Religion in Hungary is varied, with Christianity being the largest religion. In the national census of 2022, 42.5% of the population identified themselves as Christians, of whom 29.2% were adherents of Catholicism (27.5% following the Roman Rite, and 1.7% the Greek Rite), 9.8% of Calvinism, 1.8% of Lutheranism, 0.2% of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and 1.5% of other Christian denominations. 1.3% of the population identified themselves as adherents of other religions; minorities practising Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the Baháʼí Faith, Taoism, Tengrism, Hungarian Neopaganism and other Neopaganisms, and New Age, are present in the country. At the same time, 40.1% of the population did not answer, not identifying their beliefs or non-beliefs, while 16.1% identified themselves as not religious.
History
1st–10th century In antiquity, the lands of the Carpathian Basin covered by the contemporary state of Hungary were inhabited by sedentary tribes of Celts and Illyrians (the Pannonians) in the parts west of the river Danube — the region of Transdanubia — and by nomadic tribes of Scytho-Siberians (the Iazyges) in the parts east of the Danube — the Great Plain — with varying degrees of relations with each others. In the early years of the 1st century, the Celto-Illyrian western lands were incorporated into the region of Pannonia in the Roman Empire; the Roman military conquest of the region had already begun under Augustus, who in 12–9 BCE had pushed the Roman frontier to the riverbanks of the Danube, and by the year 20 CE the permanent military camp of Aquincum, located within the area which today is the city of Budapest, had been founded. The Celts and Illyrians were partially Romanised under the Roman Empire; this was especially true for their upper classes, while the population as a whole preserved their original cultures for a long time even under Romanisation. Religiously, the Roman authorities built temples of the official Roman religion of the state, to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, but also Romano-Celtic temples which continued the cults of the pre-Roman Celtic religion. Mystery religions, focused on individual otherworldly salvation, originating from the southeastern provinces of the Roman Empire, also spread to Pannonia, including Greco-Roman-Iranian Mithraism, Greco-Roman-Egyptian Isis-Anubis-Serapis' mysteries, Greco-Roman-Semitic Judaism, and also Christianity from the 2nd century, and various places of worship of these faiths were built as well.
Roman Pannonia was periodically under attack by its eastern nomadic Scythian neighbours of the Great Plain, whom throughout the 2nd and 3rd century were joined by many Germanic nomads, and at the turn between the 4th and the 5th century by the Huns, a multiethnic confederation of nomadic tribes whose original core can probably be identified as the Xiongnu of the Chinese sources, who came from Inner Mongolia and the Gobi Desert and against whom the Chinese built the Great Wall, but by that time, and especially under their king Attila ( 406–453), had absorbed many Germanic tribes, especially Goths. In 409, and then in 433 by general Flavius Aetius, the Romans yielded the lands of Pannonia to the Huns, who made them their central settlement; this marked the beginning of an ethnic transformation of the population of the region: as the Roman power waned, the local Celto-Romans, although their population shrank significantly, were not completely displaced by the newcomers, who culturally and linguistically absorbed them. Little is known about the religion of the Huns, apart that a winged griffin may have been their totemic animal-ancestor. Between the 6th and the 8th century, the regions of Pannonia and the Great Plain were dominated first by the Germanic Gepids and then by the Avars, a multiethnic alliance of nomadic tribes akin to the Huns, who brought other totemisms and the theme of the many-layered world tree which reaches the utmost sky, which together with earlier Hunnic beliefs would have continued in the beliefs of the later Hungarians; the regions were also settled by significant communities of Slavs. In 803, the Frankish emperor Charlemagne defeated the Avar rulers in Pannonia, and this region became part of the officially Christian polity of the Carolingian Empire of the Franks, as the March of Pannonia until 895, while the Great Plain fell under the sphere of influence of the First Bulgarian Empire. According to some historical accounts, some Avar governors converted to Christianity once they were defeated by the Franks, but there is no trace of Christian elements in the large Avar cemeteries of the epoch.
