Keywords

1.1 About This Study

The European Values Study (EVS) is the focus of this volume. The triad ‘Values – Politics – Religion’ as indicated in the title of the volume forms the thematic framework within which its dataset was analysed. Based on the data of the past four surveys waves in 1990, 1999, 2008, and 2017,Footnote 1 the authors offer an overview of political and religious values and their interrelationships among the European population. In particular, the authors discuss those political attitudes that are relevant for the functioning of liberal democracies, including a comparison between Western and Eastern European countries, attitudes towards solidarity and immigrants and Muslims, and the political and religious value patterns among people in economically precarious situations. Trends and dynamics related to attitudes towards redistribution, ethnocentrism, and environmental awareness will also be identified. In particular, the impact of religious attitudes on these values areas will be explored.

All of these research topics were already at the centre of public and political debate before the global COVID-19 pandemic broke out during our project – and the researched values will continue to shape political discourses in the years to come. Thus, the empirical evaluations document the values landscape in Europe, which can be considered the starting point for those value developments which can be expected to continue in the course of the ‘crisis permanence’ (Ulrich 2022) present since 2020 at the latest – COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, the subsequent global economic crises, the refugee crisis, etc. Even if in the longer term a transformation of values is to be expected as a result of the growing acceptance of the ‘normality of crises’, we assume that the value dynamics and value cleavages documented by the EVS 2017 will also shape the values debates of the coming years. As values and attitudes usually change only slowly, that is, ‘at the pace of intergenerational population replacement’ (Inglehart et al. 2017: 1313), there will probably be no ‘jumps’ in values among most of the population, but the expected change in values will start from the values before the crises.

The results of the European values Study are embedded in an interdisciplinary discussion of both the findings and the relationship between values, religion, and politics from the perspective of selected disciplines of values research, which critically reflect on this controversial and ambiguous triad from their perspective and analyse it with a view to future prospects.

The following introductory considerations justify the timeliness and relevance of this volume, introduce the European Values Study, clarify the guiding concepts ‘Values – Politics – Religion’, and present the idea, character, structure, and outline of the volume. The research process, aims, and target groups of the study are described and a summary of the individual contributions is offered. The volume is intended as an explorative pilot study that aims at stimulating the further development of interdisciplinary values research and contributing to an in-depth, qualified discourse on values – in particular on the relationship between political and religious values – in society, politics, and religious communities.

1.2 Timeliness and Relevance

The recourse to ‘values’ plays a key role in the public discourse of European societies as well as in the context of the multiple catastrophes and crises with which Europe has been confronted in recent years. The permanence of cumulative and mutually reinforcing crises forces Europe to pose the question of which values will and should meet these challenges. Particularly on the political level, ‘European values’ have been appealed to for quite some time. The political scientists Foret and Calligaro (2018) identify a:

trend that, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, has seen “values” dramatically re-emerge in the political life of the Western democracies. European multilevel governance, both in national, transnational and supranational arenas, makes no exception. In the EU, the enlargements, the geopolitical challenges and the economic crises have triggered debates on the common values susceptible to hold the Member States and citizens together, to justify public action and to ensure the sustainability of the European political, economic and social models. (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 1).

From a political science perspective, this can be seen as a thoroughly positive development, since the reference to values enables the European Union to ‘constitute a new mode to relate to identity and memory’, it provides ‘a new type of narrative’, and offers ‘a fresh way to search for normative resources to assert EU policies and politics’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 2) and to legitimise them. Also, Christof Mandry (Chap. 9, this volume) argues, that value semantics can be interpreted as the solution to the political problem of how the European Union can function as a democracy without being a state in its own right.

Indeed, values can be an enormous resource, insofar as they are ‘collective’ and ‘mental representations’ of what is worth appreciating in a society as good or bad and therefore are always ‘at work – even if only rhetorically – in all human interactions except in extreme cases based only on calculation or power’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 3). From this point of view, it does not seem surprising that the concept of ‘values’ has become the linguistic medium in many European societies by means of which they reassure themselves about questions of individual, social and political ethics.

