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Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War EuropePiety by the Numbers: Social Science and Polish Debates About Secularization in the 1960s and 1970s

Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe: Piety by the Numbers: Social Science and... [This essay examines the statistics on devotional practice generated by sociological studies in Poland in the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as the ways in which church-affiliated and secular, regime-affiliated scholars tried to make sense of those statistics. Jim Bjork argues that these debates involved a surprising degree of underlying consensus about Poland’s susceptibility to forces of secularization driven by economic modernization. Divergent visions of Poland’s religious future ultimately depended on which regional data were seen as typical and which were seen as anomalous. The narration of a particular story of Polish religious exceptionalism did not ensure the path that Poland subsequently followed in the era of John Paul II, but it did help to make it imaginable and explainable.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War EuropePiety by the Numbers: Social Science and Polish Debates About Secularization in the 1960s and 1970s

Part of the St Antony's Series Book Series
Editors: Betts, Paul; Smith, Stephen A.
Bjork, Jim
Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe — May 15, 2016
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Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
ISBN
978-1-137-54638-8
Pages
35 –54
DOI
10.1057/978-1-137-54639-5_2
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[This essay examines the statistics on devotional practice generated by sociological studies in Poland in the 1960s and the 1970s, as well as the ways in which church-affiliated and secular, regime-affiliated scholars tried to make sense of those statistics. Jim Bjork argues that these debates involved a surprising degree of underlying consensus about Poland’s susceptibility to forces of secularization driven by economic modernization. Divergent visions of Poland’s religious future ultimately depended on which regional data were seen as typical and which were seen as anomalous. The narration of a particular story of Polish religious exceptionalism did not ensure the path that Poland subsequently followed in the era of John Paul II, but it did help to make it imaginable and explainable.]

Published: May 15, 2016

Keywords: Religious Practice; Church Attendance; Catholic Church; Soviet Bloc; Head Count

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