Replies

True enough, but do they really know the current statistics...
They seemed too. My wife actually looked at some stats when we were there and couldn't believe that the nonreligious number was so large (it was something tiny, like 5%).

Yes, but they were probably, at least for the most part, old mosques.
And there were lots of new mosques too. There are lots of christians from America evangelizing there, (which may be were you heard Albanians were becoming christian en masse.) But there are lots of muslims from muslim countries doing the same, (they probably say Albanians are re-becoming muslims en masse.) For the most part, they go to the countryside where people are totally isolated, and very, very poor (it took us 5 hours to *drive* about 85 miles... The folk who live there have no car). In the cities, foreign evangelists mostly limit themselves to building/funding new churches, and building/funding mosques, rather than the wave the book on the street corner style of evangelism.

I don't think evangelism will work though the way they think it will though. They had a saying... The religion of Albanians is Albanism, which means they make their own stuff up from a mix of everything, add a dash of national pride, and get along just fine. I heard that saying many times... they're proud of their religious uniqueness.

...more people are starting to become interested in Christianity...
Since the fall of communism, religion has become kind of fashionable among some of the younger generation, but they roughly seem to get back in touch with the religion of the grandparents. Funny thing is, it seems to be most prevalent among the Albanians outside Albania.

By the way...
My wife has a Muslim surname. By practice, she's agnostic. Much of her generation and the one before her fits that mold... she grew up in the dying years of the communist regime.

Take a look at the following site. It's pretty interesting, IMHO:

http://members.aol.com/Plaku/religio.htm

This site says that about 60% of Albanians may be Moslem, 25%+ Orthodox, and 15% Catholic.

http://www.adherents.com/adhloc/Wh_9.html

The following site gives another estimate of religious affiliation:

http://www.landmarkbaptisttemple.com/ra/EEE%20Brochure%202000.pdf

Muslim 40% Orthodox 11% Athiest 42% All other 8%

With all the various statistics, who can say what the exact figures are. I don't know if even God Himself know! :-)