Religious freedom and control in independent Slovenia

Sociology of Religion, Fall, 2003 by Ales Crnic, Gregor Lesjak

Slovenia is a small and a young country, born in 1991 after the dissolution of Yugoslavia; but, unlike other parts of the former Republic (Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro), it is ethnically very homogeneous. A large majority of its two million population is of Slovene nationality. This is one of the reasons why Slovenia was only marginally affected by the tragic events that led to the emergence of the new states. The bloody war did start in Slovenia when Yugoslav troops, under nationalistic Serbian commanding officers, tried to prevent Slovenia from gaining the independence for which its population had already voted overwhelmingly in a national referendum. However, after ten days the war moved on--first to Croatia and later to Bosnia and Herzegovina where it escalated to previously unimaginable proportions. Religion played an important role in the wars, which took place in the early and mid 1990s, and shattered a large part of the Balkans (see Velikonja 2003). These were not religious wars in which Serbian Christian (Orthodox) troops would assume the role of the last bastion against the Muslim advance on the West, although this is how they were often interpreted in Western Europe and the USA. However, religion did often serve as the motivating and integrating factor for justifying military attacks that were actually nationalistic in nature. Thus, religion was merged with national identity. It was made to appear that all (real) Serbs had to be Orthodox, just as all Croatians had to be Catholics, and Bosnians had to be Muslims. Slovenia, however, was spared the need to impose such an alignment. Despite the fact that most Slovenes were Catholic, this did not need to be a defining aspect of their identity qua Slovenes. They had managed to avoid a war that insisted that they had to differentiate themselves from their enemies according to a 'Holier than Thou' criterion.

Even in other respects Slovene society cannot be described as particularly multicultural or heterogeneous. Compared to a number of other European countries it can be considered virtually homogenous. Due to a variety of historical reasons, the religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities in Slovenia are relatively small. As far as religion is concerned, a total of 31 religious groups have reported their existence to the appropriate state authority; however, 30 of these do not account for more than about 5 percent of the total population. The Roman Catholic Church is by far the largest religion, accounting for about three-quarters of Slovene citizens (if we take baptism as the formal criterion). According to the data provided by the Public Opinion and Mass Communication Research Centre of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ljubljana, which has been conducting Slovene Public Opinion Surveys for over thirty years, 71.3 percent of Slovene citizens considered themselves to be "adherents" of the Roman Catholic faith in 1992. This figure rose to 75.1 percent in 1995 then fell back to 70.8 percent in 1998. Similar results were obtained from the 1991 population census, which recorded a total of 1,403,014 (71.4 percent) adherents of the Catholic faith among a total population of 1,965,986. (1) Second in size, according to this census, was the Serbian Orthodox faith, with 46,819 adherents (2.4 percent), followed in third place by the Islamic community with 29,719 adherents (1.5 percent). Both the Orthodox and Muslim religious communities are clearly ethnic in their nature, the former consisting exclusively of ethnic Serbs, the latter of Bosnians. Due to the influx of refugees and other migrations as a result of the wars in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, quantitative changes have occurred since the 1991 census. (2)

The fourth largest religious group in Slovenia was the Evangelical Church (of the Augsburg confession) with 19,000 adherents (0.97 percent). Threequarters of these Slovene Lutherans live in the north-eastern part of the country, in the vicinity of the Hungarian border. They are the descendants of the sixteenth-century Slovene Protestants who managed to avoid the counterreformation by residing in Hungary, and, thereby, being protected by the 1606 Peace of Vienna.

According to data obtained through six Slovene Public Opinion Surveys conducted from 1993 to 1998, between 17.7 percent and 25.8 percent of the country's population declared that they did not adhere to any faith.

Although almost three-quarters of the Slovene population declare "adherence" to Roman Catholicism, Catholics are considered decidedly heterogeneous, most of them being far from orthodox in their adherence to Roman Catholicism in its strictest sense. Indeed, the majority of formal Catholics are very selective when it comes to dogmatic belief, freely combining elements of Catholicism with elements of secularism. (3) It is possible to say that only one-quarter to one third of "formal" Catholics fully accept the key doctrinal tenets of the Catholic Church, and that, spiritually speaking, secularised Catholics are the largest single segment of the population of Slovenia (Smrke 1999).