Baltic Countries

Estonia

Although Orthodox missionaries had appeared in eastern Estonia as early as the 11th century, their influence was negligible. It was the Northern Crusade of the 13th century, with the twin goals of territorial conquest and the conversion of Europe's last pagans, that brought Roman Catholicism to the Estonian lands. While German knights conquered the northeastern tribes (Ests, Livs, Letts, Cours, Prussians, etc.), German priests baptized them and administered the faith during the later Middle Ages. In the 16th century, however, the region's rulers broke with the Church and embraced Lutheranism, which became the principal religious confession of both the German minority and the Estonian majority. While the Germans who dominated the region left Estonia (and Latvia) during World War II, Russians, who began arriving in large numbers in the 19th century, supplanted them as Estonia's principal minority and brought the Orthodox faith with them.

Today, nearly 70% of the country's population consists of ethnic Estonians, whose main confession is the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church (EELC). Although this is not a state church and the Estonian constitution provides for full freedom of religion, the EELC instantly became the most numerous and influential religious association in Estonia after the country obtained its independence from the former USSR. Today, the EELC claims an estimated 180,000 members—less than 13% of the total population of Estonia, where only about 30% of the population confesses to any religious faith at all. Many of the country's ethnic Russians, constituting about a quarter of the population, are members of the Estonian Orthodox Church (which is subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate); some, however, identify with the Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church (which is independent of the Moscow Patriarchate). In addition to the dominant confessions, there is a small Jewish community of about 2,500 people, residing mostly in Tallinn, as well as communities of Old Believers (an Orthodox splinter whose adherents fled to Estonia to escape tsarist persecution), Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and other religious associations. American evangelical religious influence is felt in Estonia in the form of its small communities of Pentecostals and Jehovah's Witnesses.

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