ABSTRACT
Currently, the Czech Republic is characterized by a high level of nonreligion and religious indifference. The chapter discusses the development of nonreligious thinking in its various forms during the 20th and 21st centuries while focusing especially on its connection to political history. At the same time, nonreligion and atheism are analyzed outside the direct relationship to religion, i.e., not as its negation but, on the contrary, as independent phenomena of their own. The chapter centers on several key eras, specifically on the period growing out of the Enlightenment in its criticism of the Church and clericalism and particularly in the advancement of the Freethought movement peaking in the interwar Czechoslovakia (1918–1938). Another era is the post-1948 Czechoslovakia, in which Freethought did not continue, but the so-called scientific atheism of Marx-Leninism became the official atheism propagated by the Communist state. Despite the state promotion of the unified atheism, some relatively independent variations of Marxist thinking formed among the intellectual elite. The third period is after 1989, when Czech society underwent fundamental changes concerning the role of atheism and other kinds of nonreligion; since then, nonreligion has evolved independently.
