ABSTRACT
The text analyzes relations between the churches and the state over the last 100 years. It focuses on intellectual movements and on the influence of intellectual leaders in the spread of Freethought and atheist and humanist thinking in various historical periods. On a third level of analysis, it describes the spread of atheist and religious ideas among the general population of Slovakia. Social, political and international changes over more than 100 years in Slovakia have significantly influenced freethinking and atheist movements in the country. Beginning as the attitude of a small but growing vanguard, atheism and Freethought became parts of the ideology of a state that adopted materialism and atheism as sources of legitimation during the period of Communist Party rule in Czechoslovakia. After the end of Communist Party rule in 1989, this approach to the world lost its legitimacy and became marginalized in Slovak society. Religion, in contrast, came to be an important component in the mobilization of collective identity in certain situations. As an effect of the integration of religion into the symbolic character of the Slovak Republic established in 1993, traditional Christian beliefs have grown increasingly prevalent in public life, exhibited even among people without religious affiliation.