Foundation of the Hungarian state is connected to the Hungarian conquerors, who arrived from the Pontic-Caspian steppe as a confederation of seven tribes. The Hungarians arrived in the frame of a strong centralized steppe-empire under the leadership of Grand Prince Álmos and his son Árpád, they became founders of the Árpád dynasty, the Hungarian ruling dynasty and the Hungarian state. The religion thought to have been practiced by the majority of the Hungarian tribes consisted of animistic and shamanic elements according to scholars, and is hypothesised to have been similar to Siberian shamanism-Tengrism. Scholars have also compared it to Sumerian and Scythian religions. The conception of a supreme God, akin to the pan-Siberian Tengri (meaning "Heaven" or "God" in Turkic), has also been hypothesised. Some scholars, however, have disputed the identification of the Hungarian shaman-like figures, the táltoses, as shamans in the typical Siberian sense, and have found no clear evidence of shamanic rituals. Based on later prohibitions from Christian regulations, there is evidence that they practised sacrifices at holy groves and springs. Meanwhile, Islam was practiced by a sizeable minority of the settled Hungarian tribes. Muslims of this period described the majority religion as involving a belief in the “Lord of the Sky”, abstention from pork, the worship of natural forces and fire, and containing elements associated with astrotheology.
The evidence that Christianity was practised among the Hungarians before the 950s is weak. The question of the continuity of Christianity in the region since Roman times is unresolved; Christian places of worship that were built in the 3rd and 4th century in Transdanubia, the former Roman province of Pannonia, and under Carolingian rule in the 9th century, would have been rebuilt and reused by the Hungarians only in the 11th century. Some Christian communities of the pre-Hungarian populations of the regions, however, likely persisted under the newcomers, and Christian slaves, as well as trade with neighbouring Christianised Slavic and Germanic lands, probably made the Hungarians acquainted with Christianity. The first attested Hungarian converts to Christianity were the chieftains Bulcsú and Gyula, who adopted Eastern Christianity in the mid-10th century, followed by other local lords.
11th–16th century
Medieval Hungarian chronicles incorporated Pagan myths, and transmitted them into the folklore; these include the myth of the brothers Hunor and Magor led by a divine stag to new lands, and the myth of the divine origins of the House of Árpád — the dynasty to which all the great princes of the Magyar tribes and later kings of Hungary from the 9th to the early 14th century belonged. According to this myth the Árpád's forefather Ügyek was born from the union of a mortal woman, Emese, with the Turul, a divine bird of the Hungarian indigenous religion. The presence of various Turkic tribal groups in medieval Hungary, such as the Pechenegs and Kipchaks, further contributed to the religious landscape of the region. The religious practices of these Turkic communities were diverse, with Islam and Tengrism being prominent amongst the Pechenegs.
Hungary emerged to statehood at the turn between the 1st and the 2nd millennium, when the federation of the Magyar tribes was reformed into the Kingdom of Hungary, and Western Christianity, specifically Catholicism, was chosen as the state religion. Although the Kingdom of Hungary was undoubtedly shapen by Western Christianity, minorities of Eastern Christianity, specifically Eastern Orthodox Christianity, continued to be present throughout the nation's history. Stephen I ( 975–1038), the first sovereign who assumed the title of King of Hungary, adopted Catholicism and laid the foundations of the Catholic Church among the Hungarian people by establishing ten dioceses. Stephen started a program of Christianisation of his subjects, which at first met the resistance of Pagans and took place at least in part through coercion, through a system of legislative prohibitions of Paganism, Christianising regulations, and penalties for their violations. Within the 12th century, Paganism had been more or less eradicated and was portrayed in a dark light in historical records, although, in the late 13th century, ancient myths were reclaimed to give the ruling dynasty and the people glorious origins. Thenceforth, the principle of "patronate" of the state towards religions, or earlier royal care of spiritual matters, remained firm up throughout the 20th century.