Nevertheless, such an exclusively positive view of values and values discourses may also be met with scepticism. As many of the contributions to this volume argue, the concept of ‘values’ is not only highly ambiguous, vague, and messy, but also insufficient to solve political problems (see Polak, Chap. 2, this volume). Moreover, as a key concept in political discourses, it is comparatively young and controversial (see Weymans, Chap. 3 and Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume) and raises critical questions with regard to its capacity to solve ethical, legal, and (religious) pedagogical challenges (see Polak, Chap. 2, Konrath, Chap. 11, and Grümme, Chap. 13, this volume). Above all, however, an unreflective affirmative view of values is counteracted by the observation that the values of the European Union, as enunciated in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000/2016) and the Treaty of Lisbon (TEU 2007/2016), are not shared across the board by significant parts of the European population. Although the European Values Study – which originated in the 1980s and thus long before the European canon of values – does not explore attitudes towards the EU’s values explicitly, empirical findings have for decades demonstrated a gap between those values propagated by the European Union, academics, and intellectual elites and those values that can be discerned in significant parts of the European population and regions (Bréchon and Gonthier 2017; Luijkx et al. 2016). The universal and normative claim of European values is especially contradicted by the finding that intolerance, particularist solidarities, and other anti-democratic attitudes are part of the make-up of European citizens (see Part II, and Aschauer, Chap. 12, this volume). Moreover, pride in European values has been clouded for some time by the fact that liberal democracy, the rule of law, and human rights are also disputed within the European Union and affected by erosion processes – be it in the disputes over illiberal democracies in the Visegrád states (Leggewie and Karolewski 2021) or in the restrictive migration and asylum policies of the European Union, including human rights’ violations at its borders (Goździak et al. 2020).

Given these ambivalent findings, the catastrophes that struck Europe during our project raise pressing questions. How will Europeans’ political values discourses and values evolve when the population becomes aware that there most likely will be no return to the ‘normality’ that existed before pandemic and war? How will pre-pandemic value patterns play out when people are confronted with a situation in which ‘calculation or power’ (Foret and Calligaro 2018: 3) is given priority over values, as evidenced by the war of aggression initiated by the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir V. Putin, against Ukraine on 24 February 2022? Will this lead to a revival of the struggle for European values among citizens? Or will it result in regression and thus to a renewed outbreak of already existing value conflicts that endanger cohesion and peace in Europe?

Therefore, the more precisely one knows the initial pre-pandemic situation, the more likely one will be able to set measures that protect, strengthen, and promote the political and social relevance of that canon of values that Europe has successfully struggled for since the end of World War II. Our study aims to contribute to the knowledge of this initial situation by providing social and political elites and stakeholders with detailed and representative insights into the political and policy-relevant values and attitudes of the populations. Moreover, by embedding the results of the EVS in an interdisciplinary discussion, we present contexts in depth that go beyond the concrete empirical results and allow them to be reflected upon from the perspective of disciplines of values research that argue hermeneutically. This multidisciplinary approach is intended to promote the quality of public discourses on values and thus build bridges between the values of the population and the values as propagated by political and scientific elites.

This assessment is in no way intended to encourage the ‘elite bashing’ of populist political movements and parties. However, we do assume that the empirically given values landscape must be taken into account more seriously in order to ensure the preservation, recognition, and further development of European values in times of upheaval. In particular, more attention must be paid to those value patterns that contradict the values of the EU. From the perspective of empirical values research, right-wing populist parties in Europe probably owe their success to the fact that they address and serve attitudes and values that are overlooked by social and political stakeholders and opinion leaders, who do not adequately respond to them, or who instrumentalise them for their interests instead of trying to deeper understand them. Yet understanding of anti-democratic attitudes in no way implies agreement or acceptance. Rather, willingness to engage in dialogue and conflict on an equal footing is required. It is, for example, understandable and sometimes true when an advocate of universal solidarity identifies racism in nationalist attitudes; but they may overlook cultural, social, or historical contexts and thus values that underlie a national self-image. Conversely, someone who rejects the normativity and universality of European values may lack essential knowledge about their ethical meaningfulness or may not realise that problems generated by economic or political crises cannot be solved by a struggle over values alone.

