I was born in, and have lived my whole life in, what is possibly the most godless country on earth – the Czech Republic. I had not experienced a mass, or any form of religious service, until my late twenties. I had not witnessed a religious funeral, baptism or grace before a meal until the same age. All of those firsts came through my wife, who is from Slovakia, where Catholicism remains a living social force, and through the time I have spent with her family. Not a single person in my own family was religious. My parents could be described as mildly anticlerical, in that particular way that is so characteristic of Czechs – not really hostile, but dismissive, viewing religiosity as a strange curiosity of times long past. Every funeral I attended in the Czech Republic followed the same template: cremation, no priest. None of my friends grew up in a religious household either. My lack of experience with religion was not unusual in any way – it was, entirely unremarkably, the norm.

My first encounter with an intensely religious person came when I was twelve, hospitalized to have my appendix removed. I shared a room with a boy whose mother was visibly devout, and she would not allow me to watch Slunce, Seno, Jahody – the popular 1980s Czech comedy playing on the television in our room – because one of its recurring characters is a priest who is mocked throughout. That was, to twelve-year-old me, a serious grievance and a confirmation of my suspicion that religion is simply a vehicle for hypocritical prudes to make the lives of normal people more unpleasant. In time, my outlook changed considerably. I came to acknowledge Christianity’s essential contributions to Western civilization and to understand that we are, as Tom Holland puts it, like fish unaware of the water we swim in – living in a world of values formed by Christianity, among them the idea that every individual possesses inherent rights and dignity, even if those values have long been secularized and most people no longer understand where they came from. My sympathy was further reinforced when my demographic obsessions began to take shape since religiousness is one of the main drivers of higher fertility.

But I never became religious. Attending Christmas or Easter mass in central Slovakia, I found myself observing my surroundings with the detached curiosity of an analyst – noting the age profile of the congregation, family size, guessing at their socioeconomic backgrounds, cataloguing details. I felt, unmistakably, like a tourist. A fascinated one, standing in an exotic land full of wonders, but a tourist nonetheless – someone for whom this place will never truly be home. You can’t teach an old Czech new tricks. It is simply not my world.

The Numbers Don’t Lie – Or Do They?

Before getting into why Czechs are so irreligious and what the consequences of that are, we should first examine whether the data indeed even supports such a claim or whether it is partly a matter of semantics. According to the Pew Research Center, which produces some of the most rigorous cross-national data on religion available, 66% of Czechs do not believe in God, while only 29% do. No other country in the study scores this low. Sweden comes closest at 33%, followed by countries like Japan, South Korea, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands, clustered in the 40–50% range. For comparison, the figure stands at 83% in Poland and 78% in the United States. Among the religiously unaffiliated in the United States – already considered a secular segment of an unusually religious wealthy country – more than 61% still declare a belief in God. That is nearly double the rate of the Czech population as a whole.

If we shift from belief to behavior – looking at religious affiliation, the share of the population for whom religion is very important, weekly attendance at religious services, and daily prayer – and average those four dimensions, the Czech Republic emerges as the second most irreligious country on earth, behind only China. In China, just 3% of respondents said religion was very important to them, and only 1% reported attending services weekly or praying daily. China, however, is not a confessionally free country, and it is reasonable to wonder whether those numbers are suppressed by social desirability or outright fear. Separate Pew data surveying East Asian populations on belief in God or unseen forces yielded considerably higher figures: 77% in Hong Kong and 90% in Taiwan, the two societies most culturally proximate to mainland China. This points to a deeper conceptual problem with measuring religiosity in East Asia. The very concept of “religion” was imported to the region by Western scholars roughly a century ago, and common translations – zongjiaoin Chinese, shūkyō in Japanese, jonggyo in Korean – tend to evoke organised, hierarchical institutions of the kind associated with Christianity, rather than the diffuse traditional spiritualities that have long shaped daily life across the region. It is therefore reasonable to assume that while the Chinese may not be more religious than Czechs in any institutional sense, they are likely more spiritual. In the post-Abrahamic world, where the conceptual vocabulary is broadly comparable and the measurements more reliable, Czechs appear to be, quite straightforwardly, the least religious people on earth.

Nevertheless, one last distinction needs to be made. What makes Czechs appear distinctly irreligious in comparison with other thoroughly secularised European states is the remarkably low level of formal religious affiliation. According to Pew Research data from 2018, only 28% of Czechs show any kind of religious affiliation. The Czech census of 2021 paints an even starker picture: just 13% of citizens declared a religious affiliation, the vast majority Roman Catholic. That figure is almost certainly an undercount, given that 30% of respondents left the question blank, and some portion of them will be religious. The true number is likely somewhere between 13% and 28% – but that is somewhat beside the point.

