Christianity has shaped Europe’s religious landscape for well over a thousand years, and it still does. The Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox branches between them cover the majority of the continent. Islam holds the majority in parts of the Balkans and the former Soviet south. Judaism has been part of European life longer than most of its current nation-states, even if the numbers have always been small. These are all Abrahamic faiths with shared roots in the ancient Middle East, and together they dominate pretty much every religious map of the continent you’ll come across.
The map below takes a different angle and shows only non-Abrahamic religions, one per country.
Buddhism fills most of it. Russia is the most substantive case since Kalmykia, Buryatia, and Tuva have had Tibetan Buddhist communities for several hundred years. Across the rest of Europe Buddhism tends to lead by a thin margin through East and Southeast Asian diaspora populations, not because it has especially deep local roots.
The UK and the Netherlands having Hinduism on top makes sense given colonial history and South Asian immigration, but Moldova and Andorra are less obvious. The pattern, once you look into it, is that South Asian communities put down roots in more places than most people would guess, and in countries where almost everyone else is Christian or Muslim, even a moderately sized diaspora can end up leading the non-Abrahamic count. Nine countries in total, with Pew Research putting Europe’s combined Hindu population at roughly 2 million in 2020, up about 30% from the decade before.
Seven countries across the northeast come up Neopagan: Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus, and Romania. Ásatrú in Iceland goes back to the 1970s as an officially recognized religion and has been growing since. In Lithuania that equivalent is Romuva, in Estonia it’s Maausk, both reconstructions of pre-Christian traditions that the Soviet Union banned. After 1991 a lot of communities in the region started putting those things back together, and some of it moved faster than you might expect.
Zoroastrians were building fire temples on the Absheron Peninsula centuries before Islam arrived in the region. A small community survived the transition and is still present in Azerbaijan—a country that borders Iran.
Turkey has Tengrism, the old religion of the Turkic steppe peoples, predating Islam in the region by a considerable stretch. It’s centered on Tengri as sky deity and treats humans as part of the natural world rather than above it. There’s been a gradual revival tied to interest in pre-Islamic Turkic roots, and in 2022 a Turkish lawyer who wanted to register as Tengrist went through the country’s legal system to make it official, apparently the first person to do that.
Czechia’s leading non-Abrahamic religion turned out to be Jediism in the 2021 census, with 21,539 people filing it as their faith. It started as an organized push in the early 2000s to register protest through official census categories rather than leave the field blank. By 2021 that number had gone up almost 40% from 2011. Czechia also has the highest rate of religious non-affiliation in Europe, somewhere above 70%, so the context for all of this is a country that is mostly just done with the question of religion in a formal sense.
Non-Abrahamic Religion
Countries
Buddhism
Albania, Armenia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Russia, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden
Hinduism
United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal, Netherlands, Switzerland, Moldova, Georgia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Andorra
Neopaganism
Iceland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania
