the official censuses of the Czech Statistical Office recorded a decline of professed Christianity from about 94% to about 12% of the population of the Czech lands. The communist period of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1960–1990) certainly saw an oppression of Christianity, thus contributing to its decline, but also hampered the appearance of any alternatives in the area of religion, so that Christianity continued to have a monopolistic position in the religious interpretation of the world. Only the restoration of democracy after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 opened the country to the spread of non-Christian religions. According to the scholar Jan Spousta, throughout the 20th century Christianity gradually lost its character as the Czechs' traditional religion, and was abandoned by most while turning into a religion of sincere choice for the minority who continues to identify itself with it and practise it. Spousta also found that Christians in the early 21st century tended to be older and less educated than the general population, and females were far more likely than males to be believers. Christianity remained relatively higher in percentage among the populations of the agrarian south-eastern regions of Moravia, while the percentages were already very low in the large cities and the north-western more industrialised regions of Bohemia. Roman Catholicism Roman Catholicism was the main tradition of Christianity historically practised by the Czechs after they converted from Slavic paganism, and although in the 15th and 16th century many Czechs—in many areas and periods most—joined Proto-Protestant and Protestant churches, the Habsburg monarchy which gained imperial power on the Czech lands in the early 17th century enacted a Counter-Reformation movement which reconverted most Czechs to the Catholic Church. By the time of the collapse of the Habsburg power and the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, the position of the Catholic Church had already been weakened by criticism from the intellectual class and by the social changes brought by the rapid industrialisation of especially the northern and western pars of the country, Bohemia. At the same time, the association of Catholicism with the unpopular erstwhile Habsburg power led to widespread anticlericalism and anti-Catholicism, and to a revival of the native historical form of Czech Protestantism, namely Hussitism; in 1920, Hussites split out of the Catholic Church with about 10% of the formerly Catholic clergy and established themselves as the Czechoslovak Hussite Church. From 1950 onwards, communists gained power in Czechoslovakia, which