What matters is that Czech irreligiousness, when measured by affiliation, appears far more extreme than when measured by behavior. Of the two possible ways of measuring religiosity – affiliation and behavior – behavior is clearly far more important. Affiliation is something you are more or less born with: you were baptised by your parents’ choosing, and for large numbers of nominally religious people it is simply something they put in the census without it affecting their behavior or life choices in any conscious way. To compare like with like: using Pew data, 28% of Czechs are religiously affiliated, against 55% of Estonians, 58% of Swedes, and 62% of Belgians. Yet when we turn to behavioral metrics, the gap largely disappears. More Czechs attend religious services weekly (7%) than people in Belgium (6%), Sweden (6%), Finland (4%), Denmark (3%), or Estonia (2%). On other measures – daily prayer, the personal importance of religion – Czechs rank at or near the bottom, but the figures are broadly comparable to the most secular cluster of European countries.

It is not unlike supporting a football club that has always been supported in your family – you are still kind of a fan, but you have not watched a full match in years and could not name most of the squad. Religious affiliation works similarly: you still put your affiliation in the census and get your child baptised as a kind of social custom, but not much more than that. The difference is simply that most Czechs have dispensed even with that – they are the ones who openly say they do not follow football at all. Religion is not all that interesting as a statistical account, but precisely in its behavioral impacts – social values, fertility, and so on. In this regard, the Czech Republic is simply part of the most secular cluster of European countries, most of them early-secularising, mostly Protestant nations. Remarkable in its low affiliation figures, certainly – but in no way extreme where it actually matters.

From Franks to Comrades

Why are Czechs so irreligious, and why is their lack of formal affiliation so distinct? The answer lies in more than a thousand years of religious history in the Czech lands. The recurring leitmotif is one of the population’s preferred forms of faith being politically suppressed – usually by a foreign power – leading, over time, to a severing of any connection between Czech national identity and specific religious belief, to an anticlerical character of Czech nationalism, and ultimately to atheism.

We can begin in the ninth century. Around 860, Prince Rastislav, ruler of Great Moravia, found himself under mounting pressure from Germanic Europe. Christianity already existed in Moravia, but the liturgy was in Latin and the clergy were Bavarian – religion was, in part, an instrument of Frankish political influence. Rastislav therefore appealed to the Byzantine emperor for missionaries who would bring Christianity in the local language and free Moravia from ecclesiastical dependence on the Franks. Emperor Michael III sent two learned brothers from Thessalonica – Constantine (later Cyril) and Methodius. Before departing, Constantine devised an entirely new alphabet, the Glagolitic script, and translated liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic. The mission succeeded, and the Slavonic liturgy was eventually sanctioned by the pope himself – but after Methodius died in 885, his disciples were expelled from Moravia and the Latin rite returned.

It is worth noting that presenting Great Moravia as being in direct continuity with later Czech states would be a stretch – it was a Western Slavic polity that existed before current national boundaries had clearly coalesced. So why does it matter? Because it already establishes the pattern that would prove preeminent throughout later history: religion being leveraged as a political instrument by foreign powers navigating the essential predicament of the Western Slavic peoples – caught between West and East, shaped by the undeniable cultural, political and economic gravity of broader Western Europe as represented by the Germans, yet remaining Slavs, and thus oriented also toward the East, then embodied by Byzantium.

The next fundamental chapter is that of the Hussite Wars of the fifteenth century. They erupted in the aftermath of the burning of Czech proto-reformer Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415, which ignited decades of simmering frustration over Church corruption, the sale of indulgences, and German dominance in Bohemia – an uprising that was simultaneously religious and nationalist. What followed was a remarkable military and spiritual convulsion: a largely peasant and burgher army, inspired by radical theology and led by the brilliant tactician Jan Žižka, repelled five consecutive papal crusades launched by the Holy Roman Empire – one of the most astonishing military feats of the Middle Ages. The Hussites were never defeated from without; they were undone by their own internal divisions, when the moderate Hussites, known as Utraquists, allied with imperial forces to crush the radical Taborites at the Battle of Lipany in 1434. The compromise that ended the wars – the Basel Compacts – granted Bohemia the right to receive communion in both kinds, making it effectively the first country in Europe to win official recognition of a break with Rome, a full century before Luther.

