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3.1 Introduction

Much of the recent interest in the role of religion in civil society has derived from the participation of religious figures, churches and related organisations – mainly, but not at all exclusively, Catholic – in the dramatic transitions to democracy that have occurred in Southern Europe, Latin America, Eastern Europe and other parts of the world since the 1970s. While this interest is understandable given the particular prominence of actors such as Pope John Paul II and of religious or religion-inspired activists in Poland and Latin America, it is curious that it should have occurred at a time when the Catholic church had seemed to eschew its traditional involvement in politics in favour of, instead, developing its role in society. In 1994 Jose Casanova argued persuasively that since Vatican II, there had occurred ‘a fundamental change in the location and orientation of the Catholic church from one centred and anchored in the state to one centred in civil society … the public locus of the church is no longer the state or political society but, rather, civil society’ (Casanova 1994: 62–63). This chapter addresses the seeming paradox thrown up by these observations by surveying the location and orientation of churches and other religious organisations in Europe relative to the state, political society and civil society. It is argued that the ambivalent role of religion in public affairs in different parts of Europe continues to be conditioned by a long legacy of entanglement with states, political parties and movement organisations which continues to shape and condition its role in civil society. The picture which emerges can be described as one of triangular entanglements which entails inter alia a continuing and increasing concern on the part of state authorities with the regulation of the religious sphere, as well as a corresponding resurgence of the religious factor in politics.

The analysis is complicated by the fact that in contemporary Europe, the category religion now embraces a very wide range of disparate phenomena; in addition to the traditional Christian churches and mainline denominations with their associated institutions and organisations, recent decades have seen the emergence of significant minorities with backgrounds in the other world religions on the one hand and, on the other, the growth of a bewildering variety of so-called New Religious Movements – Scientologists, Moonies, Wicca, etc. – the existence of which have only served to highlight problems associated with issues of religious toleration, freedom and recognition. In Europe the development of this new religious pluralism has occurred in a context which is still informed by a long history of problematic church-state-society relations (Madeley and Enyedi 2003). With the almost universal acceptance by the 1990s in Europe, West and East, of the principle of religious toleration, most of the resulting arrangements – with few, if significant, exceptions – had ceased to be unduly controversial, but the subsequent influx of new, unfamiliar and occasionally exotic religious impulses has led to a recrudescence of the old debates, as well as the emergence of some new issues. In Thomas Banchoff’s terms, it is in particular arrangements reflecting the ‘hierarchical dimension of the new pluralism’ which have given rise to controversy: ‘There are majority religious traditions and majority political cultures … within which diversity is articulated. Pluralism is about the responses of minorities to majorities and vice versa. Only by viewing the interaction among religious groups on an uneven playing field can one specify distinctive contours of the new pluralism’ (Banchoff 2007: 6).

3.2 The Surviving Legacy of State Confessionalism

In an important sense religion in Europe has been pluralistic throughout history – whether under or outside the pagan Roman Empire, or during the same empire’s last century and a half when Christianity achieved the status of an established religion but suffered serious internal doctrinal and other disputes, or following the great eleventh century schism between the Greek East and the Latin West at a time when parts of northern Europe still remained pagan and a major Islamic civilisation held sway in the Iberian peninsula. Even when, finally, the successful Christianisation of most of the continent by the late fifteenth century had been achieved (excepting only those south-eastern parts where the Islamic Ottoman Empire continued to encroach), Christian Europe was decisively torn apart by forces driving the reformation(s), the Counter-Reformation and the ensuing wars of religion. An important feature of this ‘old’ pluralism of religious traditions is that until about a century ago it remained inscribed across the continent’s geography by the fixity of the boundaries between relatively cohesive confessional blocs (Madeley 2003a, b). The end of Europe’s age of religious wars, conventionally marked by historians at the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, did not issue in the establishment of general religious toleration (except at the level of relations between states), although it did require the observance of a range of particular local exceptions to the cuius regio eius religio (‘whose region, his religion’) rule. Instead the final institutionalisation of that rule decisively conferred on the authorities within each jurisdiction the right to enforce conformity to the locally established confession thereby repressing pluralistic tendencies within individual territories. Even the great 1789 French Revolution’s declaration that ‘no one may be harassed because of his opinions’ – to which was added, as it needed particular emphasis, ‘even religious ones’ – failed to introduce a decisive change to Europe’s confessional map. Although it signalled the important symbolic break of uncoupling citizenship rights from denominational membership within that country was for a long time, ‘the only country to have put this major and radical dissociation into operation’ (Rémond 1999: 39). Throughout most of Europe for a century thereafter, growing tendencies towards religious dissent and pluralism continued to be held at bay, courtesy of the civil authorities, by means of discrimination in favour of the locally established confessions, using the instrumentality of, variously, religious tests for public office, the provision or denial of public funding, the encouragement of religious-nationalist themes and in some countries the maintenance of oppressive systems of penal law. It is perhaps unsurprising then that Europe continues at the start of the third millennium of the Common Era to exhibit some of the marks of the age of the early-modern confessional state (Madeley 2009).

