Religion in Hungary is varied, with Christianity as the largest religion. According to the national census of 2022, 42.5%% of the Hungarians identified themselves as Christians, of whom 29.2% were adherents of Catholicism (27.5% following the Roman Rite, and 1.7% the Greek Rite), 9.8% of Calvinism, 1.8% of Lutheranism, 0.2% of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and 1.5% of other Christian denominations. At the same time, 1.3% of the Hungarians identified themselves as adherents of other religions; minorities practising Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, the Baháʼí Faith, Taoism, Ősmagyar vallás and other Neopaganisms, and New Age, are present in the country. Of the remaining population, 40.1% did not answer, not identifying their beliefs or non-beliefs, while 16.1% identified themselves as not religious.
History
1st–10th century
In antiquity, the lands of the Carpathian Basin covered by the contemporary state of Hungary were inhabited by sedentary tribes of Celts and Illyrians (the Pannonians) in the parts west of the river Danube — the region of Transdanubia —, and by nomadic tribes of Scytho-Siberians (the Iazyges) in the parts east of the Danube — the Great Plain —, with varying degrees of relations with each others. In the early years of the 1st century, the Celto-Illyrian western lands were incorporated into the region of Pannonia in the Roman Empire; the Roman military conquest of the region had already begun under Augustus, who in 12–9 BCE had pushed the Roman frontier to the riverbanks of the Danube, and by the year 20 CE the permanent military camp of Aquincum, located within the area which today is the city of Budapest, had been founded. The Celto-Illyrian people, among whom Celtic culture had become dominant, were partially Romanised under the Roman Empire; this was especially true for their upper classes, while the population as a whole preserved the original Celtic culture for long time even under Romanisation. Religiously, the Roman authorities built temples of the official Roman religion of the state, to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, but also Romano-Celtic temples which continued the cults of the pre-Roman Celtic religion. Mystery religions, focused on individual otherworldly salvation, originating from the southeastern provinces of the Roman Empire, also spread to Pannonia, including Greco-Roman-Iranian Mithraism, Greco-Roman-Egyptian Isis-Anubis-Serapis' mysteries, Greco-Roman-Semitic Judaism, and also Christianity from the 2nd century, and various places of worship of these faiths were built as well.
Roman Pannonia was periodically under attack by its eastern nomadic Scythian neighbours of the Great Plain, whom throughout the 2nd and 3rd century were joined by many Germanic nomads, and at the turn between the 4th and the 5th century by the Huns, a multiethnic confederation of nomadic tribes whose original core can probably be identified as the Xiongnu of the Chinese sources, who came from Inner Mongolia and the Gobi Desert and against whom the Chinese built the Great Wall, but by that time, and especially under their king Attila ( 406–453), had absorbed many Germanic tribes, especially Goths. In 409, and then in 433 by general Flavius Aetius, the Romans yielded the lands of Pannonia to the Huns, who made them their central settlement; this marked the beginning of an ethnic transformation of the population of the region: as the Roman power waned, the local Celto-Romans, although their population shrank significantly, were not completely displaced by the newcomers, who culturally and linguistically absorbed them. Little is known about the religion of the Huns, apart that a winged griffin may have been their totemic animal-ancestor. Between the 6th and the 8th century, the regions of Pannonia and the Great Plain were dominated first by the Germanic Gepids and then by the Avars, a multiethnic alliance of nomadic tribes akin to the Huns, who brought other totemisms and the theme of the many-layered world tree which reaches the utmost sky, which together with earlier Hunnic beliefs would have continued in the beliefs of the later Hungarians; the regions were also settled by significant communities of Slavs. In 803, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne defeated the Avar rulers, and Pannonia became part of the officially Christian polity of the Carolingian Empire of the Franks, as the March of Pannonia, for the whole 9th century, while the Great Plain fell under the sphere of influence of the First Bulgarian Empire. According to some historical accounts, some Avar governors converted to Christianity once they were defeated by the Franks, but there is no trace of Christian elements in the large Avar cemeteries of the epoch.