The Hussites subsequently played a central role in the self-imagining of Czech nationalism, though always in a selective and utilitarian fashion. The nineteenth-century national revival heavily accented the movement’s nationalist dimensions; the communists, in turn, emphasised the egalitarian strands present in radical Hussite theology. Each age took from the Hussites what it needed. Yet through all these reinterpretations, the underlying thread remained firmly in place: a popular, grassroots religious movement, suppressed by foreign power – usually, though not exclusively, German. One important caveat: Moravia, the eastern part of the historical Czech lands, did not join the Hussite movement. Cities such as Brno and Olomouc were besieged by the Hussites, unsuccessfully, and the Catholic Church remained dominant there throughout. This is not merely a historical footnote – its effects are felt to this day. But more on that later.

Fast forward to Europe on the eve of the destructive sectarian Thirty Years’ War. The tension had been building for decades: the Bohemian lands were overwhelmingly Protestant, shaped by a century of Hussite tradition and subsequently by Lutheran and Calvinist influences, yet ruled by the Catholic Habsburgs. This uneasy coexistence held as long as emperors tolerated it – Rudolf II even issued a Letter of Majesty in 1609 guaranteeing religious freedom – but when the devoutly Catholic Ferdinand II began dismantling Protestant rights, the Czech estates revolted. They defenestrated the Habsburg governors from Prague Castle in 1618, declared Ferdinand deposed, and offered the crown to Frederick of the Palatinate, a young German Protestant prince who spoke no Czech and had never set foot in Bohemia. It was a gamble, and it failed completely. Ferdinand’s forces crushed the estates’ army in two hours on a hill outside Prague – the Battle of White Mountain.

In the aftermath of the battle, twenty-seven Czech lords were executed in Prague’s Old Town Square, a new constitution made Catholicism the only permitted religion, and the entire Protestant intelligentsia – including Jan Amos Comenius – was driven into exile. The Jesuits were handed the task of re-Catholicization the country from the ground up, through new schools, new baroque churches, and the burning of Protestant books.

The thread continues. Once again, a religious movement suppressed from outside – and once again, that moment was later instrumentalised to construct the version of national history that the nineteenth century required: one in which the Czech versus German struggle serves as the eternal leitmotif. The crucial nuance is that the Czech nobility of 1618 was largely German-speaking, and the conflict was primarily about religious and feudal rights rather than ethnic identity. But the nineteenth-century national revival retrospectively recast the defeat as a national catastrophe, and in doing so made Catholicism synonymous with Habsburg oppression in Czech historical memory. It is a conflation that has never entirely dissolved.

Reality, of course, is more complex. After the horrific mayhem of the Thirty Years’ War and its accompanying depopulation, the Czech lands actually flourished in many respects once the re-Catholicisation had settled – from the end of the seventeenth century onwards. Much of the architecture that still makes the country so visually striking dates precisely from this era: the baroque churches, palaces and streetscapes that give Prague and other cities so much of their character are, in no small part, a legacy of the very Counter-Reformation that nationalist historiography taught Czechs to mourn.

The experience of re-Catholicisation itself varied sharply by class. The nobility and educated urban classes faced a stark choice: convert or leave. Estimates vary widely, but somewhere between 150,000 and 500,000 people chose exile – an enormous haemorrhage of the country’s elites. For the rural peasantry, the picture was considerably more complicated. Their religiosity had always been syncretic at best – a loose blend of formal Christianity, folk magic and superstition – meaning that Catholicism was not entirely foreign to them in practice. There were revolts and pockets of stubborn resistance, but no mass spiritual catastrophe. Most simply adapted, as peasants throughout history have tended to do when the powerful change the rules.

This history culminates in the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the creation of the First Czechoslovak Republic. The religious question had long presented a paradox for the nineteenth-century national revival movement: while the overwhelming majority of the Czech population remained Catholic, the nationalist intelligentsia had spent generations associating Catholicism with the German-speaking Habsburg oppressor. The consequences of this paradox are instructive. In Poland, Ireland, or the Balkan countries, a specific confession became a cornerstone of national identity – precisely because the foreign power perceived as the oppressor belonged to a different confessional tradition. Lutheran Prussia and Orthodox Russia pressing upon Catholic Poland only deepened the fusion of faith and nationhood. In the Czech case, the dynamic ran in the opposite direction: the faith of the oppressor was, confessionally speaking, the same as that of most of the population, and this produced not solidarity but estrangement – a gradual loosening of the bond between religious identity and national feeling.

