Christianity is the main religion in Romania, with Romanian Orthodoxy being its largest denomination.
Romania is a secular state and freedom of religion is enshrined in the nation's constitution.
Overview Romania is one of the most religious European countries and the majority of the country's citizens are Orthodox Christians. Romania is a secular state, and it has no state religion. Despite being one of the most religious countries, practice, church and mass attendance are low, even compared to less religious countries than Romania.
The Romanian state officially recognizes 18 religions and denominations. 86.53% of the country's stable population identified as part of the Eastern Orthodox Church in the 2011 census (see also: History of Christianity in Romania). Other major Christian denominations include the Catholic Church (both Latin Catholicism (4.62%) and Greek Catholicism (0.8%–3.3%)), Calvinism (3.19%), and Pentecostal denominations (1.92%). This amounts to approximately 99% of the population identifying as Christian. Romania also has a small but historically significant Muslim minority of around 44,000 people, concentrated in Northern Dobruja, who are mostly of Crimean Tatar and Turkish ethnicity. According to the 2011 census data, there are also approximately 3,500 Jews, around 21,000 atheists and about 19,000 people not identifying with any religion. The 2011 census numbers are based on a stable population of 20,121,641 people and exclude a portion of about 6% due to unavailable data.
According to the 2022 census, 76,215 people, approximately 0.4% of the total population, indicated that their religion was Islam.
Christianity
Eastern Orthodoxy
The Eastern Orthodox Church is the largest religious denomination in Romania, numbering 16,307,004 according to the 2011 census, or 81.04% of the population. The rate of church attendance is, however, significantly lower. According to a poll conducted by INSCOP in July 2015, 37.8% of Romanians who declare themselves to be religious go to church only on major holidays, 25.4% once a week (especially on Sunday), 18.9% once a month, 10.2% once a year or less, 3.4% say they do not go to church, 2.7% a few times a week, and only 0.9% say they go to church daily.
Apart from the mainstream Eastern Orthodox Church, other eastern orthodox groups exist in the country among which is the True Orthodox denomination Old Calendar Orthodox Church of Romania and the Old Believers of the Lipovan Orthodox Old-Rite Church.
The 2021 census recorded a decrease in the number of Orthodox inhabitants of Romania, of 2.3 million.
Latin Church of the Catholic Church
According to the 2011 census, there are 870,774 Catholics belonging to the Latin Church in Romania, making up 4.33% of the population. The largest ethnic groups are Hungarians (500,444, including Székelys; 41% of the Hungarians), Romanians (297,246 or 1.8%), Germans (21,324 or 59%), and Roma (20,821 or 3.3%), as well as a majority of the country's Slovaks, Bulgarians, Croats, Italians, Czechs, Poles, and Csangos (27,296 in all).
Romanian Greek Catholic Church
According to the 2011 census, there are 150,593 Romanian Greek Catholics in Romania, making up 0.75% of the population. The majority of Greek Catholics live in the northern part of Transylvania. Most are Romanians (124,563), with the remainder mostly Hungarians or Roma.
On the other hand, according to data published in the 2016 Annuario Pontificio, the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church had 504,280 members, 8 bishops, 1,225 parishes, some 835 diocesan priests and 235 seminarians of its own rite at the end of 2012. Information sourced from Annuario Pontificio 2012 edition However, according to the 2011 Romanian government census, the number of its followers living in Romania was as low as 150,593, of which 124,563 are ethnic Romanians.2011 Romanian census official data . In 2022, the church estimated their numbers at 488,000, noting that many citizens whose ancestors were forced to covert during the Communist regime had rediscovered their roots and joined the Greek Catholic Church.
The Romanian Orthodox Church continues to claim many of the Romanian Greek Catholic Church's properties. The law provides for the restitution of religious properties confiscated between 1940 and 1989, if they are still owned by the state; however restitution is moving slowly.
Protestantism
According to the 2021 census, Protestants make up about 6% of the total population. They have historically been made up of Magisterial Protestants (Lutherans and Calvinists) and Radicals (Unitarians), although in recent years Evangelical Protestants and various Restorationist groups such as Adventists and New Apostolics have spread and now hold a greater share.
In 1930, prior to World War II, Protestants constituted approximately 8.8% of the Romanian population. The largest denominations are the Reformed Church in Romania and the Pentecostal Union of Romania. Of these various Protestant groups, Hungarians account for most of the Reformed, Unitarians, and Evangelical Lutherans; Romanians are the majority of the Pentecostals, Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists and Evangelical Christians; while Germans account for most of the Augustan Confession Evangelicals (i.e. Lutherans historically subscribing to the Augsburg Confession). The majority of Calvinists (Reformed Church) and Unitarians have services only in Hungarian.
Lutheranism
Before the Partition of Hungary, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Romania was part of the Saxon Lutheran Church in Transylvania. In 1920 the German- and Hungarian-speaking congregations officially separated into two distinct bodies.