With the apocalyptic horsemen of multiple crises, and above all the war against Ukraine, the granting of more time, space, and resources to such deepening discussions of values is urgent. As the war shakes those values that were agreed in the course of the integration of the European Union after 1989 (see Mandry, Chap. 9, this volume) – not least in the confrontation with suffering, violence, and war – the dramatic consequences of the war may also threaten European values and their acceptance among the population. As the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krăstev (2022) stated:

Russia’s president is destroying not only Ukrainian cities and military and energy infrastructure but also moral and intellectual infrastructure. Politics is not only what governments do, but also includes the arguments they use to justify their actions. By justifying his incursion into Ukraine as a ‘special operation’ to ‘denazify’ the country, the Russian president is raping the moral foundations on which the European order was based.

Preventing this dramatic future moral scenario is therefore central to the political agenda. With our volume, we wish to contribute to this challenge by identifying the resources and crisis zones in the European values landscape. Although the future is open, the face of Europe will change and with it the values of its people. European values are thus facing an immense test. The times of a ‘democracy without enemies’ (‘feindlose Demokratie’, Beck 1995) are over. According to US President Joe Biden, the world faces a ‘battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force’ (Biden 2022). Therefore, it is necessary to fight for European values. We are afraid that the universal values of the European Union are at risk, for at the turning point in time that Europe faces at the very moment as we finish our volume, values change is primarily discussed in terms of security policy, military, and economic aspects.

However, the struggle for European values will only succeed if these values receive unambiguous support from the population. This volume proves that there is potential for both hope and risk in this struggle and provides data, theories, and argumentation to give impetus to the upcoming discourse on values, which can strengthen its effectiveness and sustainability. In our view, such discourses are necessary, because the possibilities and limitations of the concept of values, as well as the findings of interdisciplinary values research, have been given far too little consideration politically and socially to date. Values, in theory and practice, are open to interpretation and ambivalence; they are therefore not always of ethical or even universal quality; and they can stimulate but also polarise. At the same time, they must play a key role in future debates because, as ‘conceptions of the desirable’ (Sedmak 2010: 19; Kluckhohn 1951: 395), they form the basis of ethical decisions and thus belong to the fundamental stock of liberal democracies, which cannot guarantee them themselves (see the ‘Böckenförde-Dictum’Footnote 2). Yuval Harari (2022) states:

At the heart of the Ukraine crisis lies a fundamental question about the nature of history and the nature of humanity: is change possible? Can humans change the way they behave, or does history repeat itself endlessly, with humans forever condemned to re-enact past tragedies without changing anything except the décor?

Inextricably linked to this question of the possibility of human change is the question of values. Do these represent more than a function of society and politics? Do values just flexibly adapt to historical processes experienced as fated – or are humans capable of orienting themselves to values that are ethically responsible and universally valid? Are human beings capable of ethical reasoning because of their capacity for freedom, reason, and transcending given realities – or are they just the results of social and political circumstances?

And What About Religion?

Since the two editors of the volume are practical theologians, a special interest in religion in the context of values research and values discourses is self-evident. However, this volume is not a theological study. Rather, it focusses on the empirical and interdisciplinary study of values, including theology as one contributing discipline. From a practical-theological point of view, only a solid and interdisciplinarily reflected empirical value research enables a theological situation analysis, which is – besides reference to the theological tradition providing criteria for evaluation of the results – the basis for practical consequences. To provide such a theological situation analysis would go beyond the scope of this volume and is reserved for further volumes. Nevertheless, the theological approach to values is presented in the chapter ‘Values: A Contested Concept. Problem Outline and Interdisciplinary Approaches’ (Polak, Chap. 2, this volume). Furthermore, selected practical-theological consequences are provided in the chapter ‘Conclusions, Challenges, Consequences’ (Polak, Chap. 14, this volume), although without detailed theological arguments. For practical theologians also the process of research is decisive because scientific practice is a form of human practice and thus not neutral in terms of underlying worldviews, convictions and ethics, that should consequently be made transparent and reflected. So, establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between the authors of this volume and opening up an academic space of critically reflecting both the EVS and the respective disciplinary approaches is also an implicit expression of the practical-theological background of the editors.

