ABSTRACT
Even a cursory overview of church-state relations in contemporary Europe reveals what Grace Davie calls ‘a bewildering variety’.1 And if closer attention is paid to the details of different local patterns in respect of the legal status of religious bodies, churches’ internal organisation, the impact of labour law, church financing and the legal status of priests, the overall picture becomes even more bewildering.2 David Martin’s Toward a General Theory of Secularization represents a heroic attempt to identify the key elements which have combined in different historical contexts in Europe to produce the complex mosaic as it stood at the end of the 1970s.3 However, since then much has happened to change the picture in a number of key respects; for example, the collapse of communism around 1989 represented the end of an ice age for religious institutions in Central and Eastern Europe, while in the West large-scale immigration has led to the mushroomlike growth of multicultural settings. This article takes a step back in an attempt to gain perspective on the new picture as it presents itself at the start of the third millennium. It attempts to do this by both narrowing the focus and broadening the scope of inquiry: the focus is restricted to the institutional aspects of what is conventionally called church-state relations and the scope is broadened and deepened by extending it both spatially and temporally.4
