religion

Liberté! has recently launched a campaign to create a civic legislative initiative that aims at putting an end to financing religion lessons from state budget. The project has reached the leading media in Poland and has stirred up public opinion in a manner that Poles have not seen for a long time.

There are two processes going on in the Polish reality, which at a first glance may seem to exclude one another. On the one hand, there is a mass decrease in the number of church-going believers (circa 2-4 millions in the last few years), and on the other, there is the phenomenon of overtaking the “moral” discourse in Poland by extreme groups related to Church.

Reducing the problem of hate speech to nothing more than a conflict built around the issue of freedom of speech can be nowadays considered a somewhat archaic approach.

We have all been harassed by petty government officials in daily life – the taxi driver who is harassed by a policeman, the small trader who is harassed by a tax inspector, the small town baker who is harassed by the environmental officer – these are often small issues which take place in ordinary small Polish cities