ABSTRACT
The presence or absence of civil society is increasingly regarded as an indicator of the strength of democracy in the post-Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. As the space denoting the realm of engaged autonomous citizenry, civil society is a welcome antidote to the traditional reliance on fair elections and free speech as democracy’s constitutive features. Nevertheless, studies of democratisation that have taken this recent ‘civic turn’ often fail to tell us much about the strength of those organisations which are part of the so-called ‘third sector’. As a typical example of an organisation in civil society, churches suffer from this lack of attention to the precise attributes of their new-found civic freedoms.1 One reason for this is the tendency to place a stress on the quantity of associations as an adequate measurement or indicator of civil society. For example, the American institution Freedom House provides much useful comparative data on organisations in Eastern Europe but because of its generalising aims does not set out to study particular organisations in any detail.
