ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Lutheran Church, which has been the majority church in Estonia since the sixteenth century. This Church has been under different political rules and administrative systems. Estonia became a nominally Christian country in 1227 as a result of the Northern Crusade. There is some limited knowledge on the religions of pre-Christian Estonian tribes based on archaeology. Estonia became part of Western Christendom and the German cultural sphere. The Lutheran Reformation reached Estonia by 152324 and was welcomed in towns but also by the Baltic-German gentry. The Lutheran Church and its clergy carried on and maintained something that could be considered as the continuity with the pre-Soviet past or an alternative to the Soviet reality. At the same time neither the Lutheran Church nor other religious associations became a political opposition like, for example, the Roman Catholic Church in Lithuania.
