingdom of Hungary, bolstered the program of Counter-Reformation devised by the Catholic Church to thwart the spread of Protestantism. In the Kingdom of Hungary, the Protestant nobility experienced some freedom in the 17th century, but its influence was soon curbed by the re-Catholicising efforts of the Habsburgs. In 1699, the Treaty of Karlowitz ended the Great Turkish War between the Holy League, of which the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburgs was a constituent member, and the Ottoman Empire; the former won, and Ottoman Hungary was yolden to the Kingdom of Hungary, so that Hungary was reunified and the Counter-Reformation was extended to the whole country. 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.
The Counter-Reformation had some success, but Hungary was never entirely converted back to Catholicism and maintained a strong pluralism of religious denominations, aided by a deeply characteristic tolerant approach of the Hungarians towards religious matters, although there were some periods of conflict between Catholics and Protestants, which nonetheless begot a "fruitful tension" which enriched national and local culture. 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. 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. Jews became emancipated only in 1867, and by the end of the century their number had grown to represent over 5% of the total Hungarian population, and the liberal climate of the period led to their quick assimilation into Hungarian society. 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.
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. 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.
During the 1946–1949 Hungarian Republic, the system of "incorporated" religions of 1890 was abolished, and all religions were treated as equal on the level of the "recognised" ones. With the Communist takeover in 1948, and the establishment of the Hungarian People's Republic in 1949, religious freedom was curtailed, education was nationalised and religious schools abolished, theological faculties were separated from national universities, religious orders were banned, the properties of churches were confiscated by the state, and numerous religious leaders were arrested, including the cardinal József Mindszenty, leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church, who in 1949 was tortured and sentenced to life imprisonment. 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. The State Office of Church Affairs exercised control over all churches, and while the collaboration between the state and minor denominations was easier, within the Catholic Church such collaboration brought to a rupture in the clergy, since the government claimed the right to regulate the nomination of bishops, and even minor priests, for itself.
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. These stipulations were a unique development in the Communist Block, and from that year onwards representatives of the Hungarian government and of the Holy See met twice a year, once in Budapest and once in the Vatican City. In the late 1980s, the state's control over religions were loosened significantly, historical denominations experienced more freedom and new denominations were recognised. The collapse of the Communist Block in the early 1990s opened a new era of religious freedom and church–state relations in Hungary, inaugurated in 1990 by the "Act of Freedom of Conscience and Religion and the Churches".
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. The censuses of the 1990s and of the early 21st century have recorded an overall decline of Christianity among the Hungarians — affiliation to which shrank from 92.9% of the population in 1992, to 74.4% in 2001, 54.2% in 2011, and 42.5% in 2022 —, accompanied by a rise of the unaffiliated people and people who declined to answer the census' question about religion. Adherents of new religions might be over-represented among the unanswering population, and contemporary studies on the general beliefs of the Hungarians have shown that among those who do not identify themselves as Christians, syncretism of elements from different religions and esotericism are indeed popular.
Contemporary Hungary is a secular state, where the Constitution guarantees freedom of religious belief and practice, and of irreligion, to all Hungarian citizens, as well as the neutrality of the state in matters of religion, safeguarded by a complex set of legal norms.
In the national census of 2022, 42.5% of the population identified themselves as Christians; 29.2% of Hungarians were adherents of Catholicism (27.5% following the Roman Rite, and 1.7% the Greek Rite), 9.8% of Calvinism, 1.8% of Lutheranism, 0.2% of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and 1.5% of other Christian denominations. 1.3% of the population identified themselves as adherents of other religions; minorities practising Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, the Baháʼí Faith, Taoism, Ősmagyar vallás and other Neopaganisms, and New Age, are present in the country. At the same time, 40.1% of the population did not answer, not identifying their beliefs or non-beliefs, while 16.1% identified themselves as not religious.
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. In the early years of the 1st century, the Celto-Illyrian western lands were incorporated into the region of Pannonia in the Roman Empire; the Roman military conquest of the region had already begun under Augustus, who in 12–9 BCE had pushed the Roman frontier to the riverbanks of the Danube, and by the year 20 CE the permanent military camp of Aquincum, located within the area which today is the city of Budapest, had been founded. The Celto-Illyrian people, among whom Celtic culture had become dominant, were partially Romanised under the Roman Empire; this was especially true for their upper classes, while the population as a whole preserved the original Celtic culture for long time even under Romanisation. Religiously, the Roman authorities built temples of the official Roman religion of the state, to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, but also Romano-Celtic temples which continued the cults of the pre-Roman Celtic religion. Mystery religions, focused on individual otherworldly salvation, originating from the southeastern provinces of the Roman Empire, also spread to Pannonia, including Greco-Roman-Iranian Mithraism, Greco-Roman-Egyptian Isis-Anubis-Serapis' mysteries, Greco-Roman-Semitic Judaism, and also Christianity from the 2nd century, and various places of worship of these faiths were built as well.
