Abstract |
The article addresses two major issues: the legacy of the communist regime on the popular attitudes towards religion and the Church, and the patterns of religious politics and the political behaviour of the Lutheran Church in a traditionally Lutheran post-communist country. In Estonia, the general alienation from organized religion has, in addition to the experience of the communist regime, also been aided by a weak relationship between the Estonian national identity and the Lutheran church of the pre-communist period. Religious politics in post-communist Estonia follows four main types—civil religion, an unofficial neoliberal-conservative-clerical alliance, the emergence of a Christian-Protestant political party and a moderate anti-clerical left-wing religious ideology. In general, Lutheranism in Estonia provides a framework of religious politics, where religious symbols and values culturally unite the whole political community, and allows the ‘politics of religion’ and ‘religious politics’ to be interpreted to a large extent according to the private preferences of individual politicians and activist pastors. |