section_path: Demographics/Religion
section_name: Religion
paragraph_text: Religion
  
  Austria was historically a strongly Catholic country as the centre of the Habsburg monarchy, which championed Catholicism. Although in the 16th century many Austrians converted to other denominations (Lutheranism, in particular) as the Protestant Reformation (begun in 1517) spread across Europe, the Habsburgs enacted measures of Counter-Reformation as early as 1527 and harshly repressed Austrian evangelicalism; only a minority of Austrians remained Protestant. At least since the 1970s, a few decades after the fall of the Habsburg monarchy and the transformation of Austria into a federal republic, there has been a continuous decline of Christianity (with the exception of Orthodox churches) and a proliferation of other religions, a process which has been particularly pronounced in Vienna, with its large foreign and immigrant populations.
  
  In 2001, about 74% of Austria's population were registered as Catholic, while about 5% considered themselves Protestants. Austrian Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, are obliged to pay a mandatory membership fee (calculated by income – about 1%) to their churches; this payment is called the Kirchenbeitrag ("ecclesiastical contribution").
  
  From the second half of the 20th century, the number of adherents and churchgoers has declined. Data for 2023 list 4,638,000 members of the Catholic Church, or around 50% of the total Austrian population, yet Sunday church attendance was only 347,000, or 3.7% of the total Austrian population. Additionally, the Lutheran church recorded a loss of 74,421 adherents between 2001 and 2016.
  
  The 2001 census reported that about 12% of the population declared themselves without a religion; according to ecclesiastical information, this share had grown to 20% by 2015 and further increased to 22.4% (1,997,700 people) in 2021. Of the remaining population, around 340,000 were registered as members of various Muslim communities in 2001, originating chiefly from Turkey, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo; the number of Muslims doubled in the fifteen years to 2016, to 700,000, and reached 745,600 in 2021. In 2021, another 436,700 residents of Austria (mostly Serbs) were members of Eastern Orthodox Churches, 26,600 were Buddhists, 10,100 were Hindus, about 21,800 were active Jehovah's Witnesses, and 5,400 were Jews.
  
  According to the Eurobarometer 2010,