ABSTRACT
The chapter deals with the various trajectories of secularization in Latvia historically from the era of the German Enlightenment in the Baltics until modern-day cultural tendencies and secularity. It began in the 18th century as philosophical secularization, it gained types of cultural secularization in the 19th and 20th centuries under the influence of Marxist ideology, and it was transformed into political secularization, which influenced the founding principles and the social order of the Republic of Latvia. In the latter part of the 20th century in Latvia, secularization reached its culmination in forced atheism, but in the first decades of the new millennium, it was centered on individual secularization. Latvian society and its cultural milieu are not absolutely secularized at present as a pluralism of views exists in a democratic society. The decisive role here is the recent experience of the Soviet period, which provides immunity against radical secularization. Secularization at present, in Latvia as in Western Europe, is a much more complex phenomenon than the simplified “decline of religion”, which is usually explained as a consequence of social changes determined by modernization.
