Whether Europe can still credibly be described as a secular continent in the early twenty-first century is a question that has unsettled sociologists, political theorists, and theologians with equal force, challenging assumptions that had seemed settled for decades. Can we still today perceive Europe as the last shelter of secularism? Is the position of Religion as we used to know it a personal matter that should not appear on the public space and even play a role at the state? Sociologist José Casanova (2019) has argued that the secularization thesis — the assumption that modernization inevitably produces religious decline — was always more ideological than empirical, and that Europe’s post-war secularism represents an exception to global patterns rather than the template for humanity’s future.
In the year 2007 an international conference was organized at the Libera Università degli Studi San Pio V in Rome to think about the nature and development of the European political thought after 1989 between globalization and new humanism. One of the main issues discussed was a question of how the different political and philosophical cultures have come back to questions about religion’s role in public sphere. In addition to the issue of identity, this is the central intellectual question of our times and one of the most exciting new zones of interdisciplinary research and studies in both European and non European studies and even in some postcolonial research centers.
It seems quite relevant to ask these questions with the few issues that sprung up with the unification and Europeanization processes between more than 27 states now of the continent — those new and tremendous challenges that tested European solidarity for decades. The debate about religion’s place in the European public sphere has intensified considerably since the initial drafting of the European constitution, with the question of whether to include a reference to Europe’s Christian heritage becoming one of the most acrimonious negotiations in the constitution’s drafting process (Weiler, 2020).
In his article ‘A new Humanism in Europe between Secularism and the Return of Religion,’ Danillo Brechi reported that even the most renowned intellectuals of atheism and secularism have started to raise questions about the limits of secularism. Habermas is more and more sceptical about the thesis of an unstoppable secularization of the West, if not of the entire world. On the contrary, the last years have shown how secularized Europe is much more of an exception than a rule.
One of the main drives for these questions about Europe’s secularism is that dialectic on European identity and the position of religion in the unified constitution, in addition to the big refusal and rejection of Turkey’s bid to join the European Union — a rejection most probably due to the fact of Turkey being a Muslim country.
Words like ‘Lord’, ‘God’, ‘Christian Patrimony’, and ‘Christian Club’ in the European constitution project appeared to put European secularism in doubt despite the continuous talk about the commitment to secularism. This idea has been reinforced by claims and declarations of personalities and European parties about accepting Turkey’s joining the European Union as a threat to the idea of Europe as a ‘Christian Club’.
2. Christian Religion in the unified constitution
The dialectics of Christianity and secularism appear in the very daily practices of political and social institutions in a competitive yet complex manner. In his Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis, Bruce Steve wrote that where culture, identity, and sense of worth are challenged by a source promoting either an alien religion or rampant secularism and that source is negatively valued, secularization will be inhibited. Religion can provide resources for the defense of a national, local, ethnic, or status group culture. Poland and the Irish Republic are prime examples, but Ulster can also be included, as can, in more attenuated form, other so-called dual societies. The national culture and identity are associated with presbytery and chapel against the attempted cultural domination of metropolitan secularity. Bruce Steve, Religion and Modernization, p. 17.
The involvement of religion is today more apparent as pressures started to insist on the Christianity of Europe in the unified constitution since the European conference in 2003. This also appeared in the discussions related to the issues of abortion and teaching religion in schools, and then with the enlargements and the inclusion of Eastern European countries known for their strong religiosity like Romania, Bulgaria and Poland. De Vries and Sullivan (2022) have observed that the entry of these Eastern European states into the EU significantly altered the internal balance of opinion on religion-state relations, introducing powerful voices in favor of more explicit public acknowledgment of Christian heritage.
This later instigated many troubles for this purpose and supported the current that calls for a Christian Europe with the increase of talks about accepting Islamic Turkey into the Union — a prospect that created fears and worries about the potential growth of Islam at the expense of Christianity’s cultural dominance in the continent.
The Ex French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing who presided the conference tried to find a solution accepted by everyone without affecting the stable secular roof, especially with the French insistence on the principle of secularism. He actually suggested three norms included in article 51 related to the churches and religious organizations:
The European Union should respect the position of churches, organizations and existing religious groups inside the member states.
The European Union should respect the position of organizations with philosophical beliefs.
The European Union should be committed to open a wide, honest and organized dialogue with churches and organizations, in recognition of their identity and participation.
Despite the medium solutions that contrast with secularism, looking at the problem proves a special characteristic and existence of religion — regardless of its bias to Christianity — it does in fact contradict the article included in the ‘constitution’ related to the freedom of expression and religious beliefs which permits the freedom of beliefs without prejudices or favoritism.
