Survival and Identity. Baptist Czechs from Banat
Survival and Identity. Baptist Czechs from Banat

Author(s): Sînziana Preda
Subject(s): Anthropology, Sociology, Identity of Collectives
Published by: Етнографски институт САНУ
Keywords: Czechs; Banat; St. Helena; neo-Protestants; religious Identity
Summary/Abstract: In Romania, the Baptist denomination includes, according to the 2002 census, about 130,000 believers. In terms of ethnicity, Romanians represent the majority, followed by Hungarians (Hungarian Baptist Convention). One of the smallest minorities in Romania, that is the Czechs, also provides a number of believers, in the village of Sfînta Elena (Coronini township, Caraş-Severin county) being found the only Czech Baptist community from our country. Here, besides Catholics, we find a Baptist community, twice as small and of relative recent origin. In the following, we intend to outline this image, based on field observations and interviews carried out between the years 2005-2010. We believe that religious identity represents, beyond all doubt, an important dimension in defining the being of Czech group, regardless of their religious orientation. We paid a particular interest in Neo-protestant group, in order to identify means of building the image of another group with a different faith, considering the double minority status, ethnical and religious. Also, we tried to capture the ratio of forces between two different faith groups that were facing the same economic and social problems, problems that have caused depopulation of villages, by massive migration of people in the Czech Republic.

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