Korrespondent: Disappointment in Government Institutions and Low Level of Life Turns Ukrainians into One of the Most Religious European Nations

Disappointment in government institutions and low level of life turns Ukrainians into one of the most religious European nations, reports korrespondent.net. According to the poll of the International Social Survey Project, which analyzes social processes in Europe, Ukrainians forgot their Communist and atheist past and turned to the church on a mass scale, making them the fifth most religious nation in Europe. 

According to the publication, 71.4% of the population now considers itself believers, which means that in this respect Ukrainians yield only to the Polish Catholics, Cyprus Orthodox, and Portuguese and Slovakian Catholics. Moreover, the number of people believing in God is growing: According to polls by the Razumkov Center, the national flock has increased by 13% in the last decade.

According to Korrespondent, the number of believers is actively growing even in the eastern regions, where religious traditions were considerably weakened under the Communists as opposed to the western regions. For instance, the number of parishes in the Luhansk Oblast is growing quickly. “There were two churches per 100 thousand residents, whereas now, there are 16 of them and all of them are filled,” reported Protopriest Oleksandr Avdiuhin of the Luhansk Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate.” 

The increase of the number of believers is recorded against the background of the steadily increasing authority of the church, which is even more noticeable as trust in the government and the level of well-being is dropping. The publication notes that an additional “missionary” in the spread of religiosity has been the fashion to be religious, a kind of a response to the many years of imposed atheism during Soviet times.

However, according to the Razumkov Center, only one in six Ukrainians attend church regularly, at least once a week.  

At the same time, according to the head of the Department of Information of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Ihor Yatsiv, the share of young people among the believers is growing.

The western regions remain the most religious ones, where 34.5% of parishes of all the Orthodox Churches are located there, whereas only 15.9% are located in the east of Ukraine. The flocks of Protestant and Muslim denominations are growing dynamically. The shares of these confessions have increased from 26.5% tо 29.1% and from 1.5% tо 4.3% respectively.