Nearly nine out of 10 Poles stated they belonged to the Roman Catholic Church in 2024. The share of those who did not belong to any religion was more than seven percent.

In 2021, nearly 89 percent of respondents aged 16 and over in Poland belonged to the Church or religious association, with the most significant percentage (88 percent) belonging to the Catholic Church.

Denominations in Poland In 2021, Christianity was the dominant religion in Poland, establishing 125 registered denominations. The Christian faith had over 33 million adherents. Also, Poland had 207 churches and religious associations in the same year, with Protestant denominations accounting for the most significant percentage. A forecast of the religious composition of Poland in 2010 shows changes in the number of affiliates by 2050. While there were over 36 million Christians in 2010, their number was expected to decrease to almost 29 million over the next 40 years. The study predicted an eight-fold increase in the number of Muslims. An unbound community is expected to double.

Public opinion on religion and religiosity Although most Poles are Catholics, their religiosity is decreasing year by year. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly affected the scale of participation in Sunday Mass and the sacramental life of Polish Catholics. The proportion of people attending Sunday Mass dropped to 28.3 percent in 2021. Due to the pandemic restrictions, the number of people receiving Holy Communion also decreased. Most Poles agreed with the presence of crosses in public buildings in 2021. In contrast, only 15 percent of respondents favored priests instructing people on how to vote in elections. Almost every second respondent in Poland had a negative opinion about Muslims in 2019.

In 2021, Christians were the most numerous religious group in Poland. However, a downward trend in the number of believers can be observed in the presented period. Nevertheless, nearly 93 percent of Poles belonged to the Catholic Church in 2021.

Throughout the 19th century, what we know today as Poland was not a united, independent country; apart from a brief period during the Napoleonic Wars, Polish land was split between the Austro-Hungarian, Prussian (later German) and Russian empires. During the 1800s, the population of Poland grew steadily, from approximately nine million people in 1800 to almost 25 million in 1900; throughout this time, the Polish people and their culture were oppressed by their respective rulers, and cultural suppression intensified following a number of uprisings in the various territories. Following the outbreak of the First World War, it is estimated that almost 3.4 million men from Poland served in the Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian armies, with a further 300,000 drafted for forced labor by the German authorities. Several hundred thousand were forcibly resettled in the region during the course of the war, as Poland was one of the most active areas of the conflict. For these reasons, among others, it is difficult to assess the extent of Poland's military and civilian fatalities during the war, with most reliable estimates somewhere between 640,000 and 1.1 million deaths. In the context of present-day Poland, it is estimated that the population fell by two million people in the 1910s, although some of this was also due to the Spanish Flu pandemic that followed in the wake of the war.

Poland 1918-1945

After more than a century of foreign rule, an independent Polish state was established by the Allied Powers in 1918, although it's borders were considerably different to today's, and were extended by a number of additional conflicts. The most significant of these border conflicts was the Polish-Soviet War in 1919-1920, which saw well over 100,000 deaths, and victory helped Poland to emerge as the Soviet Union's largest political and military rival in Eastern Europe during the inter-war period. Economically, Poland struggled to compete with Europe's other powers during this time, due to its lack of industrialization and infrastructure, and the global Great Depression of the 1930s exacerbated this further. Political corruption and instability was also rife in these two decades, and Poland's leadership failed to prepare the nation for the Second World War. Poland had prioritized its eastern defenses, and some had assumed that Germany's Nazi regime would see Poland as an ally due to their shared rivalry with the Soviet Union, but this was not the case. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, in the first act of the War, and the Soviet Union launched a counter invasion on September 17; Germany and the Soviet Union had secretly agreed to do this with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August, and had succeeded in taking the country by September's end. When Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 it took complete control of Poland, which continued to be the staging ground for much of the fighting between these nations. It has proven difficult to calculate the total number of Polish fatalities during the war, for a variety of reasons, however most historians have come to believe that the figure is around six million fatalities, which equated to almost one fifth of the entire pre-war population; the total population dropped by four million throughout the 1940s. The majority of these deaths took place during the Holocaust, which saw the Nazi regime commit an ethnic genocide of up to three million Polish Jews, and as many as 2.8 million non-Jewish Poles; these figures do not include the large number of victims from other countries who died after being forcefully relocated to concentration camps in Poland.

Post-war Poland

The immediate aftermath of the war was also extremely unorganized and chaotic, as millions were forcefully relocated from or to the region, in an attempt to create an ethnically homogenized state, and thousands were executed during this process. A communist government was quickly established by the Soviet Union, and socialist social and economic policies were gradually implemented over the next decade, as well as the rebuilding, modernization and education of the country. In the next few decades, particularly in the 1980s, the Catholic Church, student groups and trade unions (as part of the Solidarity movement) gradually began to challenge the government, weakening the communist party's control over the nation (although it did impose martial law and imprison political opponent throughout the early-1980s). Increasing civil unrest and the weakening of Soviet influence saw communism in Poland come to an end in the elections of 1989. Throughout the 1990s, Poland's population growth stagnated at around 38.5 million people, before gradually decreasing since the turn of the millennium, to 37.8 million people in 2020. This decline was mostly due to a negative migration rate, as Polish workers could now travel more freely to Western European countries in search of work, facilitated by Pola...

