| dc.description.abstract | Abstract Today Czech is considered the most secular country of Europe. Czech always have had a tensed relationship between nation and church, but this does not mean there is no spiritual expression and personal belief nowadays. The Durkheimian forms of philosopher Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age shed a new light on this casus, first on the church-nation relations and second on the spiritual climate since the 1960’s. The paleo-Durkheimian form, which means that church entails society, was already suspicious in the fifteenth century when there was a wave of anti-Catholicism due to the privileged status it had in the Austro-Hungarian Empire which controlled Czech. The neo-Durkheimian form, in which a certain church is linked to a political identity, expressed itself the best in the twentieth century, whereas Taylor situates this form earlier in time. The Evangelical Church of Czech Brethren advocated by president Masaryk and the Hussite Church were then anti-Catholic, but they favored a nationalistic identity. Since the second half of the twentieth century the post-Durkheimian form, where the religious belonging is unconnected to the national identity, is in a way victorious in Czech. Czechs do have a high level of spirituality, but more on an individual level than between church borders. So, church and nation were connected for a long time in Czech, only in a very complicated way and not in the chronological way as Taylor suggests. Taylors book should therefore be considered in the first place as a philosophical instead of a primarily historical work. Only then it can emphasize the unique character of the Czech secularization. | |