Roman Pannonia was periodically under attack by its eastern nomadic Scythian neighbours of the Great Plain, whom throughout the 2nd and 3rd century were joined by many Germanic nomads, and at the turn between the 4th and the 5th century by the Huns, a multiethnic confederation of nomadic tribes whose original core can probably be identified as the Xiongnu of the Chinese sources, who came from Inner Mongolia and the Gobi Desert and against whom the Chinese built the Great Wall, but by that time, and especially under their king Attila (c. 406–453), had absorbed many Germanic tribes, especially Goths. In 409, and then in 433 by general Flavius Aetius, the Romans yielded the lands of Pannonia to the Huns, who made them their central settlement; this marked the beginning of an ethnic transformation of the population of the region: as the Roman power waned, the local Celto-Romans, although their population shrank significantly, were not completely displaced by the newcomers, who culturally and linguistically absorbed them. Little is known about the religion of the Huns, apart that a winged griffin may have been their totemic animal-ancestor. 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. In 803, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne defeated the Avar rulers, and Pannonia became part of the officially Christian polity of the Carolingian Empire of the Franks, as the March of Pannonia, for the whole 9th century, while the Great Plain fell under the sphere of influence of the First Bulgarian Empire. According to some historical accounts, some Avar governors converted to Christianity once they were defeated by the Franks, but there is no trace of Christian elements in the large Avar cemeteries of the epoch.
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. 907), starting the ethnogenesis of the modern Hungarians. 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. Early scholarship compared it to Sumerian and Scythian religions. The conception of a supreme God, akin to the pan-Siberian Tengri (meaning "Heaven" or "God" in Turkic), has also been hypothesised. Some scholars, however, have disputed the identification of the Magyar-Hungarian shaman-like magicians, the táltoses, as shamans in the typical Siberian sense, and have found no clear evidence of shamanic rituals. Islamic historians of that period described the religion of the Magyar-Hungarians as based on astrotheology and the worship of natural forces and fire. Based on later prohibitions from Christian regulations, there is evidence that they practised sacrifices at holy groves and springs.
The evidence that Christianity was practised among the Hungarians before the 950s is weak. The question of the continuity of Christianity in the region since Roman times is unresolved; Christian places of worship that were built in the 3rd and 4th century in Transdanubia, the former Roman province of Pannonia, and under Carolingian rule in the 9th century, would have been rebuilt and reused by the Hungarians only in the 11th century. Some Christian communities of the pre-Hungarian populations of the regions, however, likely persisted under the newcomers, and Christian slaves, as well as trade with neighbouring Christianised Slavic and Germanic lands, probably made the Hungarians acquainted with Christianity. The first attested Hungarian converts to Christianity were the chieftains Bulcsú and Gyula, who adopted Eastern Christianity in the mid-10th century, followed by other local lords.
Medieval Hungarian chronicles incorporated many Pagan myths, and transmitted them into the folklore; these include the myth of the brothers Hunor and Magor led by a divine stag to new lands, and the myth of the divine origins of the House of Árpád — the dynasty to which all the great princes of the Magyar tribes and later kings of Hungary from the 9th to the early 14th century belonged —, according to which the Árpád's forefather Ügyek was born from the union of a mortal woman, Emese, with the Turul, a divine bird of the Hungarian indigenous religion. The presence of various Turkic tribal groups in medieval Hungary, such as the Pechenegs and Kipchaks, further contributed to the religious landscape of the region. The religious practices of these Turkic communities were diverse, with Islam and Tengrism being prominent amongst the Pechenegs.
Hungary emerged to statehood at the turn between the 1st and the 2nd millennium, when the federation of the Magyar tribes was reformed into the Kingdom of Hungary, and Western Christianity, specifically Roman Catholicism, was chosen as the state religion. Although the Kingdom of Hungary was undoubtedly shapen by Western Christianity, minorities of Eastern Christianity, specifically Eastern Orthodox Christianity, continued to be present throughout the nation's history. 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. Stephen started a program of Christianisation of his subjects, which at first met the resistance of Pagans and took place at least in part through coercion, through a system of legislative prohibitions of Paganism, Christianising regulations, and penalties for their violations. Within the 12th century, Paganism had been more or less eradicated and was portrayed in a dark light in historical records, although, in the late 13th century, ancient myths were reclaimed to give the ruling dynasty and the people glorious origins. Thenceforth, the principle of "patronate" of the state towards religions, or earlier royal care of spiritual matters, remained firm up throughout the 20th century.