One of the most striking – if rarely remarked – features of contemporary religious Europe is the survival of high levels of confessional identity inherited from an earlier age, despite the recent growth of the new religious pluralism. Table 3.1 illustrates the fact that the confessional map of Europe continues to be dominated by the historically mono-confessional blocs of Roman Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox countries in the Southern, Northern and Eastern parts of Europe, separated though they are from each other by relatively narrow belts of historically multi-confessional territories, where the principal traditions have abutted on each other since 1648 (Knippenberg 2006).

Table 3.1 The long shadow of the confessional state in Europe: confessional majoritarianism by tradition and country
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The fixing of this overall pattern has been analysed by German historians as the result of processes of the ‘confessionalisation’ (Konfessionalisierung) of subject populations which continued for long to reinforce confessional conformity within individual territories. Nor have the secularising trends of declining levels of religious belief and observance over the last century led to the erasure of the resulting patterns of confessional identity; in Grace Davie’s terms, habits of belonging – or at least of identification – have survived even where traditions of believing and practice have decayed (Davie 2000). As the table shows, 38 (83 %) out of Europe’s 46 national territories continued in 2000 to exhibit single-confession majorities and 33 (72 %) of these had supermajorities (i.e. populations in which more than two-thirds share a single confessional identity) – 13 of them (28 %) are even recorded as having over 90 % of their population sharing a single identity. However crude and at the margin disputable, these figures can be taken to demonstrate that, despite the twentieth century’s massive economic, social, political and other dislocations, the early-modern confessional state continues to throw a long shadow. Of course the finding of continuing confessional majoritarianism does not imply that the majorities referred to represent cohesive blocs of religious opinion and observance. Under current conditions even the most solid confessional identity majorities – such as the Roman Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox majorities in, respectively, Spain, Iceland and Greece – can be seen to be internally divided along many dimensions of membership, belief, practice and ethical viewpoint. And in almost all countries there is now a growing penumbra of alternative traditions, some with deep roots in particular territories, others relatively novel and often exotic in their provenance; the fractionalisation scores in the last column of the table indicates by the use of Herfindahl quotients the presence of these other groups. There are also in most parts of the continent more or less significant groups of secularists – some of them enjoying state recognition as separate ‘communities of conviction’ – although it is notable that their often high profile in cultural and intellectual circles is rarely reflected in terms of their representation among the general population.

3.3 The Continuing Role of State Authorities in the Religious Sphere

One of the reasons why confessional majoritarianism continues to mark Europe’s religious map is that state authorities, having largely abandoned attempts to repress religious dissidence, have continued to provide support for the historically dominant confessions while extending it usually on less generous terms to other mainstream religions on the grounds that they also could be argued to contribute to the public good. It is often assumed that in Western liberal democracies traditions of religious establishment have been superseded and replaced by one form or another of separation of the religious from the political. Thus for example Charles Taylor presents as unproblematic the claim that in western societies the public sphere has been almost completely secularised: ‘whereas the political organization of all pre-modern societies was in some way connected to, based on, guaranteed by some faith in, or adherence to God, or some notion of ultimate reality, the modern Western state is free from this connection. Churches are now separate from political structures (with a couple of exceptions, in Britain and the Scandinavian countries, which are so low key and undemanding as not really to constitute exceptions)’ (Taylor 2007: 1). Although there is room to question the nature and significance of the surviving connections between religious institutions and political structures, a brief review of the headline evidence indicates that this judgement requires some qualification.

