In the coming decade religion will become an increasingly salient issue in European politics.¹

This prediction runs counter to the conventional wisdom that Europeans are “post-Christian.” When comparing Europe to the United States, observers note that church pews are empty, that fewer people profess to believe in God, and that Europeans are moral relativists who shy away from principled positions against authoritarian countries. In the European view, modernization implies secularization, and by this standard Europeans are modern while Americans are, depending on who the observer is, either postmodern or irrational.² Why then are we flooded with evidence of the “re-Christianization” of Europe?

Surveys show recent growth in the number of Europeans who express an increasing measure of religious commitment. It is only in Sweden and the former East Germany that nonbelievers are the majority.³

When the new constitution of the European Union (EU) was drafted, German, Italian, Polish and Slovakian delegates argued that a reference to “God” and to “Christian values” should be incorporated in the text, and they were supported by the former French president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a Roman Catholic.⁴ Greece, Denmark, and Ireland fought to include a preemptive paragraph (Article I-51 [3]) that protected existing church privileges against the convention's antidiscrimination clauses, arousing the ire of the British Humanist Society and the International Association of Non-Confessionals and Atheists (Internationaler Bund der Konfessionslosen und Atheisten) a German-based association.⁵ The governors of the BBC criticized the corporation for cutting religious programming.⁶ A Danish social democrat and former New Left historian, Karen Jespersen, has declared that she does not want to live in a multicultural society and prefers to stick to the national values articulated by N. F. S. Grundtvig, a nineteenth-century Lutheran reformer. The Norwegian press is suddenly filled with references to Christianity.⁷

Before we pronounce a Christian revival to be on its way, we should pause to consider if the original reports on the dearth of faith were perhaps not exaggerated. The empty-pews comparison presumes that if you do not go to church on Sunday, you do not care about religion. But religion matters more to Europeans than their Sunday behavior lets on. Europeans pay their governments to support their churches and quite rightly assume that the church will be there when they need it. The consumption of essential religious services—baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and funerals—has been remarkably resistant to change. Denmark and Sweden are often described as the epitome of European secularism, but 85 percent of the population in the two countries belong to the national Protestant churches. Swedes are more prone to church weddings (61 percent) than are Danes (43 percent); however, Danes are more partial to confirmations (80 percent). About three-quarters of the newborns in both countries are christened, and they get christened even if the parents are not married.⁸

The Danish and Swedish national churches provide 90 percent of the population with a religious burial. One has to conclude that many Swedes and Danes who profess not to believe in God nevertheless turn to the church for assistance throughout their lives.

But if Europe is still Christian, and perhaps becoming more so, it is also grappling with new issues of religious pluralism. Fifteen million Muslims live in western Europe today. The new insistence on Christian values is clearly linked to a backlash against Islam. Angela Merkel, the leader of Germany's Christian Democratic Party, has said that everyone who lives in her country must accept that it is based upon a Judeo-Christian value system. Annette Schavan, the Christian Democratic culture minister in Baden-Württemberg who was responsible for pushing through legislation prohibiting teachers from wearing the Muslim headscarf in public schools in Baden-Württemberg—a state that also mandates placing crucifixes in public classrooms—gave as the reason for the apparent inequity in the treatment of Christianity and Islam that Christianity is an essential part of the value systems of the “occident.” It is, in her view, a matter of public ethics to keep Christianity in the classroom: “We cannot allow a spiritual vacuum to emerge that would leave our society without guidance,” the Minister warned, “We must stand by our cultural and religious traditions as they are expressed in our Constitution.”⁹

Academics have also voiced the view that the moral identity of Europe rests upon secularized Christian values, which other faiths (for example, Islam) are perceived not to share.¹⁰

The problem with Muslims, it is widely argued, is that they are too religious and do not distinguish properly between private faith and public values. Last fall, Helmut Schmidt, the former chancellor of Germany, expressed his regret that under his stewardship, Germany had opened the doors to Muslim labor migrants. In retrospect, he said, it had been a mistake, because it was now clear that Christians and Muslims could not tolerate each other. Schmidt blamed the Christian churches for having indoctrinated Germans with resentment against Muslims, but he said also that peaceful accommodation between Islam and Christianity is possible only in authoritarian states.¹¹

Western European states are not secular. Nor are they neutral in matters of religion. On the contrary, Europe is riddled with Christian privileges. Existing state-church frameworks carry the imprint of the 1555 Treaty of Augsburg, which established the principle that subjects would have the faiths of their rulers. Among the countries that have both constitutionally established confessions and publicly subsidized faiths are Austria, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Greece, and Italy. The Church of England is an established church, although it receives few direct subsidies. If we count funding for faith-based educational institutions, the education of Christian clergy at the theological faculties at public universities, and publicly funded Christian social and health services as examples of public support for religion, the self-portrayal of Europe as deeply committed to secular values and state neutrality crumbles even further.

