Pagan Religions in Five Minutes - Suzanne Owen
28. Is Romuva an Official Religion in Lithuania?
Pagan Religions in Five Minutes - Suzanne Owen
Rasa Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson [+]
Vilnius University
Rasa Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson is an anthropologist, based at Vilnius University,
Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies. Pranskevičiūtė-Amoson has
experience of fifteen years (2004–2019) in applying qualitative social research
methods. During this period, she has conducted fieldwork in Baltic countries,
Russia, Sweden, Ukraine, Armenia, and India. She has published on
the material collected during her fieldwork on post-Soviet and Soviet religiosity,
alternative religious movements and subcultures. During 2014–2017,
she was a book series editor in the field of New Religious Movements at
De Gruyter Open. She has edited and co-edited journal issues (e.g., Open Theology
(2017), Journal of Lithuanian Anthropology (to be published in 2019).
Since 2016, she has been the correspondent for information concerning sociological
and legal aspects of religion in Lithuania (French National Research
Center (CNRS) and University of Strasbourg (France)). Since 2018, she has
been President of the Lithuanian Society for the Study of Religions.
Description
Organisations can be recognised as an official religion in Lithuania in different ways. The first Romuva religious community was registered in 1992 and recognised as a non-traditional religion in 1995. Lithuania does not have a state religion, but the law lists three categories of religion – “traditional”, seen as historically present in Lithuania; “recognised”, which includes more recent Christian groups; and “other”, the largest group of religious communities.