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. The Protestant Reformation began to spread into Hungary from historical Upper Hungary (which included Northern Hungary but also areas which today are in Slovakia), originally as unclear eclectic theologies brought in the 1520s and 1530s by German itinerant preachers, which in the 1540s stabilised along the lines of the doctrine of Lutheranism, with minorities professing Anabaptism. Protestantism reached Hungary when the Catholic kingdom was in struggle with the Islamic Ottoman Empire and the central power was weak, since the Hungarian throne was contended between Ferdinand I of the Austrian House of Habsburg, the house which also held the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Hungarian aristocrat John Zápolya (1487–1540). In 1526, after the Battle of Mohács, large portions of southern and eastern Hungary, including Southern Transdanubia and the whole Great Plain, were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.[29] At the same time, the Hungarians of Transylvania further east, who had not fallen under the domains of either the Kingdom of Hungary or the Ottoman Empire, came under the rule of John Zápolya, who proclaimed himself the legitimate king, while the throne of the western main kingdom was claimed by Ferdinand I; while, at first, the latter tolerated Lutherans, Zápolya presented himself as a preserver of Catholicism. Transylvanian Hungarians were, however, the first among whom Calvinism and Unitarianism (a nontrinitarian doctrine) took root — first introduced among local Transylvanian Saxons — and, given that Lutheranism became increasingly associated with ethnic Germans throughout all the Hungarian lands, Calvinism became the most successful Protestant doctrine among ethnic Hungarians, first in Transylvania, abetted by the support of the son of Jon Zápolya, King John Sigismund Zápolya (1540–1571; with whose abdication in 1570 also Transylvanian Hungarians came under the Habsburgs), himself a Unitarian convert, and soon afterwards also in Ottoman Hungary. Important Calvinist reformers were Márton Kálmáncsehi (1500–1550) and Péter Melius Juhász (1532–1572), the latter of whom made the Bible and other religious writings available in the Hungarian language and made Debrecen in the Great Plain the centre of Hungarian Calvinism, the "Hungarian Geneva" or the second "Calvinist Rome". Calvinism flourished in Ottoman Hungary, thanks to the tolerant Ottoman policies on religions, and was even supported by the Ottomans themselves against Catholicism because of its independent communal organisation and strict discipline, which were appreciated by the Ottoman administration. Calvinism also spread to the eastern parts of Upper Hungary, already penetrated by the Lutheran doctrine. Even in the western Kingdom of Hungary, where Catholicism had survived while elsewhere it had become residual, the nobility supported Lutheranism. 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.
While the Protestant Reformation was spreading rapidly throughout Europe, the House of Habsburg, which also held the throne of the Kingdom of Hungary, bolstered the program of Counter-Reformation devised by the Catholic Church to thwart the spread of Protestantism. In the Kingdom of Hungary, the Protestant nobility experienced some freedom in the 17th century, but its influence was soon curbed by the re-Catholicising efforts of the Habsburgs. In 1699, the Treaty of Karlowitz ended the Great Turkish War between the Holy League, of which the Holy Roman Empire of the Habsburgs was a constituent member, and the Ottoman Empire; the former won, and Ottoman Hungary was yolden to the Kingdom of Hungary, so that Hungary was reunified and the Counter-Reformation was extended to the whole country. 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.
The Counter-Reformation had some success, but Hungary was never entirely converted back to Catholicism and maintained a strong pluralism of religious denominations, aided by a deeply characteristic tolerant approach of the Hungarians towards religious matters, although there were some periods of conflict between Catholics and Protestants, which nonetheless begot a "fruitful tension" which enriched national and local culture. 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. 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. Jews became emancipated only in 1867, and by the end of the century their number had grown to represent over 5% of the total Hungarian population, and the liberal climate of the period led to their quick assimilation into Hungarian society. 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.
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. 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.
During the 1946–1949 Hungarian Republic, the system of "incorporated" religions of 1890 was abolished, and all religions were treated as equal on the level of the "recognised" ones. With the Communist takeover in 1948, and the establishment of the Hungarian People's Republic in 1949, religious freedom was curtailed, education was nationalised and religious schools abolished, theological faculties were separated from national universities, religious orders were banned, the properties of churches were confiscated by the state, and numerous religious leaders were arrested, including the cardinal József Mindszenty, leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church, who in 1949 was tortured and sentenced to life imprisonment. 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. The State Office of Church Affairs exercised control over all churches, and while the collaboration between the state and minor denominations was easier, within the Catholic Church such collaboration brought to a rupture in the clergy, since the government claimed the right to regulate the nomination of bishops, and even minor priests, for itself.
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. These stipulations were a unique development in the Communist Block, and from that year onwards representatives of the Hungarian government and of the Holy See met twice a year, once in Budapest and once in the Vatican City. In the late 1980s, the state's control over religions were loosened significantly, historical denominations experienced more freedom and new denominations were recognised. The collapse of the Communist Block in the early 1990s opened a new era of religious freedom and church–state relations in Hungary, inaugurated in 1990 by the "Act of Freedom of Conscience and Religion and the Churches".
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. The censuses of the 1990s and of the early 21st century have recorded an overall decline of Christianity among the Hungarians — affiliation to which shrank from 92.9% of the population in 1992, to 74.4% in 2001, 54.2% in 2011, and 42.5% in 2022 —, accompanied by a rise of the unaffiliated people and people who declined to answer the census' question about religion. Adherents of new religions might be over-represented among the unanswering population, and contemporary studies on the general beliefs of the Hungarians have shown that among those who do not identify themselves as Christians, syncretism of elements from different religions and esotericism are indeed popular.
Contemporary Hungary is a secular state, where the Constitution guarantees freedom of religious belief and practice, and of irreligion, to all Hungarian citizens, as well as the neutrality of the state in matters of religion, safeguarded by a complex set of legal norms.
22-25, F
