Religious Actors and the Contestation of Liberal Democracy: Comparative Insights from EU Accession Contexts

In the context of democratic backsliding and growing political polarisation, religion has re-emerged as a central arena of contestation over liberal democracy, sovereignty, and European integration. This paper examines how churches and religious communities operate as political actors in EU accession and neighbourhood contexts, focusing on Orthodox Churches in Serbia, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Rather than treating religion as inherently anti-democratic or uniformly opposed to European integration, the paper analyses how religious actors selectively mobilise theological, moral, and civilizational narratives to contest specific liberal norms promoted by the EU. The paper asks how and under what conditions religious actors become effective vehicles for populist and illiberal contestation in EU accession-related contexts. The paper argues that churches function as powerful intermediate organisations between the state and society, translating geopolitical anxieties and moral grievances into frames of belonging. In particular, religious actors increasingly frame minority rights, gender equality, secularism, and courts as sites of moral and sovereign contestation, portraying them as domains threatened by an externally imposed liberal agenda. These dynamics are most pronounced where churches are embedded in dense networks of political support, transnational alliances, and where they can rely on high levels of societal trust, enabling them to act as norm antipreneurs or norm spoilers in accession-related reform processes. Empirically, the paper traces how religiously inflected narratives, political alignments, and transnational conservative linkages shape contestation over liberal norms, drawing on a broad range of public statements, political interventions, and societal indicators. Adopting a comparative perspective, the paper explores how differing configurations of religious authority, political alliances and societal trust shape the conditions under which religion becomes politicised in struggles over liberal norms. By juxtaposing cases with varying degrees of institutional entanglement of churches and governing elites, as well as divergent patterns of societal religiosity and support for European integration, the analysis highlights how similar religious narratives can acquire different political meanings and mobilising capacities across contexts. By conceptualising religion as a site of democratic contestation rather than a fixed ideological force, the paper contributes to debates on religious nationalism, populism and the governance of diversity. It shows how religious actors can simultaneously claim democratic legitimacy and undermine liberal-democratic norms, thereby complicating EU efforts to promote liberal transformation in accession and neighbourhood contexts.