But there are also other reasons why the specific research interest in the influence of religiosity on political attitudes based on the European Values Study are timely and relevant. For one, religiosity is an essential source of values; religious communities influence the values of their members, including political values; and religious traditions harbour values that they contribute to social and political discourses (see Polak, Chap. 2, this volume). Admittedly, these functions of religion have ambivalent effects. Moreover, the concept of religion is as controversial as the concept of values. This ambivalence of religion became as publicly visible in the course of the pandemic with regard to positions on state measures as it did in the war against Ukraine, in which Russian Orthodox priests, arrested as a result of their criticism of Putin, were confronted with the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill, a religious leader who legitimised the neo-imperialist, anti-Western ideology of violence with religious arguments and interpreted it as a fight against evil, that is, as a moral duty (Sooy 2022).

Moreover, the political relevance of religion has become a social, political, and scientific topic in twenty-first century Europe (Boari and Vlas 2013) – as recently as the Islamist terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 11 September 2001. A fundamental and paradoxical change in the role and meaning of religion can also be observed in Europe since 1989. The sociologist of religion Grace Davie (2022) characterises this change on the basis of international empirical studies as follows: while Christianity retains its formative role in European culture, especially in terms of temporal and spatial order through holidays and architectural spatial design, and churches continue to play an important role in the lives of many people, they are losing their influence on the values, attitudes, and behaviour of the majority, especially among the younger generation. As a result, patterns of religious affiliation and commitment have also been noticeably changing for decades on the basis of free choice. Moreover, the influx of religious migrants and refugees into Europe is accelerating religious pluralisation and confronting the more secularised West in particular with new public and political challenges. Although there are clear differences between Western and Eastern Europe with regard to these developments, these dynamics can be observed throughout Europe.

Against this background, which can also be substantiated by the results of our study, Europe is confronted with a paradox: a process of progressive deconfessionalisation and de-churching (mostly referred to as secularisation) and the simultaneous growing importance of religion in public and political discourses as well as the politicisation of religion, which takes over functions in identity politics and nation-building processes (see Polak and Schuster, Chap. 6, this volume). Religion is becoming more important as a topic of political debate, while the importance of religious communities and power is diminishing in the political sphere, that is, changes in political order are leading to a dwindling of possibilities for participation for religious communities in political decision-making (Rosenberger 2022). In the context of migration policy in particular, challenges and new conflict zones have been emerging for some time, which allow us to speak of a ‘hijacking’ of religion (Marzouki et al. 2016) for political and especially populist interests. While in Western Europe this development has led to a declining influence of the more liberal church leaderships in migration issues (Rosenberger 2022), the cooperation between conservative church leaders with national governments has increased in Eastern Europe (Pickel and Sammet 2012). This reveals a thoroughly contradictory understanding of religion (Rosenberger 2022): while ‘Christian values’ and religion as ‘Christian culture’ are experiencing a discursive revaluation, religion is considered a private matter, which, when it comes to Islam, has no right to publicity. At the same time, in the context of democratic political debates on gender and sexual ethics as well as bioethical issues, religious communities prove to be highly active (for example, in Germany; see Pickel and Liedhegener 2016) but internally divided actors who support or block the change of values regarding these controversial issues.

Although our study is not a political science study, these dynamics form the background for this volume’s interest in the impact of religion on political values. The central question is whether and how this relationship between religious and political values is reflected at the level of the values of Europeans and what an interdisciplinary perspective can contribute to understanding this relationship from diverse academic approaches. For religion will play a fiercely contested but irrepressible and vital role in the upcoming discourses on values. The more precisely these relationships can be described empirically and interpreted in an interdisciplinary way, the more political and religious actors and institutions will be able to identify and promote the contribution of religion to the debates on European values. Thus, our volume offers insights into the influence of religion on political attitudes that go beyond empirical findings and are comparatively rarely considered in research on the relationship between values, politics, and religion.