After the creation of Czechoslovakia, many of the new state’s leading figures were either Protestant, like President Masaryk, or irreligious and potentially anti-clerical, like his closest ally and later successor Edvard Beneš, or one of the era’s most celebrated writer Karel Čapek. There was a deliberate attempt to construct a national Protestant church along Scandinavian lines: the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, founded in 1920, emerged directly from a mass exodus from Catholicism – approximately 1.4 million people left the Catholic Church in the republic’s first years alone. The new church aspired to be modern, national and democratic: services conducted in Czech, married clergy permitted, no allegiance to Rome. Yet it was always more of a nationalist state-building project than a genuinely religious one. The First Republic was a state with a strong nationalist streak and a current of humanitarian secularism running through its founding ideology – religion was, at best, a cultural instrument in service of the nation, not an end in itself.

The communist period did no favors to religion, and much of the residual rural religiosity that had survived earlier upheavals was uprooted during these decades – though the picture is, once again, complex. The most visceral illustration of what communist anticlerical repression looked like in practice is the case of Father Josef Toufar, a simple rural priest serving the village of Číhošť in the Vysočina region. On the third Sunday of Advent, 1949, nineteen witnesses present at his mass reported that a wooden cross on the altar moved on its own. The regime saw an opportunity to discredit the Catholic Church. StB feared that locals were prepared to physically defend their priest, so agents lured him outside the rectory under false pretences, forced him to sit into a waiting car and drove him to the interrogation facility at Valdice. There, he was beaten, stripped, tied up, hung on a hook, flogged and subjected to electric shocks until he signed a confession admitting to staging the miracle. He died on 25 February 1950 from his injuries. He was buried in a mass grave in Prague-Ďáblice under the false name.

For ordinary believers, the violence was less spectacular but no less consequential. The regime operated through the quiet machinery of the kádrový posudek – the personnel file that followed every citizen from school to workplace. Going to church was enough to disqualify a child from secondary or higher education – not because of anything the child had done, but simply because their parents attended mass. Active believers were effectively barred from university study and from any position of responsibility.

While the regime was aggressively anticlerical and actively persecuted the Church, this had an unintended consequence: it made the Church part of the broader anti-communist coalition, alongside its strongest component – the humanist, pro-democratic intellectuals gathered around Václav Havel and Charter 77, people who in other circumstances might easily have been rather anticlerical themselves. The Catholic Church was not the cornerstone of anti-communist resistance in Czechoslovakia as it was in Poland or Slovakia, but it was part of the coalition.

In the immediate aftermath of the Velvet Revolution, the 1991 census recorded a striking result: the share of people declaring religious affiliation surpassed those without it, reaching nearly 40%. But this proved to be more a declaratory act of rejecting communism, made possible by the newly won freedom to declare anything at all, than a genuine revival. It was not a religious awakening so much as a political gesture. Since then, through three decades of capitalism and democracy, the numbers have moved in only one direction.

The result of this long and complex history is simply a nation that was never fully permitted to pursue its own religious path and eventually said to itself – ah, screw it. Nevertheless, this was mostly the case for the Bohemian part of the Czech lands. As alluded to earlier, Moravian religious identity was far more continuous, and contemporary data clearly shows that this has left a persistent imprint to this day. Those religious people who still hold to their faith – overwhelmingly Catholic – are concentrated in Moravia, and especially in those parts least affected by the post-war expulsion of the German population and the subsequent demographic replacement that followed: the southeast of the country, adjacent to Slovakia. The regional variation is striking. The share of religiously affiliated people ranges from 54.5% in the Zlín region to less than 16% in the Ústecký region – one of the areas most thoroughly reshaped by population replacement after the Second World War.

Laughing Beasts

Nevertheless, how does all of this shape Czech national character and society? I believe it is one of the key contributors to a specific Czech mentality that I cherish deeply. Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War, allegedly called Czechs lachende Bestien – laughing beasts – intending it as a condemnation of their sharp, dark and subversive humour. The phrase has since been adopted as a badge of honour, shorthand for something genuinely distinctive in the Czech character: a blend of cynicism, mockery, and the ability to find comedy in even the gravest of situations.

The most enduring literary expression of this sensibility is The Good Soldier Švejk, the most translated Czech book of all time, written by Jaroslav Hašek. Švejk is a simple Prague man dragged into the machinery of the Austro-Hungarian army by the First World War. Throughout the book he attempts to reach the front and never does – not because he resists, but precisely because he doesn’t: he follows orders so literally, with such enthusiasm and such painstaking obedience, that the system around him constantly collapses under its own weight. He walks perpetually on the edge where it becomes impossible to tell whether he is an idiot or a genius – a little man under the boot of a great empire who survives not as a hero or a martyr, but as someone who smiles, nods, and quietly does as he pleases.