Table 3.2 shows that in 1900 all but one of Europe’s 46 territories were occupied by states which could still be judged de jure ‘religious’ that is officially committed in one way or another to the support of either a particular religion or religions (31 cases) or to religion in general (14 cases). The one exception identified is the Netherlands which is labelled de jure ‘secular’, presumably on the grounds that the Dutch Reformed Church had by then finally been disestablished in 1848, although it – along with other Calvinist denominations which had divided from it – continued to enjoy considerable status, political power and influence (Kennedy 2010). Elsewhere in Europe the legal and/or official foundations of the inherited systems of church establishment still survived across almost the whole continent, even if by 1900 they appeared to be increasingly under threat. In most countries religious freedoms had expanded – albeit at different paces and occasionally with reversals – and few establishments could any longer rely for their maintenance on the negative penal disciplines by which state authorities had once shored them up. In France tensions between clericals and anticlericals were to come to a head soon after 1900, issuing in a decisive change which made that country Europe’s first laïciste (or secularist, as opposed to merely secular) state. The Law of Separation of 1905 proclaimed that henceforth the Republic would neither recognise nor subsidise any religious confession or cult (Rémond 1999: 149). This was an exceptional move however, and no other countries followed the French example until after the First World War when in Turkey after 1923 Kemal Atatürk introduced his own laiklik version of laïcité. In Russia, following a more brutally secularist path, Lenin’s Bolsheviks had by then disestablished the Orthodox Church 3 months after seizing power in late 1917, reducing it to the status of a mere religious association with no corporate personality, thereby preventing it from even holding property in its own right. In Germany and Austria in the aftermath of the First World War, formal establishment was also ended, although the resulting arrangements continued to allow for cooperation in such matters as religious education in the public schools, the raising of the Kirchensteuer (a church tax collected by the state tax authorities) and other valued aspects of the earlier system of formal establishment.

Table 3.2 State religiosity and regime types in Europe (de jure), 1900–2000
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Some contemporary commentators concluded that all these developments indicated that by the early 1920s church establishment had finally been consigned to the dustbin of history (Wyduckel 2001: 169). The table indicates that this judgement was however at the very least premature. Formal church-state establishment survived in different confessional guises in the Nordic countries, England and Scotland within the UK, the Iberian peninsula and the Orthodox states of the continent’s south-east. In Catholic thinking state, churches – despite their virtual existence in the small, overwhelmingly Catholic states of Liechtenstein, Malta and Monaco – had never been regarded by Rome as fully legitimate institutional forms, often having come into existence on the back of entanglements with the local temporal authorities. The arrangement which the Vatican preferred to formal establishment was friendly cooperation between church and state within a particular territory on the basis of Concordats, that is, treaties which were negotiated to protect the autonomy of the church in the spiritual sphere while providing favourable conditions for its mission within civil society. It was on such a basis that relations between the Vatican and the Italian state were at last settled with the Lateran Pacts of 1929 – a series of concordat agreements which also finally regularised the existence of Europe’s only surviving church-state: the State of Vatican City. Four years later major concordat agreements were also signed in 1933 with Germany and Austria, although these subsequently were found to provide inadequate protection from the depredations of Nazism. In Spain, where the French or Latin pattern of clerical-anticlerical confrontation was starkly exemplified in a series of violent political oscillations involving the standing of the Catholic Church, 1931 saw the establishment of a Second Republic, the separation of church and state, the nationalisation of church property, the abolition of state support, the secularisation of the education system and the expulsion of the Jesuits. By the end of the decade, however, after 3 years of bitter civil war, Franco’s authoritarian regime had reversed the situation once again and firmly entrenched a system of National Catholicism.