1.3 The European Values Study

This volume is fundamentally based on data from the EVS. The EVS is an empirical, large-scale, cross-national, longitudinal, and representative survey research programme on basic human values. Its research focuses on the values, attitudes, beliefs, and opinions of European citizens in the areas of family, work, religion, politics, and society (European Values Study 2022a).

The roots of the EVS go back to the 1970s. Initiated by two Catholic theologians – Jan Kerkhofs (Catholic University of Leuven/Belgium) and Ruud de Moor (Tilburg University/The Netherlands) – the European Values Systems Study Group (EVSSG) was established in 1978 as an informal group of social science academics to study moral and social values underlying European institutions. Questions addressed included the following: Do Europeans share common values? Are values changing in Europe – and if so, in what direction? What role do Christian values play in the context of a changing meaning of religion in life and the public sphere? Is a replacement by an alternative system of meaning taking place? What are the implications for the European unification process?

Between 1981 and 1983, the EVSSG conducted the first wave of the EVS and in an international comparison studied the values of Europeans in twelve European countries, which were called the ‘Community of the Twelve’ then, using a standardised questionnaire. Since then, four further waves took place at intervals of nine years: 1990, 1999, 2008, and 2017, in which an increasing number of countries participated. In the meantime, the European Values Study is an internationally renowned, professionally institutionalised research centre, which is managed by the Council of Programme Directors, who are responsible for the general outlines of the project, the approval of the final questionnaire, and the survey method, which must be used across all participating countries to ensure the comparability of the data. The Theory Group develop the questionnaire and the Methodology Group ensure the quality of the project. The EVS is steered by the Executive Committee, which is chaired by Ruud Luijkx (Tilburg University/The Netherlands). The Department of Practical Theology at the Catholic-Theological Faculty at the University of Vienna, to which the editors of this volume belong, became a member of the EVS in 1990. In 2017 it established a cross-faculty Research Network ‘Interdisciplinary Values Research’ (n.d.) including the Faculty of Catholic Theology, the Faculty of Social Sciences, the Faculty of Philosophy and Education, the Faculty of Psychology, the Faculty of Law, and the Rectorate of the University of Vienna.

For 2017, data are available for a total of 37 European countries, from Portugal to Russia and from Iceland to Serbia (European Values Study n.d.). The data on the five waves provide information showing that value transformation processes have been taking place in the values landscape of various European countries, but to different degrees and at different speeds, and in some cases in different directions (European Values Study 2021). These developments are strongly influenced by various contextual factors (including political and socio-economic conditions in the respective countries as well as historical events and constellations), which the authors of this volume have repeatedly taken into account in their argumentation.

The major strength of the EVS is that it allows replication and comparison over time in many European countries. In the meantime, very extensive data are available, which offer a wide range of possibilities for analysis. In addition, the data sets and questionnaires are stored free of charge for scientific purposes in the data archive of GESIS. There one can also find the integrated data set (European Values Study 2021) across all previous survey waves and participating countries, which – unless otherwise stated – also forms the basis for the empirically oriented chapters of this book. There is also further information, for example, on the questionnaires used. In addition, the website of the European Values Study (European Values Study 2022) contains a bibliography with a wide range of literature that deals with the EVS data on various key topics that are updated regularly. More than 2800 publications have been published on the surveys (European Values Study 2022b).