Czechs are simply a nation that rarely takes things very seriously, including itself. To mock and deflate is in our essence. I think it is a natural defense mechanism of a small nation frequently ground between the large rocks of history. When that happens, you face a choice. You can fall back on heroic self-aggrandisement – the melancholy pride of fallen heroes, the cult of martyrdom, cultivating a tragic national mythology to forge the nation for future struggles – the Polish way. But that requires taking yourself seriously. Or you can focus on the absurdity and tragicomedy of it all. The Czech disposition chose the latter.

The lack of religious feeling is, I believe, connected to this. Religion is a serious matter – about the salvation of the soul, no less. A nation that has decided not to take that seriously will hardly work itself into a frenzy over worldly ideological projects either. There is something here that is the precise opposite of the German – especially Protestant German – tendency toward what one might call ideological maximalism: the Drang toward the absolute, the almost mechanical pursuit of ideological purity projects, followed with relentless precision and often to tragic ends. For Czechs, the grand projects of building brave new worlds are mostly laughable. There is something of the East Slavic Orthodox fatalism in this outlook, yet it is lighter, less drab and less despairing. The Czech lands are, after all, a beautiful, plentiful and largely peaceful and prosperous corner of the world – there is no reason to spoil that with being all too dramatic.

Politically speaking, the results are a certain natural skepticism toward ideology, a pragmatic and materialist earthiness, and perhaps a certain baseline coarseness. The lack of religious zeal has not translated into the secularised version of religious reformist fervour that has produced wokeness across much of the Protestant West – wokeness being, from a Czech perspective, simply another ideological project deserving of mockery, and one particularly well endowed for being made fun of. Religion, fierce nationalism, wokism, saving the planet from environmental catastrophe – all of it requires a degree of pathos that is simply foreign to the Czech temperament. The result is a certain overall moderation. Czechs are liberal in a live and let live kind of way, but not overtly progressive. When this kind of liberalism starts to transform itself into something once again resembling an ideological rigidity, it is a major red flag for most Czechs.

One interesting pattern I have observed: in countries where a serious religious and nationalist right exists – the two frequently fused, religion having become inseparable from national identity and thus paradoxically deployed in a mostly secularised way – the reaction tends to produce an equally radical progressive left. Slovakia and Poland have more strident progressive movements than Czechia, even though both countries are considerably more conservative overall. That is not a coincidence; there is a causal relationship at work. The fiercest ideological battles tend to erupt not when one value system is dominant, but when the balance of power between competing ones is actively shifting. When religion loses its social grip while secularism rises – or, conceivably, the other way around – the friction is most intense precisely because the outcome remains genuinely uncertain. When an overwhelming majority of the population shares the same basic orientation, whether religious or secular, there is simply less to fight about. Czech society, having largely settled the question a long time ago, has been spared much of that turbulence.

Czech politics, by contrast, are thus somewhat boring. There are no great visions, no clashing ideological ambitions, no messianic projects. I think this is fundamentally a good thing – but it is undeniably a little dull. Another Czech Substack writer, Lucie Sulovská, captured this perfectly in a post following last autumn’s elections, with a comparison between Czechs and Hungarians:

“Can you imagine how Orbán would go down here, a man whose speeches routinely contain sentences like: ‘From the dust of history the thunder of our horses’ hooves has risen once more, and we, the only nomadic people of the Turan, defended our living space in the heart of the Carpathian Basin at the point of a spear’? A Hungarian weeps at this. A Czech weeps too. With laughter.”

And yet, for all the ironic detachment and anticlerical reflexes, the basic human desire to believe in something metaphysical has not disappeared. Czechs are not some different species, devoid of such needs. While it is entirely normal to meet a Czech who has never attended a mass, a baptism or a religious funeral, who knows almost nothing about the tradition that shaped their civilisation, and for whom Christmas and Easter are purely secular occasions involving carp, the spanking of women and getting drunk, something else quietly fills the void. Tarot cards, amulets, fortune telling, astrology, chakras, crystals and vague cosmic energies are enormously popular, particularly among women. Nobody in my family was religious, yet I grew up hearing my mother and aunts deliver confident verdicts on people’s characters based on their star signs. According to survey data, 43% of Czech women believe in angels and demons, and 45% believe in preordained destiny. The archetype of the woman in batik trousers explaining that she needs to get her chakras realigned is not a caricature – it is a recognisable feature of the landscape. One is tempted to suggest that it might, on balance, be slightly more dignified to simply go to church.

