The political geography of religion: historical state-church relations in Europe and recent challenges |
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| Authors: | Hans Knippenberg |
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| Institution: | (1) Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, Amsterdam, 1018 VZ, The Netherlands |
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| Abstract: | Historical processes of state formation and nation building are crucial for an understanding of the geography of religions
and churches in Europe. Each country has developed its own model of state-church relations, giving rise to a ‘bewildering
variety’ as Grace Davie aptly remarks. The aim of this paper is to bring some order to this variety by developing a framework
for the comparative study of church-state relations based on Stein Rokkan’s famous conceptual map and recent extensions of
it to Central and Eastern Europe by John Madeley. According to that framework Europe has been divided into three mono-confessional
(Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox) blocs and two multi-confessional culture belts from Northwest to Southeast,
and from Northeast to Southeast. This historical pattern has been challenged by secularisation, which started with the Enlightenment
and the French Revolution (Western Europe) and the Russian Revolution (Eastern Europe until the velvet revolutions of 1989/1991)
and then became widespread after the ‘cultural revolutions’ of the 1960s. A second challenge has to do with globalisation
and its consequences, such as massive immigration and the rise of immigrant religions, and in general deterritorialisation,
which means the disembeddedness of religion from its national territory. A third challenge concerns reterritorialisation at
other (supranational, regional, transnational, and local) scales, of which the new territorial order of the European Union
seems to be the most important. Finally, this paper serves as an introduction to the case studies on church-state relations
in this special issue. |
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| Keywords: | Europe Geography of religions Nation building Political geography State-church relations State formation |
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