Religious Supply, Existential Insecurity and Church Attendance in Post-communist Romania

During the last 30 years Romania has experienced a revival of church attendance, and a significant increase in the number of houses of worship, having the highest rate of construction in Europe. The paper provides theoretical arguments that support the idea that the increase in church attendance has roots in the fast growth in the number of houses of worship, which provide easier access to religious services, and help the development of parish communities, which are highly relevant for Eastern Orthodoxy. This growth is the outcome of the privileged position of the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC), which received funding from the central government and in-kind support from local authorities to extend the ROC's infrastructure, in exchange for active support in the political arena granted by the ROC to the party in power. Different from other religious organizations in Romania or other Orthodox churches in postcommunist societies, the ROC is a powerful organization, and played its cards to get privileges from the political power during the communist and post-communist eras, which made the ROC more visible and attractive to the Romanian public. The research uses a composition of pooled datasets derived from 18 national and international surveys in Romania, covering a time span of 27 years, from 1991 to 2018, and employs multilevel logistic regression. The hypothesis regarding the relationship between the growth in church attendance and the increasing number of houses of worship is supported by the empirical data. Data have shown that growth in the number of houses of worship may fuel religious revivals, even if the offer is homogenous, and comes from nearly only one religious provider.