Of course, there are also the less pleasant aspects. One of the more notorious facts about the Czech Republic in certain corners of the internet is that we, together with Hungary, produce some of the largest numbers of pornographic performers per capita in the world. That both countries assumed this distinction after 1989 – the two most secular nations in the region – is not a coincidence. Economic conditions in Poland or Slovakia were no better in the 1990s, and in many respects worse, but public morality still shaped by Christianity did not produce the same numbers of young women choosing that particular path to income.

Czechs are consistently among the world’s heaviest consumers of alcohol, usually placing in the top five alongside fellow Eastern Europeans. Beer is its own category entirely – there is simply no competition. Statistically, the average Czech, toddlers included, drinks approximately 250 beers a year. In cannabis, cocaine, MDMA and particularly methamphetamine consumption, Czechs rank among the top performers in Europe across the board. There is, in short, quite a lot of degeneracy going on.

What is quite interesting, however, is that the Czech Republic simultaneously ranks among the countries with the lowest rates of drug-induced death in Europe – recording the lowest figure on the continent outright just a few years ago. In various measures of problematic or pathological drug use, Czechia does not fare badly at all, much better than the overall consumption numbers would suggest. It is a strange and somehow very Czech combination: nihilistic hedonism paired with a peculiar ability to walk right to the edge without going fully overboard. Even in vice, it seems, the instinct for moderation quietly reasserts itself.

What about the demographic question so close to my heart? Does Czech secularism exact a meaningful toll on fertility? Looking at the raw numbers, the answer is simply: no. Within the EU, the Czech average fertility rate over the last twenty years sits slightly above the European mean at 1.54. With the possible exception of Ireland, the countries consistently topping the rankings are among the most secularised in Europe – France, Sweden, Denmark. Meanwhile, the countries clustered at the bottom are almost exclusively the formerly overwhelmingly Catholic, late-secularising nations: Poland, Malta, Spain.

Does this mean that the well-established link between religiosity and fertility has been severed? Not quite. It means, in my view, that there are no genuinely religious countries left in Europe. Young people devout enough for faith to actively shape their life choices – including decisions about family formation and family size – are simply no longer numerous enough anywhere on the continent to meaningfully push fertility rates upward. Nevertheless, the secular character of the Czech Republic is reflected in family structure: low childlessness, few large families of three or more children, two children being the established norm. Even though Slovakia and especially Poland both record lower average fertility than Czechia, they have a higher proportion of large families – most likely sustained by their devout Catholic minorities. This makes Czech fertility structurally vulnerable. The low-childlessness norm established during communism is already showing signs of erosion in contemporary conditions, yet there is no countervailing force of large families to compensate. The result could be a fertility rate settling around 1.3 children per woman.

The more visible effect of secularisation shows up elsewhere: in births outside marriage, which are on average highest in the most secularised – and, notably, higher-fertility – nations. In countries where religious tradition remains stronger, marriage is still a relevant institution, yet this does not translate into any meaningful fertility advantage, and may even carry a slight negative effect. Divorce rates are also higher in the more secularised countries. So one could argue that in secular societies families are less institutionalised and less resilient – yet more children are being born. As trade-offs go, that seems like an acceptable one.

God Be With Us

How is life in the most godless country on earth, then? Well, what can a Czech say without being overtly sentimental about it – it is not bad. As noted earlier, Czechia is not really all that more secular than a number of other European countries; it is simply more honest about it. The thousand-year thread of Czech history made the nation sceptical of organised religion without producing the conformist secular utopianism so often seen in formerly Protestant societies. For the Catholic Church, Czechia is not conquered territory but missionary ground.

Yet the thread of history does not end, and as some of our more god-fearing neighbours might say, the Lord works in mysterious ways. Some time ago I came across an interview with a Czech-Roma evangelical pastor who described himself as driven by a divine plan: to awaken the Roma to the Christian faith, through the Roma to awaken the Czechs, and through the Czechs perhaps all of Europe. Would that not be a lovely paradox – the godless heathens returning to their Hussite heritage and becoming true believers once again, arriving at faith not through the grand institutions of Rome or the solemn reformation of Wittenberg, but through the most marginalised community in the land.

Well. God be with us.