Religion and History in Lithuania

Lithuania is majority Catholic, around 75 to 80 percent per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, with small Orthodox Christian, Protestant and religiously unaffiliated minorities. Lithuania holds the distinction of being the last pagan state in Europe, resisting Christianization far longer than its neighbors and only formally converting in 1387 under Grand Duke Jogaila as part of a dynastic union with Poland, centuries after most of the continent had already Christianized, which allowed elements of the pre-Christian Baltic pagan religion, centered on deities such as the thunder god Perkunas, to persist informally in folk custom and modern revivalist movements longer than in most of Europe.

Lithuania was once home to one of Europe's most significant Jewish communities, centered on Vilnius, revered in Jewish tradition as the Jerusalem of Lithuania and a preeminent center of rabbinic scholarship associated with the eighteenth-century Vilna Gaon, a community almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust, when the Nazi occupation and local collaborators killed the great majority of Lithuania's roughly two hundred thousand Jews, one of the highest destruction rates of any Jewish community in Europe.