At the same time, however, the EVS also has a few blind spots that should not be concealed. First, the theoretical concept of values was not developed to the highly differentiated theoretical level that can be observed in social science and other disciplines of values research today, as at the start of this project ‘there was no grand claim for any unified theory of human values’ (Arts and Halman 2011: 79). Instead, the EVSSG assumed that there were European values patterns that constitute systems – an idea that was refuted by the results in 1981 and led to the question regarding which social scientific theories could be applied to interpret the findings of the EVS. Since then, modernisation theory and (new) institutionalism were the guiding paradigms to understand value patterns (Arts and Halman 2011). However, the lack of a precise understanding of concepts has shaped the EVS from its start. This applies in particular to the items related to politics and religion (see Sect. 1.4). Second, the more recent developments since the beginning of the EVS require a balancing act between the change of questions and the comparable interpretability (over time). Moreover, there are also aspects of so-called measurement equivalence, which have recently been discussed more closely and which relate, among other things, to the possible difficulties with regard to comparability as a result of the respective translations used, since the questionnaires are presented in the official language(s) of the participating countries respectively. A final point then relates to the different survey dates (that is, data from EVS 2017 were collected between 2017 and 2021), which may contain situational effects to a greater or lesser extent.

This volume explicitly refers to the past four survey waves in 1990, 1999, 2008, and 2017, as data are available for most European countries. In this respect, it is possible to examine changes and developments over a period of almost three decades. For the purpose of comprehensibility, in the empirical chapters that refer to the EVS data the questions and items used are labelled with a letter (Q for Questions and v for variables) and a number. These labels refer to the CAPI Master Questionnaire of the most recent EVS wave (European Values Study 2020) and are intended to ensure the traceability of the variables and items used.

The results of the EVS are not only of interest from a social science perspective, but also to a wider audience of social scientists, politicians, managers, journalists, and stakeholders in various social institutions such as schools, universities, religious communities, or civil society organisations. Therefore, the data is also a useful resource for educating young people about Europe and its values and promoting a better understanding of each other.

1.4 Description of the Volume

1.4.1 Concepts

The triad ‘Values – Politics – Religion’ forms the umbrella under which this volume presents its findings. Admittedly, all three terms are scientifically controversial and ambiguous concepts that can be understood in a highly heterogeneous way – empirically, hermeneutically, or normatively – in different disciplines of values research. Equally complex and plural, their mutual relationship can be theorised.

Since the EVS is at the centre of this volume, we started and based our project on the meanings these terms have had in this long-term study, which we present now in a first step.

  1. (a)

    ‘Values’

As a result of the genesis of the EVS, the concept of values in the EVS does not correspond to the contemporary status quo of the scientific discussion of this concept; nor does it have a consistent definition. Nevertheless, from a sociological perspective, the EVS data offer a rich and valuable repository of information about attitudes, ideas, convictions, beliefs, etc. that are related to values and express what people consider valuable. This enables sociologists, through interpretation by current theories of values, culture, and society, to make quite valid statements about how attitudes correlate with each other, which political and religious preferences and value patterns can be detected, and how these can be interpreted – for example, in the context of theories of liberal democracy, solidarity, or secularisation theories (see Part II in this volume).

  1. (b)

    ‘Politics’

The term ‘politics’ is also not clearly defined in the EVS. Rather, the questionnaire comprises a wealth of questions that can be assigned to different levels of politics, policy, and polity or that refer to political and policy-relevant attitudes, depending on the theoretical concept chosen for interpretation. Like work, family, leisure time, friends and acquaintances, politics is understood as an area of life. Furthermore, the survey asks about interest in politics; political self-assessment (left–right); participation in political activities (for example, signing petitions, joining boycotts, strikes, etc.); attitudes towards democracy; preferences for political systems; attitudes towards the state and the government; trust in political and social institutions (parliament, police, social security system, UN, etc.); active and passive participation in political activities (for example, political activism); active and passive institutional affiliations (for example, in voluntary organisations, including religious communities); proximity to the nation, to Europe and to the world; and attitudes towards immigrants, Muslims, and homosexuals, which allows statements to be made about Europeans’ willingness to show solidarity and tolerance.

