ABSTRACT
Across Europe, a variety of parties and movements are re-claiming the rubric of religion in order to draw boundaries between who should, and who should not, belong to the common European home. From right-populist governments in Hungary and Poland, to the Lega in Italy and the Forum voor Democratie in the Netherlands, the role of supposed ‘Christian values’ in defining what/who Europe is (and should be) has emerged front and centre (see, among others, Hafez, 2018; Lewicki, 2017; Kalmar, 2018; Krzyzanowski, 2013; Scott, 2018). Over the past decade, calls for a ‘reverse crusade’ to protect Europeans both against a looming ‘Islamic takeover’ and ‘enforced secularisation’ by EU institutions have moved into the public arena from what were previously the extreme fringes of acceptable political discourse (Bialasiewicz, 2006). At the same time, recent rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (Scharffs, 2010; Zucca, 2012; McCrea, 2014) have raised fundamental questions regarding the role of religions in public life and public spaces, and have also opened new theoretical debates regarding the scope of religious freedom (Jones, 2017) and the negotiation of the boundaries of state neutrality and liberal democracy (see, for example, Laborde, 2017; Laborde and Bardon, 2017; Balint, 2017).
