Religious Conversions and Religious Diversification in Interwar Yugoslavia and Slovenia

With the foundation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, the respective nationalities and ethnic communities were faced with the reality of a multi-confessional state. Internal migration and minority policy, in particular, set in motion a slow diversification in the religious sphere, even in the ethnically and religiously extremely homogeneous territory of Slovenia. This paper aims to analyze the role that religious converts—who were largely former Catholics—played during the interwar period in Slovenian regions in the phenomenon of the gradual transformation of the religious landscape over a long period of time. Converts were an important part of almost all religious minorities: including in “traditional” religious communities, such as the German Evangelicals (i.e., Lutherans of German nationality), as much as in religious communities that were new to this region, such as the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Old Catholic Church, and the Islamic religious community, and even in small communities, including the Baptists, the Nazarenes, and others. Religious conversions, above all, marked the contemporary and historical relationships among the various religious communities in Slovenian territory, and, in a broader framework, among Yugoslav nationalities—and often given the ethnic character of these religious communities, even cross-national and interethnic relations. Despite their conflictual hypostasis, it can be argued that these changes in relationships constituted the basis for further secularization, greater heterogeneity among the congregation of the majority Catholic Church, and germs of religious plurality