The period following the end of the Second World War saw the restoration of the historic churches in the West and the suppression of their freedom in the East, now under Soviet overlordship. As complete disenchantment with the authoritarian and totalitarian alternatives of fascism, Nazism and communism set in, Christian Democratic parties emerged across most of the West – even for a time in France where such parties had fared poorly earlier. In the terms used by Alfred Stepan, this made for a considerable role in political society as well as for direct influence in the state. Aside from the critical economic reconstruction over which they presided, Western Europe’s Christian Democrats were also responsible for ensuring conditions favourable to the principal religious institutions in their several countries. Unlike in 1918 there was little appetite for measures of disestablishment; instead, in Western Europe the churches either retained or were restored to their former places of honour and privilege; in Germany and Italy the interwar concordats remained in force, while in Franco’s Spain, a new concordat in 1953 further reinforced an anti-pluralist system of National Catholicism. In Eastern Europe the outcome of the world war produced radically different outcomes however, as Soviet-installed regimes imposed strict controls on the churches and other religious bodies. This occurred more often than not in the context of constitutional provisions which ostensibly guaranteed religious freedom in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and other international legal instruments (Boyle and Sheen 1997). In defiance of these commitments however, by 1970, as Table 3.2 indicates, all 22 countries of Central and Eastern Europe which lay behind the Iron Curtain could be designated Atheistic de jure, committed in Barrett’s terms to ‘formally promoting irreligion’. This meant typically that while the state was ostensibly separated from all religions and churches, it was also ‘linked for ideological reasons with irreligion and opposed on principle to all religion’, claiming the right ‘to oppose religion by discrimination, obstruction or even suppression’ (Barrett 1982: 96). The so-called church-state separation in these states was in other words entirely one-sided; it meant exclusion (separation) of the religious from public life and the cutting off of most of the resources required for religion to flourish. It emphatically did not mean however that the state was debarred from interfering in the field of religious provision – rather that, as in Turkey, the state and its organs were equipped to exert maximum control. In the extreme case of Albania, finally, the attempt was openly made between 1967 and 1991 to abolish all manifestations of religion altogether. In very different ways the decades after 1945 can then be seen as a time when the connections between, and mutual entanglement of, religion and the state were actually reinforced in both Western and Eastern Europe albeit under opposite signs, positive and negative.

The changes which have occurred since the 1970s have transformed church-state relations in the Iberian peninsula and Eastern Europe. The so-called third wave of democratisation began in April 1974 with the military overthrow of Portugal’s authoritarian regime and the transition to democracy which followed shortly afterwards upon the death of Franco in neighbouring Spain. Having spread out to Latin America and parts of Asia before washing back across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, this wave put an end to the atheist or secularist regimes of the Soviet bloc. Churches and religious groups in some of these countries, most notably in Poland, were important actors in the campaigns for liberalisation and democratisation which – along with the withdrawal of Soviet guarantees – precipitated the shift to more open, democratic regimes. As part of this transition, as Table 3.2 indicates, by 2000 all the states which were coded as Atheistic in 1970 had either returned to the category of de jure Religious states providing support to the locally dominant religious tradition (15 cases) or had made changes which justified classifying them as de jure Secular (seven cases: Russia, the three Baltic states, Hungary, Slovakia and Macedonia), that is, officially promoting neither religion nor irreligion. None of them formally adopted a state church model even though it is notable that in almost all cases ministries and departments devoted to regulating the religious field continued – and continue – to exist. Nor did more than one of them (Azerbaijan) opt for the separationist model, despite the recommendations of the United States and international organisations such as the OSCE (the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) and the claim in some quarters that so-called church-state separation constituted a virtual sine qua non of liberal democracy (Ferrari 2003: 411–427). As the last column in Table 3.2 indicates, most have instead chosen to adopt models which involve endorsement of – or patterns of accommodation or cooperation with – the principal churches and many, including those that did not have significant Catholic populations, have negotiated some kind of concordat settlement with the Vatican.Footnote 1

3.4 Patterns of State-Religion-Society Entanglement in Europe, East and West

Table 3.3 illustrates the 2002 distribution of different types of state-religion regime type identified by Cole Durham and Jonathan Fox as between Western and Eastern/Central Europe (Durham 1996; Fox 2008). The table is arranged by deciles based on the scores for Fox’s measure for Separation of Religion and State (SRAS) where a zero score would indicate complete or strict separation. Each point above zero can, then, be counted as reflecting the existence of a deviation from separation as this was interpreted and applied by the United States Supreme Court between the 1940s and the 1980s during the heyday of strict separationism. The deviations are identified from batches of variables which code for (a) state support for one or more religions either officially or in practice, (b) state hostility towards religion, (c) comparative government treatment of different religions, including both benefits and restrictions, (d) government restrictions on the practice of religion by religious minorities, (e) government regulation of the majority religion, and (f) legislation of religious laws (Fox 2008).

