This paper presents findings from a workshop which will take place at the European University Institute Florence in February 2013 on religious assistance in the military and in prisons in several European countries (Italy, France, UK, Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands) (see: www.religiowest.eu) and tries to formulate some of the theoretical and conceptual challenges that are connected with research on this topic. Firstly, the demand to involve also “newcomer religions” like Islam or Orthodox Christianity in secular Western institutions, in particular the military or prisons, creates pressure on religious communities to follow a specific institutional design that is compatible with established structures. Spiritual assistance consequently becomes modelled on the Christian model of chaplaincy, and the religious communities, confronted with the task to provide suitable personnel, need to work out a specific kind of theology that is similar to Christian pastoral theology. While most involved actors seem to agree on the positive aspects of this development, there are also some negative consequences. These consequences are twofold: firstly, the exclusion of forms of religiosity and spirituality that cannot be easily reconciled with Western Christian patterns of religiosity; secondly, the narrowing down of the definition what constitutes an acceptable “public religion”. The paper wants to suggest (and put to discussion) the observation that the boundaries between religion and the democratic state are not only shifting in order to include religious “newcomers”, but that they are actually being drawn ever more narrowly around what secular public discourse designates as “sacred” to the extent that religious communities as such, whether newcomers or not, may feel excluded.
