PragueBuzz!

Czech is the most or one of the most atheist countries in the world. The majority of people I asked, including old women, who were usually religious, said flat out that they don’t believe in God or it was not important.

I think this rare atheistic phenomenon has to do with Jan Hus, Czech’s greatest man. He inspired the Protestant movement in Czech, protested vehemently against the Catholic Church and demanded reforms. Later, the Catholic Church burned him at the stake for refusing to recant.

For a couple of centuries, Czech became a Protestant country until was forced by their ruler, Austro-Hungarian empire, to convert back to Catholic. Also many German noblemen arrived in the Czech Republic to replace the Czech noblemen. The hatred toward unwelcome foreign occupators, once again, turned Czechs away from the very core of their enemy, the Catholic tradition.

Now if you look further east to Poland and Slovakia, two countries which most resemble Czech Republic in term of histories, cultures and languages, there are more religious Catholic in these countries. A logical explanation might be that before communism, Czech was more industrialized. Prague was, for a long time, the culture center of Europe’s Holy Roman Empire. So the developed Czech Republic seemed to affiliate less to religion than their more rural neighbors.

Despite that, many Catholic traditions are upheld in Czech, and the country has an impressive array of magnificent churches. Prague is known as the city of 100 spires