Table 3.3 State-religion-society entanglement in Europe, East and West: measures and state-religion regime types
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It is notable that the lowest SRAS scores in Europe are to be found in the three countries with an Accommodationist, not a Separationist, type of state-religion regime – the two cases of Separationist regimes in fact score either moderately above the regional average SRAS in the case of France or well above the average in the case of Azerbaijan. By contrast with Separationism, Accommodationist regimes are described by Cole Durham as marked by a ‘benevolent neutrality toward religion’ which does not however extend to direct financial subsidies or the requirement that religious education be provided in schools (Durham 1996: 21). In Western Europe the eight countries with the highest SRAS scores are, unsurprisingly, those with Official Religious regimes – or, in Cole Durham’s terms, those with Established Churches. In Eastern/Central Europe only two cases of Official Religion are identified – Greece with its long-standing recognition of, and support for, the Greek Orthodox Church as ‘the prevailing religion’ of the country and Armenia, the only post-Soviet state to opt for this type of state-religion regime. The other two types of regime occupy the central range of both columns with the Cooperationist type being on average lower in the 7 Western and the 10 East/Central European cases and the Endorsed Religion higher in the 2 Western and the 10 East/Central European cases on the SRAS loading; as these figures indicate, both types exhibit significant levels of deviation from full religion-state separation.

The traditional distinction between the principal patterns of church-state relations in Europe identified only three categories: state or national church, more or less strict separation and cooperation (sometimes called concordatarian) patterns (Robbers 2005: 578–579). This typology had a number of disadvantages. On the one hand it failed to distinguish other types such as the Accommodationist and Endorsed Religion patterns identified by Cole Durham. On the other hand, as Ferrari argued, it granted ‘excessive importance to the formal element of the relationship between church and state, in other words to the type of association that exists between two institutions, and overlooks its legal substance’ (Ferrari 2003: 415). Concentrating on the official or constitutional de jure aspect obscured the different dynamics which occurred at lower levels of actual regulatory interchanges between different state authorities and the whole range of religious institutions and organisations (Bader 2007). More importantly the traditional typology was inadequate to the task of describing the changes which have been occurring in the field of state-religion-society relations since the 1980s. In 1999 Ferrari claimed to be able to identify the ‘legal substance’ of an emergent European model which distinguished it from models to be found in other parts of the world. The key feature of this model was the distinctive framing of relations between the public authorities and religious actors in civil society:

A religious sub-sector is singled out within the public sector. This may be understood as a ‘playing field’ or ‘protected area’. Inside it the various collective religious subjects (churches, denominations, and religious communities) are free to act in conditions of substantial advantage compared to those collective subjects that are not religious. The state’s only role is to see that the players respect the rules of the game and the boundaries of the playing field. (ibid: 3)

The considerations involved in this important claim can be objected to on normative and descriptive grounds – in other words whether it describes an acceptable state of affairs or whether it accurately describes that state of affairs. The privileging of religion involved in granting ‘conditions of substantial advantage’ clearly departs from the requirements of some normative liberal theorists such as Robert Audi (1989), for example. In Audi’s terms the European model as identified by Ferrari can be seen as seriously deficient on neutrality and equality grounds since it grants religious ‘subjects’ significant advantages not available to nonreligious ‘subjects’. But it might be argued that it fails also to recognise another inegalitarian feature of almost all patterns of state-religion interconnections in Europe, namely, the effective ‘hierarchies of recognition’ which distinguish between, respectively, highly favoured religions, recognised but less favoured religions, recognised but barely tolerated religions and, a gradation down, those religious bodies that are denied any recognition as religious at all, sometimes even being denied legal existence on one ground or another (Richardson 2004; Madeley 2006). With the increased levels of religious pluralism, this feature has become increasingly noticeable. The modelling of the role of the state on that of a football referee ‘seeing that the players respect the rules of the game and the boundaries of the playing field’ appears also to underplay the fact that, to adopt Banchoff’s phrase, the playing field is in fact in almost all cases very uneven and actually tilted – that there is a ‘hierarchical dimension’ in the relations between religious actors which has been of long standing but has become even more strikingly visible with the development of ‘the new pluralism’. These intrusive elements of inequality have been recognised by Ferrari in the most recent presentation of his European model: ‘the centre of gravity of European church-state relations seem to be shifting towards a range of national systems that are distinct but which share certain common features: acceptance of the public standing of religious communities; recognition of their special features; a certain degree of state control over them; and the selective and graded cooperation of public institutions with religious communities’ (Ferrari 2008: 110). It is notable that each of these emergent features involves a degree of direct or indirect regulatory action on the part of state actors.

