28 July 2022

The data on religious beliefs of the population from the 2021 Census, published by the Czech Statistical Office in the first half of this year, have now been expanded with more detailed data sets that combine data on religious beliefs with the sex and age structure of the population.

The data have been published in a territorial breakdown for the entire Czech Republic, cohesion regions and regions. Data is available for the basic age groups 0-14, 15-64 and 65 and over, 10-year or 5-year age groups, and selected data for age units.

The age structure for inhabitants of different denominations or attitudes towards religious beliefs may, in addition to territorial differentiation, present interesting differences. For example, some traditional churches, such as the Czechoslovak Hussite or Czech Brethren Evangelical, have historically shown a higher proportion of older persons than other, less numerous and newer religious groups. The Jedi movement's supporters are very significantly dominated by younger and middle-aged people, although the declared Jedi belief is also found among those over 65.

The data presented in the CZSO Public Database are structured into two levels. The first level distinguishes the basic groups: believers belonging to a church, religious society or movement, believers not belonging to any church or religious society, persons with no religious belief and persons who did not answer the (voluntary) question. The former group is then further broken down in the second level - for the Czech Republic, a complete list of all independently surveyed churches, religious societies or movements which at least one person has declared is given; in the case of regions and cohesion regions, a selection of the most numerous ones is given.

In the Census, it was possible to identify to any belief in one's own words, and the processing of these entries was therefore one of the more difficult. The respondent's declaration is always respected and the CZSO processes the recorded answer as accurately as possible. Where possible, the answer is attributed to a specific church or religious group. If the entry is not sufficiently precise, it is at least included in a more general category.

This also applies to the most frequently cited entries. 741,000 believers stated the Roman Catholic Church, 8.3 thousand the Greek Catholic Church, but almost 236,000 persons indicated only the entry Catholic belief without distinguishing a specific church. Another 71 thousand people declared Christianity as their belief without specifying it. Similarly, apart from a number of nominally identified Evangelical churches, 27 thousand persons could only be classified in the general category of evangelical/evangelical belief.

The published list therefore mixes dozens of often disparate categories, ranging from the exact names of registered churches to general denomination and entries. Other listings that were not separately enumerated are included in the "Other" category. A separate category then lists those who identified themselves as believers – belonging to the church but did not fill in the name of a church or religious direction; there were over 65,000 such people.

The data are published in the CZSO Public Database in the thematic section for population - religious beliefs. The complete data can be downloaded in open CSV format on the Census 2021 Results - Open Data page (Czech only).