3. The Truth of European secularism
Despite the continuous European insistence on the principle of secularism, the actual and concrete reality proves the strong existence of the Christian background even in public spaces that are supposed to be far from religion according to the secular text. The complete split between religion and state — a reason why Turkey is refused integration into the EU — is in fact rarely achieved by any European state examined closely.
Another contradiction is that although the Turkish Constitution dictates the secularity of the state, many EU countries blame Turkey for what they call an incomplete commitment to the principles of secularism. They blame Turkey for teaching religious courses in schools and making it obligatory and paying the teachers from the government budget. They also accuse Turkey of not respecting the rights of minorities and discriminating between them on a religious basis, favoring the ‘Sunnah’ to other minorities. Yet identical practices prevail in multiple EU member states without triggering comparable criticism, an inconsistency that Kuru (2019) characterizes as a form of double standard rooted in cultural bias rather than principled commitment to secularism.
Italy, for example, insists on teaching Christianity in the public schools and hires priests from the churches to teach Christianity, paid from the government budget. Also, the state allows people to pay some of their taxes to the churches and presents subsidies to help them build new churches and religious places. The church marriages in their turn are more respected than the civil ones. In England, the queen is considered the head of the church, considered as Defender of the Faith. The queen has many exceptional privileges apart from tax exonerations, and 26 members of the House of Lords are bishops from the Church of England. The same thing applies to Denmark, whose parliament includes a number of priests from the church nominated by a minister called Minister of Church Affairs.
4. The position of the Vatican
The longing for Christian identity of the united Europe was not sought only by the member states but also by the power of the Vatican, the biggest and strongest religious institution in Europe, which put considerable pressure on political leaderships and their representatives in the European Union to stress the ‘Christian identity in the constitution.’ Before the ratification of the Maastricht Agreement, the Vatican suggested an idea to be added to the articles related to the rights and general freedoms — mentioning in the constitution that Christianity is the Christian cultural patrimony of European peoples. This recommendation was refused initially with the argument that the Vatican is not a member of the European Union; yet, just before the Amsterdam conference, Italy, Germany and Portugal adopted this suggestion and the Vatican practiced its pressures on representatives of the member states until it succeeded in adopting the article that stipulates the preservation and privileges that churches and religious communities should have without the intervention of any states.
5. Why Turkey Only?!
One cannot understand the insistence on the Christian identity without the strong dissent and disagreement about Turkey’s joining the European Union, for all the arguments and evidence show that the main reason behind not accepting Turkey is for it being Islamic — otherwise Turkey has all the necessary qualifications and institutions to fit in the EU.
Turkey is one of the founding states of the European Council and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Turkey is also one of the pillars of NATO and holds the largest military in Western Europe after the United States. It is not possible to deny Turkey’s role in protecting Europe from Eastern alliances during the Cold War. Turkey also has immense economic importance for Europe, representing a large market and a gateway for European economic expansions in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus.
It is clear then that despite all these qualifications, right-wing Christian parties in Europe insist on refusing Turkey’s EU membership — which, as the analysis above suggests, is because of the will to keep Europe defined by a Christian civilizational identity that would be fundamentally altered by Turkey’s 70 million predominantly Muslim citizens joining the Union.
6. Conclusion
The debate over Turkey’s EU membership and the place of Christian identity in the European constitution together illuminate a broader tension at the heart of European political culture: the tension between a formal commitment to secular universalism and a substantive, cultural Christianity that continues to shape institutions, public symbols, and political reflexes in ways that formal neutrality cannot fully conceal. The definition of Europe through its Christian heritage or the Enlightenment era is not very convincing, for there are no objective criteria that could define one’s future and identity through a single cultural heritage. The future alone will determine which path the continent will take — toward a genuinely pluralistic civilization that honors all its constituent faiths equally, or toward the reinforcement of a Christian cultural hegemony that its own constitutional commitments formally disavow.
References
Casanova, J. (2019). Public religions in the modern world (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.
De Vries, H., & Sullivan, L. E. (2022). Political theologies: Public religions in a post-secular world. Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823227662.001.0001
Kuru, A. T. (2019). Islam, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment: A global and historical comparison. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108754316
Weiler, J. H. H. (2020). Un’Europa cristiana: Un saggio esplorativo [A Christian Europe: An exploratory essay]. Rizzoli. [See also Weiler’s English language discussion in the European Journal of International Law, 2021.]