  1. (c)

    ‘Religion’

The EVS defines the term religion comparatively precisely, albeit traditionally. The focus is on the self-assessment of subjective religiosity, whereby the concept of religion is oriented towards the classic sociological dimensions of a denominational self-image, agreement with statements of faith, religious practice (for example, prayer, attendance at religious services), and active and passive membership in religious communities, and thus, for the sake of long-term comparison, is still primarily shaped by a Christian understanding of religion (see Polak and Schuster, Chap. 6, this volume). Specific statements about the religiosity of members of other religious communities and alternative spirituality are therefore only possible to a limited extent and are also not possible due to the lack of representativeness of most national samplings. It is also not possible to make statements about religious communities as political actors and their influence on political attitudes. The volume also refrains from evaluating the impact of religiosity according to denominational self-image and affiliation.Footnote 3 However, in view of the influence of Christian churches on political attitudes, as is particularly evident in the role of parts of the Orthodox Church in the Russian war against Ukraine, this should be a central topic for further analysis of the EVS data.

1.4.2 Empirical Research Questions

While conceptualising this volume, the sometimes messy and vague terminology of the EVS on values, politics, and religion led us to the decision to address this weakness through an interdisciplinary research process that takes advantage of the richness and strength of the EVS data material and at the same time reflects its problems and weaknesses. This explains the character and structure of this volume as well as the volume’s research process, all of which are outlined below in a second step.

Previous results of the EVS (Polak and Schachinger 2011; Doebler 2015), current research in the sociology of religion and political science (see references in Pickel and Pickel, Chap. 5; Polak and Schuster, Chap. 6; Aschauer, Chap. 12, this volume), and public discourses have led us to focus on the questions of how the development of political attitudes is represented in the European values landscape and how religious attitudes affect them when analysing the data of the EVS 2017. Religion has been shown to have a significant impact on political attitudes (see references in Polak and Schuster, Chap. 6, this volume). In this volume, we would like to explore this issue in more depth and in a more differentiated way based on the EVS. At the same time, the topic of religion – at least since 9/11 – has become a conflictive and contested issue in political discourses. In this context, the recourse to values – especially religious (that is, Christian and Islamic) values – plays a central role (Mattes 2016). As already mentioned, the decline in subjective religiosity, which has been documented for some time, contrasts with an increase in the political significance of the topic of religion. Moreover, religious communities also legitimise their social and political contributions by referring to values (Polak 2011). The change in political significance or the influence of political discourse on religiosity cannot be measured with the help of the EVS data. However, it is possible to make representative statements about the empirical basis of this close connection between values, politics, and religion at the level of individuals and the European population. In particular, the following questions were of interest to the Research Network ‘Interdisciplinary Values Research’ (n.d.) to which the two editors belong and with which the topics for this volume were identified:

  1. 1.

    What is the state of those political attitudes in the European population that are relevant to democratic politics, and what impact do religious attitudes and values have in this context? Is it possible to observe a difference between Western and Eastern Europe?

  2. 2.

    How can the impact of religiosity on political attitudes be understood in more depth and precisely, that is, is it really religiosity as such that has an effect, or do other factors also have an impact?

  3. 3.

    How is solidarity shaped in the European population, both in terms of range and quality? And what impact does religiosity have on the solidarity of Europeans? This question has repeatedly become virulent in political discourses, especially since the refugee crisis in 2015, and the answer to it is highly relevant for the cohesion of the European Union in view of multiple and cumulative crises.

  4. 4.

    What political and religious value patterns can be observed among those classes that receive little attention in values studies and values discourses: people in precarious socio-economic circumstances?

To answer the research questions listed, only data from the questionnaire that relate to the areas of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ in the narrower sense are used. This choice does not take into account those attitudes and values that relate to the so-called ‘private’ area of life (e.g. family, work, gender, economy, moralities), which are also provided by the EVS. Undoubtedly, these values on the micro-level of life have an impact on political attitudes (and vice versa) and are by no means ‘private’. So, our choice carries the risk of giving the impression of separating ‘private’ and ‘political’ attitudes and thus contributes to the depoliticisation of daily life values and individual moralities – a dynamic that currently puts the political system under pressure and is a far too little discussed cause of the crisis of democracy. But research needs focusing. So, the research on the impact of religiosity on ‘end-of-life’ values (Halman and Sieben, Chap. 4, this volume) pays only one, but important tribute to the nexus of so-called ‘private’ and ‘political’ values, as this issue is highly politicised and religious communities and institutions play an ambivalent role in this sphere.

