Majority Religion, and a Movement Inside It

Romani communities have generally practised the religion of the majority around them: Orthodox Christianity in the Balkans and eastern Europe, Catholicism in central and western Europe and in Spain, Islam in Turkey and parts of the Balkans. That pattern is often described from outside as shallow or merely nominal, which is a judgement rather than an observation, and the atlas does not make it. Distinctive practice exists inside those frameworks: the annual pilgrimage to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue each May, where Sara-la-Kali, Saint Sara, is venerated in the crypt, is the best known gathering in western Europe and draws Romani people from across the continent.

The largest development of the last century is Pentecostal. The Gypsy Evangelical Church, which began in France in the 1950s and grew into a movement with Romani pastors preaching in Romani, has spread across Europe and into the Americas and now claims a very large following. It is unusual in being a mass religious movement led from inside a community that has almost never had institutions of its own, and it has changed the religious map of Romani Europe within living memory. Older practice persists alongside all of it, particularly around purity and pollution, marime among many Roma, which regulates cleanliness, contact and conduct, and which functions as a body of religious law without a clergy to administer it.