Co-authored by a husband-wife team (she a political scientist, he a professor of theology), this book represents a welcome addition to the sparse English-language literature on the interaction between religion and politics in East-Central Europe. Encompassing case studies of all 10 of the post-communist states that acceded to the European Union in the enlargements of 2004 and 2007, the work is distinguished not only by its geographic scope, but also by its analytic inclusiveness. Adopting Alfred Stepan's model of the “twin tolerations” as a frame, Stan and Turcescu examine the impact democratic states and governments have on religious entities, as well as the influence faith-based actors and institutions exercise in the reverse direction. To their credit, the authors go beyond merely surveying these relationships relative to a dominant tradition or set of traditions, instead also according due consideration to minority groups and their interactions with the state and other religious bodies. The focus, however, is not just confined to domestic factors; intra-regional differences are also addressed, albeit less thoroughly, along with similarities and divergences between the post-communist world and Western Europe.

As such, this effort represents a timely foray into an under-theorized field. A key point made here is that the shared legacy of communism (the lived experience of which, in reality, differed quite a bit between states) explains little of the range of variation currently evinced in Church-State affairs. After all, Poles and Romanians — who number among the most religious nations in Europe — tend to have very different concerns over the intersection of religion and politics than do more laicized Western Europeans or, for that matter, the highly secular Czechs and Estonians. However, while it is not resurgent everywhere in the post-communist world, religious practice and belief is a still-emerging political factor throughout much of the region, decades spent promoting official policies antagonistic to faith not having enervated the theistic impulse entirely. But as intriguing as the resultant internal country dynamics are, the topic is also relevant to the reimagining of Europe's broader identity. Thus while many of the “old” European Union-15 member states remain embroiled in contentious debates over the societal integration (or lack thereof) of Muslim immigrants, mounting evidence from the post-communist space is beginning to suggest that the fundamental “civilizational” fault-line in a united Europe may end up being drawn not so much between Christianity and Islam as between secular and religious worldviews more generally, both perspectives having proven themselves capable of making aggressive and exclusionary demands on liberal democracy.

Devoting a full chapter to each nation-state, this volume divides individual cases according to five sub-headings: the historical role of religion; its relationship to the post-communist legislative process; its involvement in electoral politics; the extent of religious instruction in public schools; and a discussion of religion and sexuality relative to legal codes. This segmentation is convenient, if somewhat arbitrary (why privilege “sexuality” in lieu of “social justice” or “market economics”?), in that it allows for ready comparison across countries. The conclusion, meanwhile, provides helpful tabular summaries of the arrangements pertaining to Church-State relations among the surveyed polities.

However, although the study deserves accolades for its comprehensiveness and ambition, it is not without flaws and eccentricities. For one thing, a disconcerting degree of stylistic unevenness is exhibited across chapters, resulting in prose that has a tendency to feel stilted and unnatural in its cadence (this is particularly evident in the Polish case). More substantively, a troubling semantic and conceptual imprecision occasionally rears its head. Thankfully, most of the over-broad generalizations and factual errors encountered are no more than minor distractions (e.g., misstating the liturgical language of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is Church Slavonic rather than Russian [102]). Some, though, are more confusing and/or problematic. For example, Stan and Turcescu claim that “[i]n the Czech church-state separation model religion and politics are treated as distinct areas of human endeavor; the government is secular, religion is a private matter, no denomination is funded from the public purse, and no religious instruction is offered in public schools” (13). But this characterization is incorrect. Puzzlingly, the authors themselves later on acknowledge that the Czech state “continues to pay directly the wages and pensions of priests and bishops” (39), and note that Prague is responsible for the salaries of religion teachers in public educational institutions, as well as for funding denominationally affiliated schools (45–46). Another such instance arises when referencing the Romanian Orthodox Church's reaction to a seminal bioethics committee report. “In a welcome move,” they write, “the Church has officially endorsed the Committee's pronouncements on abortion and euthanasia on July 6, 2005, thus renouncing the obsolete canons produced mostly in the first Christian millennium” (148). Obvious editorializing aside, in this reviewer's opinion the previous statement and ensuing discussion significantly distorts the Church's actual position (see http://www.gloriagrup.ro/PatriarhiaPhp/eng/bioetics.php).

Meanwhile, in holding up the new European Union members for comparison to Western Europe, the authors give the impression that they regard the West as a normative exemplar of how democracy and religion can successfully coexist under conditions other than strict Church-State separation. Yet it is worth emphasizing that while overall levels of belief and belonging in the West are lower than the average among the post-communist states, this part of Europe remains a bastion of institutionalized, and specifically Christian, privilege. The observation by itself does not militate against Western European states being regarded as paradigms of the “twin tolerations” — they are, after all, invoked as such in Stepan's classic argument. Recent years, however, have witnessed a fraying of the pluralistic dimensions of this mutual tolerance across Western Europe (we need only to think of the “headscarf” ban in France, or the growth of anti-Islamic political platforms in the Netherlands), making these countries less compelling as a metric.

In conclusion, notwithstanding the above criticisms, this book represents the most comprehensive and inclusive survey of post-communist Church-State relations available to date. More broadly, while the volume's early pages hold out the promise of an overarching theoretical framework being applied to the task at hand, its actual development is fairly cursory. Consequently, individual chapters are not as tightly integrated with one another as they could be, often leading the text to read less like a conceptually unified study of the post-communist region than a grouping of discrete cases and related observations linked by an accident of proximity.

Nevertheless, despite the above-noted criticisms, this book provides a generally effective examination of post-communist Church-State relations. Moreover, it constitutes a useful reference tool, collecting together country information not easily accessible otherwise. Given this, Church, State and Democracy will surely be of interest to discerning readers desirous of better understanding the complex and dynamic interplay between religion and politics taking place within and across the states of contemporary East-Central Europe.