France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden are constitutionally secular states but provide direct or indirect subsidies for institutions associated with recognized faiths, for example, religious schools or social and health services. In Sweden, Belgium, and the Netherlands, funding opportunities are de jure available to all religions, but state neutrality remains an elusive and not fully accepted goal. In Germany, the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, as well as Judaism, but not Islam, the third largest faith, are entitled to federally collected church taxes and the right to run state-subsidized religious social services and hospitals. Spain's 1978 constitution, created after the overthrow of the Franco regime, declared the state to be secular and ended the Roman Catholic Church's long-standing association with the state. Yet the government continued to fund the Catholic Church following an informal agreement reached in 1979 and still in effect. The Netherlands and Sweden “privatized” but fully funded clergy salaries and pensions in 1983 and 2000, respectively. Even in France, where the law of 1905 and the principle of laïcite has been invoked to prohibit Muslim girls from covering their heads in school, churches are municipal properties and are lent free of charge to parishes, cemeteries are owned by municipalities but run by parish councils, and 25 percent of French students go to Catholic schools, which are publicly funded. No publicly funded Muslim school exists.

Twentieth-century European states modernized religion but they never embraced constitutional principles about state neutrality and the separation of church and state. Secularization in Europe was achieved by means of state control of religion. Germany and France still maintain lists of banned sects. Stein Rokkan's theory of path-dependent nation-building since the sixteenth century and the subsequent “freezing” of partisan cleavages in the age of mass politics depended upon the unacknowledged but assumed stability of basic religious affiliations, of the cuius regio, eius religio principle.¹²

Political scientists have for a decade debated the consequences of the collapse of the Westphalian order—so named after the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which established the sovereign nation-state as the basic unit of the international order—for international relations, but we have neglected the attendant consequences for the Augsburg principles of Religionsfriede.¹³ Migration is one of many consequences of the new international order, and it means that many subjects no longer belong to the official faiths of states.

Conflict over the role of religion in western Europe does not pit Christians against Muslims, but secularists against those who want public policy to endorse faith. Muslims are as divided as Christians on these issues. Lale Akgün, the SPD member of the Bundestag, told me that, in her view, when historians come to explain how Muslims changed Europe, they will conclude that Muslims promoted the belated separation of state and church. “Because of [the headscarf bans], we are having a discussion about secularism. I do not say that things will change in two months, but we are looking for a new parity of state and secularism and religion in Germany. It is very interesting that Islam has brought a new dimension to the discussion in this country. It is a very big difference, and when you look in five years, in ten years, what will have changed will be because of this decision.”¹⁴

Nonetheless, many religious Muslims prefer a Christian state to one that has no public religion. A young man of Turkish origin, native-born and a German citizen, who was elected as a Christian Democrat to a state parliament, explained to me that Muslims like himself, who draw their civic values from their faith, see nothing wrong with a party program that mentions God. But when religion comes to mean exclusively “Christianity” and “occidental values,” then Muslims have to object.¹⁵

The manager of a controversial German association of mosques hesitated when I asked which party Muslims like himself could best expect to work with in the future. “Many people say the Greens,” he said, “I am not so sure. Probably, the Christian Democrats are better.”¹⁶ His hesitation was understandable, since he and his association had just been subjected to yet another volley from the Christian Democrats about German commitments to “occidental” and “Christian” values. The Greens have attracted support from many Muslims for their strong support for human rights and strengthened antidiscrimination enforcement, but the party is also secularist.

Religious pluralism is a new social fact that European states have yet to engage. Europeans have to reexamine the twentieth-century “stability pacts” between church and state. New national conversations about religion and public policy cannot be avoided. The European Union is a central actor in these debates for two reasons. First, the awkward debates on the ratification of the European Constitution and Turkey's accession will soak up the simmering conflict. Second, the EU is based upon a post-Augsburg constitutional framework. The EU has no one “national” religion and must remain neutral with respect to all the religions within the European space. Europe's large political parties are faced with the difficult task of negotiating between the rocks of xenophobic parties mobilizing on nativist sentiments about the dilution of national “values” caused by immigration and the shoals of the EU's efforts to endow the federalist project with a bill of rights based upon principles of nondiscrimination that reach beyond mere mercantilism. I predict that in a decade, Europeans will no longer be able to accuse Americans of being the ones to mix politics and religion. Governments face a choice of funding Islam or allowing foreign sponsors to continue to provide money for mosques and supply imams and religious instruction. Muslim associations, community groups, and political and civic leaders, who strongly favor dismantling the ties to the Islamic countries, have found an ally in national security agencies. At the same time, growing public sentiment that Islam is a threat to national identities and the populist embrace of Christianity as tool for mobilizing voters guarantee heightened conflict over the place of religion in public policy.