In 1992 Jacques Delors, socialist President of the European Commission, after meeting bishop Klaus Engelhardt, President of the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany, said that “[i]f in the next ten years we haven’t managed to give a soul to Europe, to give it spirituality and meaning, the game will be up (…). This is why I want to revive the intellectual and spiritual debate on Europe. I invite the Churches to participate actively in it” . Although Christian Democrats played a crucial role in the first phase of European Integration and were significant players in the subsequent decades, it was not Christian Democratic politician, who started the process of dialogue between European institutions and different churches. It was not Christian Democracy, who tried to give Europe Christian soul, neither in the fifties, nor during the debates on the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe in the first decade of the 21st century.
The translation of religious worldviews into political programme has always been problematic. In my paper, I would like examine the conceptualisation of ‘religion’, ‘religiosity’, ‘Christianity’, ‘Islam’, ‘the West’, and ‘secularism’ in the official documents of the Christian Democratic party, as well as the use of this term by politicians in official and unofficial documents: in both cases I will concentrate mostly on the European People’s Party. I will analyse documents starting from 1976 when the Party was created till its last programme, adopted in Bucharest in 2012. My main theoretical concern will be twofold: what role can religion play in the context of European liberal democratic consensus, and secondly: does the steady growth of religious issues in the European political debate give the Christian Democrats opportunity for an ideological revival?