Christianity was the largest religion in a high number of the countries included in the survey. Of the countries, Peru, South Africa, and Poland had the highest share of Christians at around 75 percent. Moreover, around 90 percent in India and Thailand stated that they believed in another religion, with Hinduism and Buddhism being the major religion in the two countries respectively. Sweden and South Korea were the only two countries where 50 percent or more of the respondents stated that they did not have any religious beliefs.

Religiosity has been identified as a pivotal factor in shaping societal attitudes, particularly in the context of gender roles (Peterson, 2004; Allport, 1967). Ambivalent sexism, which includes both hostile and benevolent attitudes towards women, is a critical aspect of gender-based prejudices (Glick & Fiske, 1996). Gender essentialism, the belief in fixed, inherent gender differences, often intersects with and potentially reinforces these sexist attitudes (Skewes et al., 2018). The cross-national analyses show that after controlling for the effects of socioeconomic development, religiosity tends to impede gender equality (Yeganeh, 2021). Religiosity often carries prescribed gender stereotypes, ideologies, and roles, which tend to be more conservative than the general population (Maltby et al.,2010). Adults with stronger religious affiliations often exhibit higher levels of gender essentialism and tend to uphold stricter norms about gender roles and characteristics (Robinson & Smetana, 2019). This suggests a link between higher levels of religiosity and the reinforcement of traditional gender roles, supporting gender essentialism where inherent differences between genders are emphasized and considered unchangeable. The moderating role of gender in the relationship between religiosity and sexism has been under-researched. Initial studies exploring this moderating role, such as the one by Maltby et al. (2010), found gender to moderate the relationship between religious orthodoxy and aspects of benevolent sexism. This preregistration outlines a comprehensive analysis aimed at unpacking the intricate relationships between religiosity, gender essentialism, and sexism across a diverse international sample. Drawing upon data from 62 countries, this study includes the under-researched religious groups of Buddhists and Hindu followers. The dataset comes from a prior project funded by the National Science Centre in Poland (Grant Number: 2017/26/M/HS6/00360) led by Natasza Kosakowska-Berezecka. The primary goal of this analysis is to test a moderated mediation model where religiosity is posited as a predictor of gender essentialism, which in turn is expected to influence levels of benevolent and hostile sexism. The study seeks to delineate how these relationships are contingent upon the interactive effects of religious affiliation and gender. Furthermore, we will compare mean levels of ambivalent sexism based on religious affiliation or lack thereof (agnosticism, atheism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Muslim, Hinduism, and Judaism) to understand how these beliefs vary among different groups. In comparative studies, Muslims were found to hold stronger benevolent and hostile sexist beliefs than Christians and non-religious participants, suggesting significant variation in sexist attitudes across religious groups (Hannover et al., 2018)​​. This research is funded by a grant from the National Science Centre in Poland (Grant Number: 2023/49/N/HS6/01936) awarded to Jurand Sobiecki.

The world's Jewish population has had a complex and tumultuous history over the past millennia, regularly dealing with persecution, pogroms, and even genocide. The legacy of expulsion and persecution of Jews, including bans on land ownership, meant that Jewish communities disproportionately lived in urban areas, working as artisans or traders, and often lived in their own settlements separate to the rest of the urban population. This separation contributed to the impression that events such as pandemics, famines, or economic shocks did not affect Jews as much as other populations, and such factors came to form the basis of the mistrust and stereotypes of wealth (characterized as greed) that have made up anti-Semitic rhetoric for centuries. Development since the Middle Ages The concentration of Jewish populations across the world has shifted across different centuries. In the Middle Ages, the largest Jewish populations were found in Palestine and the wider Levant region, with other sizeable populations in present-day France, Italy, and Spain. Later, however, the Jewish disapora became increasingly concentrated in Eastern Europe after waves of pogroms in the west saw Jewish communities move eastward. Poland in particular was often considered a refuge for Jews from the late-Middle Ages until the 18th century, when it was then partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and persecution increased. Push factors such as major pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 19th century and growing oppression in the west during the interwar period then saw many Jews migrate to the United States in search of opportunity.

This chart presents the religious composition of Hungary in 2010 and the projections up to 2050, broken down by affiliation. In 2010, Christianity with more than eight million affiliated people was the largest religion in the country. The Muslim community in Hungary is expected to triple in the period observed. The number of unaffiliated persons is projected to reach 1.99 million by 2050.