Christianity is the main religion in Belarus, with Eastern Orthodoxy being the largest denomination. The legacy of the state atheism of the Soviet era is evident in the fact that a part of the Belarusians (especially in the east part of the country) are not religious. Moreover, other non-traditional and new religions have sprung up in the country after the end of the Soviet Union.
According to the estimations for 2011 by the Ministry of the Interior, 73.3% of the Belarusians are Orthodox Christians, 14.8% are irreligious (atheists and agnostics), 9.7% are Catholic Christians (either Roman Catholic and Belarusian Greek Catholic), and 3.5% are members of other religions (mostly pentecostals).
History
By the end of the 12th century, Europe was generally divided into two large areas: Western Europe with dominance of Catholicism, and Eastern Europe with Orthodox and Byzantine influences. The border between them was roughly marked by the Bug River. This placed the area now known as Belarus in a unique position where these two influences mixed and interfered.
Before the 14th century, the Orthodox church was dominant in Belarus. The Union of Krewo in 1385 broke this monopoly and made Catholicism the religion of the ruling class. Jogaila, then ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, ordered the whole population of Lithuania to convert to Catholicism. 1.5 years after the Union of Krewo, the Wilno episcopate was created which received a lot of land from the Lithuanian dukes. By the mid-16th century Catholicism became strong in Lithuania and bordering with it north-west parts of Belarus, but the Orthodox church was still dominant in Belarus.
In the 16th century, a crisis began in Christianity: the Protestant Reformation began in Catholicism and a period of heresy began in an Orthodox area. From the mid-16th century Protestant ideas began spreading in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The first Protestant Church in Belarus was created in Brest by Mikołaj "the Black" Radziwiłł. Protestantism did not survive due to the Counter-Reformation in Poland.
Religion in post-Soviet Belarus
The revival of religion in Belarus in the post-communist era brought about a revival of the old historical conflict between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. This religious complexity was compounded by the two denominations' links to institutions outside the republic. The Belarusian Orthodox Church was headed by an ethnic Russian, Metropolitan Filaret, who headed an exarchate of the Moscow Patriarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church. The Catholic archdiocese of Belarus was headed by an ethnic Pole, Cardinal Kazimir Sviontak, who had close ties to the church in Poland. However, despite these ties, Archbishop Sviontak, who had been a prisoner in the Soviet camps and a pastor in Pinsk for many years, prohibited the display of Polish national symbols in Catholic churches in Belarus.
Fledgling Belarusian religious movements are having difficulties asserting themselves within these two major religious institutions because of the historical practice of preaching in Russian in the Orthodox churches and in Polish in the Catholic churches. Attempts to introduce the Belarusian language into religious life, including the liturgy, also have not met wide success because of the cultural predominance of Russians and Poles in their respective churches, as well as the low usage of the Belarusian language in everyday life.
To a certain extent, the 1991 declaration of Belarus's independence and the 1990 law making Belarusian an official language of the republic have generated a new attitude toward the Orthodox and Catholic churches. Some religiously uncommitted young people have turned to the Uniate Church (Greek Catholic) in reaction to the resistance of the Orthodox and Catholic hierarchies to accepting the Belarusian language as a medium of communication with their flock. Overall, however, national activists have had little success in trying to generate new interest in the Greek Catholic Church.