Centripetal and centrifugal dynamics of religion and politics at the European Court of Human Rights

The European Court of Human Rights is both a critical site for expressions of the interplay between religion and politics in Europe and a significant actor impacting that interplay at the national and European levels. This dual role of the Court may be expressed in terms of centripetal and centrifugal dynamics. The centripetal dynamic is entailed by problem points at the intersection between religion and politics which come to the Court as a venue for their resolution, and the centrifugal dynamic is that of the Court as an actor impacting the interplay between religion and politics at the national and supranational levels through the ultimate judgments it issues and the broader messages that those judgments communicate about the relationship between religion and politics. This chapter demonstrates the dual role of the Court first through a brief historical overview of the many issues at the intersection between religion and politics that have been addressed by the Court through particular cases and second through attention to particular trends in its case law, trends which, however, are not at all linear in part because of the difficult interactions between religion and politics which result in fluctuations between judicial activism and judicial restraint.