Oases of Trust Revisited: Church–State Entanglement, Military Reform, and Institutional Legitimacy in Post-Communist and Post-Soviet Europe

This paper extends prior comparative research on institutional trust by examining a persistent divergence between post-communist EU states and the post-Soviet East. While trust in both the Church and the military remains high across former communist societies, their relative standing reverses across regions: in the Post-Communist EU, trust in the military exceeds trust in the Church, whereas in the Post-Soviet East the Church retains higher levels of trust despite sustained political entanglement. Building on earlier global findings, the paper advances a more disaggregated explanation of institutional legitimacy in post-authoritarian contexts. Drawing on historical institutionalism, civil–military relations, political theology, and public trust theory, it argues that politicization erodes trust only where it violates historically embedded role expectations. Empirically, the analysis relies on World Values Survey (WVS) data, disaggregated by age, religiosity, and education, complemented by illustrative case studies.