3.5 The European TAO of State-Society-Religion Relations

In attempting to describe emergent features and to understand the dynamics of change which have produced them, it is also possible to use the individual constituents of Fox’s SRAS measures to identify the basis of the different patterns of religion-state-society relations which continue to underlie the developing pan-European pattern. Doing this also makes it possible to test hypotheses about the explanatory potential of, for example, the relative levels of inherited confessional majoritarianism, the character of the different confessions involved or the existence of contrasting state traditions (Dyson 1980). One approach to undertaking this task involves distinguishing between those elements of religion-state relations which relate to fiscal, financial and property connections (Treasure), those which relate to the exercise of states’ powers of command (Authority) and those which relate to the direct or indirect effects of the involvement of governmental institutions on the actual organisation of the religious sphere itself (Organisation) (Madeley 2009). The different combinations of these three instrumentalities of the state (what Christopher Hood calls the Tools of Government) can then be used to specify more precisely the complex nature of the European model and its internal structure (Hood and Margetts 2007). On the basis of this analysis the European model can be identified as a European TAO – a European ‘way’ or methodology for the management and regulation of religion-state-society relations structured according to the use by public authorities of the government tools of Treasure (T), Authority (A) and Organisation (O). In schematic form the three elements can be displayed by the intersecting circles of a Venn diagram which illustrates the use or non-use (at various dichotomous cut-off points) of each of the three instrumentalities in different countries. In a 2009 exercise using the Fox data 44 of the 45 countries for which there was relevant data on all three elements appeared within the intersecting fields of the Venn diagram, meaning that only one country failed to appear as having no positive score on any of the three (Madeley 2009: 285). Sixteen states (36 %) scored on all three and were therefore located in the central field of maximal crossover, 15 (33 %) scored on two, while the remaining 13 (29 %) scored on only one. A notable finding of the analysis was that France and Turkey, despite their claims to be laïque or laiklik, were found among the 16 countries located in the centre field, indicating their use of the full range of TAO government tools. The analysis appeared to confirm Ferrari’s overall thesis that, despite surface differences, almost all European governments provide graded levels of support for religious institutions and organisations.

The data recorded in the middle columns of Table 3.3 provide another means of detecting and describing some of the differences between Europe’s 50-odd countries as they relate to the mutual entanglement of state authorities and religious bodies (or, as in some cases, ‘communities of faith or conviction’, including secular bodies) and, in addition, provide a proxy measure for autonomous, civil society regulation effects in the field of religion. The data is coded from the information provided by the US State Department Reports on International Religious Freedom for 2005. The GRI (Government Regulation of Religion Index) is based on six variables indicating the incidence of ‘restrictions placed on the practice, profession, or selection of religion by the official laws, policies, or administrative actions of the state’ (Grim and Finke 2006: 7). In terms of the TAO typology these negative sanctions affecting religious freedom can be accounted as exercises of different states’ Authority tool. The GFI (Government Favouritism of Religion Index) on the other hand is based on five variables which indicate the incidence of ‘subsidies, privileges, support, or favourable sanctions provided by the state to a select religion or a small group of religions’ (ibid: 8) (Fig. 3.1).