Currently there are three Lutheran denominations in Romania. The largest, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Romania, has some Slovak- and Romanian-speaking congregations, but is mostly a Hungarian-speaking denomination. The Evangelical Church of Augustan Confession in Romania is a German-speaking denomination with some congregations holding bilingual services. The smallest is the newly-founded Confessional Lutheran Church in Romania, which is a Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod foreign mission which has several congregations in Romania and Moldova.
Calvinism
The Reformed Church in Romania is an exclusively Hungarian-speaking denomination with some 495.000 members, making it the largest Protestant denomination in the country. Other Calvinist denominations with a presence in the country include the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Central and Eastern Europe, which has 13 congregations in Romania and missionary congregations from various foreign denominations such as the URCNA, IPC and PCB.
Other magisterial protestants The Church of England has a congregation in Bucharest and the United Protestant Church of France has one in Iași.
Evangelicals Evangelicals (or sometimes called "neo-Protestants" in Romania) are mostly identified with the Baptists, Plymouth Brethren, Pentecostals (both Apostolic and Assemblies) or members of various other independent churches. Not to be confused with any of the above, the Evangelical Church of Romania (0.08%), is an indigenous Eastern Protestant denomination with some similarities to the Plymouth Brethren.
Jehovah's Witnesses
Jehovah's Witnesses were banned and persecuted in some occasions in Romania from 1948 to 1989.2006 Yearbook of Jehovah's Witnesses, page 112-116. In 1989, after the Romanian ban was lifted, members and representatives of the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses were able to gather thousands of Romanian Jehovah's Witnesses that had been separated for a long time, but some of them still rejected certain doctrinal changes and preferred their autonomy, forming The True Faith Association of Jehovah's Witnesses in 1992. archive.org
Nowadays, Romania is the only country in the world to have 2 different Jehovah's Witnesses organizations.
As for the main group, in 2020, the number of Jehovah's Witnesses was 39,328 active publishers, united in 535 congregations; 74,363 people attended annual celebration of Lord's Evening Meal in 2020.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) had some presence in the country from 1899–1913. Most of these early members emigrated to the west. The LDS Church was reintroduced in 1990 and a small branch was formed in Bucharest in 1991. In 2019, the LDS Church claimed 3,064 members in 15 congregations in Romania.
Religious minorities
Hinduism
Since the end of World War II, thousands of Nepali, Bangladeshi and Indian immigrants have brought Hinduism with them. The International Society of Krishna Consciousness operates nearly a dozen temples throughout the nation's largest cities, such as Bucharest, Brașov, Timișoara, Oradea, and others. These temples organize large festivals with Hindu significance such as Ratha Yatra, Diwali and Durga Puja, and see thousands of attendees each year from various religions and people.
Islam
Although the number of adherents of Islam is relatively small, Islam enjoys a 700-year tradition in Romania particularly in Northern Dobruja, a region on the Black Sea coast which was part of the Ottoman Empire for almost five centuries (ca. 1420–1878). According to the 2011 census, 64,337 people, approx. 0.3% of the total population, indicated that their religion was Islam. The majority of the Romanian Muslims belong to the Sunni Islam.
According to the 2022 census, 76,215 people, approximately 0.4% of the total population, indicated that their religion was Islam.
97% of the Romanian Muslims are residents of the two counties forming Northern Dobruja: eighty-five percent live in Constanța County, and twelve percent in Tulcea County. The remaining Muslims live in cities like Bucharest, Brăila, Călărași, Galați, Giurgiu, Drobeta-Turnu Severin. Ethnically, most of them are Tatars, followed by Turks, Albanians, Muslim Roma, and immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, although there are a few ethnic Romanian converts to Islam who even established a mosque in 2014. Since 2007, there are Indonesian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani workers coming to Romania, who are mostly Muslims.
In Romania there are about 80 mosques. One of the largest is the Grand Mosque of Constanța, originally known as the Carol I Mosque. It was built between 1910 and 1913, on the order of Carol I, in appreciation for the Muslim community in Constanța. According to the legal status of the Muslim denomination, the Romanian Muslim community is officially represented by a mufti, while the Muftiat is the denominational and cultural representative institution of the Muslim community, with a status similar to that of the other denominations officially recognized by the Romanian state. Likewise, Muslims in Constanța, which comprise approx. 6% of the population of this county, are represented in the Parliament by the Democratic Union of Turkish-Muslim Tatars of Romania, founded on 29 December 1989.
Judaism
In 1930, more than 700,000 people in the Kingdom of Romania (including Bessarabia) practiced Judaism. By 2011, that number had dropped to 3,271. A legacy of the country's once numerous Jewish congregations is the large number of synagogues throughout Romania. Today, between 200,000 and 400,000 descendants of Romanian Jews are living in Israel.
Other religions