Religion in Albania

I am writing this post in English so that non-Albanian-speakers can understand it, too. It is important to educate the greatest number of people about this, however inconsequential it may appear.

There is finally a separate page discussing the issue of religion in albania on Wikipedia. I am particularly glad about this because, for the first time, it addresses the issue of secular Albanians and claims what I think are the most realistic assessments about religious belief today in Albania. Still today, many individuals, organizations, and countries cite a census from the 1930s in saying that Albania is 70% Muslim, 20% Orthodox, and 10% Catholic. Although I do not question these numbers for the time in which they were taken, and for the times that preceded it, I have to say that much has changed in Albania since then. Years under a 'Communist' régime alone—quotation marks necessary, since it wasn't Communist in the proper sense—created mixed families and eradicated religion from the life of many families in Albania.

Today, it is no longer valid and is perhaps completely unfair to the majority of the Albanian population to claim those same numbers for religious belief in Albania. They may have been true at one point, and they may be somewhat true as far as one's traditional family religion goes, but when individual belief is in question, everybody had better be wary and consider atheist and agnostic Albanians as a sizable community.