Fig. 3.1
figure 00031

The European TAO as reflected in Grim and Finke’s GFI/GRI/SRI typology. Attributions are based on all-Europe averages as cut-offs, i.e. all those below the median on a particular measure are excluded from a field. Countries scoring below average on all three measures (and therefore not represented in the diagram) are Albania, Austria, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Poland and Sweden (Source of data: pewresearch.org/pubs/1443/global-restrictions-on-religion accessed on 21 May 2011)

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In terms of the TAO four of the five data points relate to differential government funding of favoured religious bodies and can therefore be taken to measure the use of the Treasure tool to provide positive supports. The table discriminates between the 20 Western European and the 25 Eastern-and-Central European states in order to provide an indication of whether the existence or otherwise of stable consolidated democracy has a bearing on the differences between the principal measures. It is striking that the GFI averages for the two sets of countries are identical when rounded to the nearest whole decimal point (6.4). This finding lends support to the idea that there is indeed an emergent Pan-European model characterised in part by the privileging of the principal mainline religious institutions in both in the Western and Central/Eastern parts of the continent. In the field of governmental regulation using negative sanctions against disfavoured religious groups and practices (GRI), there is on the other hand a significant difference between the low average of 1.2 in Western countries and the higher average of 4.3 in Central and Eastern Europe. In attempting to account for this it would be natural to speculate about the effects of decades of state atheism managed by directories of religious affairs and, more distally perhaps, the connections which might be presumed to exist with the character of the different confessional traditions, Catholicism and Orthodoxy being collectively predominant in Eastern Europe.

In addition to the measures of governmental regulatory activity however – and most notably in the current context – Grim and Finke’s SRI (Social Regulation of Religion) also provides a valuable extra measure focusing on ‘general social attitudes toward religion and the actions of social movements and religious institutions toward other religious groups, especially new, foreign, or minority religions’, in other words the ‘restrictions which groups face from the larger culture and other institutions’ (Grim and Finke 2006: 19). The measure is principally based on data relating to popular and official attitudes towards nontraditional religions, including attitudes to their proselytising, and the way their converts are regarded, and insofar as these receive official endorsement they can be expected to impact on the organisational capacities of the groups affected – i.e. in terms of the TAO they reflect the use of the O tools of government as well of society more generally. Although there is a high correlation between the GRI and SRI indexes, exploratory factor analysis indicated to Grim and Finke, who developed the measure, that they tapped distinct latent factors (Grim and Finke 2006: 21). Insofar as SRI measures negative attitudes in civil society between groups defined by religion, it might be taken to reflect the presence of what some analysts of civil society have dubbed negative social capital. And in the analysis of ‘the new religious pluralism’, it can be taken to indicate civil society endorsement of the vertical dimension which characterises the discriminatory effects of governmental regulation and favouritism.

3.6 Conclusion

The involvement of state authorities in regulating religion in Europe appears to generate increasing controversy. In the western half of the continent relatively stable patterns of cooperative church-state relations have been put in question as new religious groups present the claim that they should not be excluded from access to the same or equivalent benefits received by more established religious bodies. In the context of post-9/11 concerns about Islamic jihadi militancy on the one hand and the suspicions directed against so-called cults and NRMs (New Religious Movements) on the other, such claims for favourable treatment have, unsurprisingly, raised questions about how far, if at all, religious bodies should receive such benefits. In addition to the aggrieved groups who have pressed claims on their own behalf, others have involved themselves and raised the temperature around these and related issues, in particular increasingly voluble groups of humanists and atheists, who have always objected to the fact that religion is made the object of a positive discrimination, which inevitably entails the relative favouring of non- and antireligious groups. For them the fact that ‘communities of conviction’ – and this means overwhelmingly the churches and religious organisations which fought for the measure – are, according to the now ratified 2006 Lisbon Treaty, to be accorded special consultation rights (‘open, transparent and regular dialogue’) with the top officials of the European Union is a characteristic cause of offence as it promises a degree of special treatment not available to other civil society organisations and movements (Madeley 2013). With new departures of this sort, secularists observe that the positive discrimination entailed in Europe’s TAO is set to continue (and in Eastern Europe maybe to increase), rather than to decline or be removed as many theorists of liberal democracy have demanded and most secularisation theorists had always expected. A number of the less-established religious groups have also argued that religion-state entanglements actually tend to compromise and corrupt, rather than to protect or promote, religion itself and should thus be progressively removed. There appears however to be little prospect of this occurring in the near future despite the controversies now surrounding the ‘triangular entanglements’ of state, civil society and religion which continue to characterise Europe.