ABSTRACT
This chapter turns to the churches and discovers that the churches are not doing well, perhaps because they are not doing good. However, as human institutions presided over by human beings, the churches have perhaps never done very well. There is then some movement back and forth across the line that divides those who have a religious affiliation and those who do not. However, much of the movement back to affiliation is in Eastern Europe where it may be a one-time phenomenon that has resulted from the fall of socialism. The highest scores on the absence of confidence in the church are in East Germany and the Czech Republic, though in neither country is the church seen as having excessive power. The reciprocal interaction between church behavior and attitudes and aspirations of the people in a particular country, particularly when the issue was freedom has generated conflict and classic Clericalism and Anti-Clericalism for two centuries.
