Citation: Bognár, Bulcsu, and Zoltán Kmetty. 2023. The Strength of Religious Lifeworld: The Impact of Social Spaces on Religious Values in Central and Eastern Europe. Religions 14: 25. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel14010025 Received: 29 October 2022 Revised: 8 December 2022 Accepted: 18 December 2022 Published: 22 December 2022 Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). religions Article The Strength of Religious Lifeworld: The Impact of Social Spaces on Religious Values in Central and Eastern Europe Bulcsu Bognár 1, * and Zoltán Kmetty 2 1 Institute of Communication and Media Studies, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, 1111 Budapest, Hungary 2 Centre for Social Sciences, 1097 Budapest, Hungary * Correspondence: bognar.bulcsu@btk.ppke.hu Abstract: This study explores the role of social spaces in the religious worldview in the Central and Eastern European region through a comprehensive study of values spanning nearly three decades. The analysis focuses on the differences between the values of religious and non-religious people in different social spaces during this period. Drawing on the insights of the spatial turn, the study provides a new way of understanding the impact of social spaces on the emergence of religious values. For the first time, the analysis attempts to verify the influence of social spaces on the emergence of specific religious values using a representative database. The research on the four waves of EVS interprets the values of the religious and non-religious along the lines of their relationship to norm violations. The analysis points out that religious worldview does not appear equally in different spaces of society. The research proved in a novel way that in the social space of production and administration, in the systematic organization of society, religious people do not have significantly different values in this region. On the other hand, the values of the religious, which are different from those of the non-religious, are expressed in values that can be linked to the social space of lifeworld. All these findings can give a new direction to quantitative and qualitative research on religion, which now includes aspects of spatiality. Keywords: religion; social spaces; violations of norms; value system; religious lifeworld; sociology of religion 1. Introduction The study of religious values is as old as the sociological study of religion. The research of the relationship between religious belief and values (already present in the work of Durkheim and Weber) has led to countless research directions and has enriched our knowledge of the religious worldview with many fundamental insights. However, little has been explored about how social spaces affect the values of religious people. We do not know enough about the extent to which particular social spaces offer opportunities for, or inhibit, the emergence of the specific religious values. A related question is the relationship between the use of space and religious values in some historical regions of Europe. This study seeks to better understand the role of social spaces in the emergence of religious values in the Central and Eastern European region after the communist era through a comprehensive study of values spanning nearly three decades. The analysis focuses on the differences between the values of religious and non- religious people in different social spaces during this period. We explore social spaces in which the values of the religious are more separate from the non-religious, and the spaces where the values of the religious are inserted into the values of those who do not have faith. In this way, we interpret which social spaces offer opportunity for the emergence of specific religious values. This is a completely new direction in the sociological study of religion, which is based on the spatial turn, and which analyses the impact of social spaces on religiosity. The novelty of our analysis is therefore that we draw on the insights of Religions 2023, 14, 25. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14010025 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions