The left-wing majority in the first parliamentary bodies of the newly independent Republic of Estonia led to a radical separation of church and state, which had profound repercussions on the position of the dominant Lutheran Church in society. The aim of this paper is to identify sources of the anticlerical attitudes of Estonian left-wing politicians based on their own accounts of the development of their worldview during their formative years. Memoirs of eight socialist and socialist-revolutionary members of the Constituent Assembly and deputies of the first State Assembly are analysed in the paper. All the authors were Lutheran ethnic Estonians who had grown up in villages.

According to the findings, most of the future left-wing deputies went through a radical change in attitude towards church and religion during their adolescent years.

As for their childhood milieu, belief in God was taken for granted and the authority of the church was generally not disputed, though attitudes towards particular pastors might have been critical. However, the practicing of religion played no significant role in the daily lives of the families of the authors. Also, several of them claim that they already experienced their first doubts regarding the validity of the teachings of the church during their studies in village peasant schools. However, those doubts did not lead to the abandonment of their faith in God.

Explicitly irreligious and anticlerical views started taking shape only after they had left their childhood homes as teenagers and moved to the cities – usually to study in secondary schools or to find a job. Eventually, four authors explicitly claim to have become irreligious, two more suggest it implicitly, and two do not mention their personal attitude towards religion. Perceived contradictions between science and religion, as well as the connections of the church with the despised Tsarist regime and the Baltic German upper-class, are usually cited by the authors as the reasons for breaking away from the church. Importantly, influences from Russian radical youth as well as the anti-clericalism of radical and socialist authors also seem to have impacted their stances.

Irreligious and anti-clerical views spread mostly by means of communication with peers and the reading radical literature. Personal negative encounters with the church or the clergy seem not to have played a significant part in it.

The accounts of the authors regarding the formation of their stances towards religion and the church are significantly similar, despite the different time periods (from the 1910s unil the 1960s) and political contexts (including Soviet Estonia and post-World War II exile) in which they were written. However, it is important to note that besides the personal religious convictions of the left-wing deputies, pragmatical political considerations and church-related political controversies in other European countries also might have influenced their support for anti-clerical legislation.