1.4.3 Interdisciplinary and Explorative Character

During the project conception, it became clear that the character of the EVS makes it necessary to approach the research triad from the perspective of other disciplines of values research too, in order to be able to discuss in depth the questions arising from their mutual relationships. For this reason, from the outset the volume was designed to be interdisciplinary. Thus, it is not an exclusively social science study that is presented here. Rather, the volume is intended as an exploratory contribution to the further development of increased interdisciplinary research on values, which is to be developed in the future. Since at the beginning of our project there was no comprehensive theory for interdisciplinary research on the relationship between values, politics, and religion, we consider it a first necessary step to make visible the subject-specific approaches to the topic from the perspective of the respective disciplines. The interdisciplinary contributions therefore reflect on the issues from those perspectives. The following questions were of particular interest to us:

  1. 1.

    What are ‘values’? What questions are raised while evaluating the data of the European Values Study? And what understanding of values can different scientific disciplines contribute to the discourse on values, particularly with regard to religion?

  2. 2.

    How does the concept of values enter the political discourse of the European Union from a historical perspective? And what role does religion play in this?

  3. 3.

    What long-term developments and transformations can be identified on the basis of EVS data with regard to the influence of religion on value attitudes?

Furthermore, we selected three exemplary perspectives on our topic that play or should play a central role in current discourses on values in the context of religion and politics:

  1. 1.

    How can the concept of values be used in the political context of the European Union in an ethically responsible way?

  2. 2.

    What role do values and religion play in a politically and everyday powerful area of people’s lives, that is, in the field of economics? This question is intended to make the relationship visible in an exemplary practical field.

  3. 3.

    What is the relationship between values, politics, and religion from a legal perspective?

Finally, one of the practical-theological concerns of an interdisciplinary study is to formulate future perspectives and perspectives for action based on scientific research, which are relevant not only for the scientific community, but also for stakeholders in society, politics, and religious communities. In doing so, we ask the following questions:

  1. 1.

    What social and political challenges will arise in the future on the basis of value trends to be identified in the EVS? And what influence does religion have on them?

  2. 2.

    What can a (religious) pedagogical perspective contribute to better understand the impact of religiosity on political attitudes and thus to better shape them with the aim of promoting democratic values?

  3. 3.

    What conclusions, consequences, and challenges result from the project’s findings for social, political, and religious actors and institutions, especially for the EU and religious communities, as well as for the European Values Study and interdisciplinary values research?

Since neither theoretical nor methodological concepts and thus scientific standards of interdisciplinary values research have been available so far, the authors have oriented themselves in a first step to the classical model of interdisciplinary values research as formulated by the EVS: values research situates itself in four levels and distinguishes between (a) an ‘empirical-descriptive level’ that documents ‘what is the case’; (b) an ‘explicative-theoretical level’ that interprets ‘how this can be explained’; (c) a ‘normative level’ that reflects ‘what should be the case’; and (d) a ‘pragmatic level’ that asks ‘what consequences result from this’ (cf. the relation model between (social) sciences and policymaking of Arts and Halman 2011: 96–97).

From this point of view, the sociological contributions correspond to levels (a) and (b), the contributions from the hermeneutic and normative sciences offer exemplary approaches to level (c), and in the part ‘Future Prospects’, elements of level (d) are outlined. Nevertheless, this four-level model did not seem sufficient to answer our questions, since we lacked essential perspectives of interdisciplinary values research, including an interdisciplinary discussion of the controversial concept of values, a historical, a socio-ethical, a legal, an economic, and an educational science perspective. We have therefore modified the four-level model and structured the volume along our research questions in order to make visible its interdisciplinary and exploratory character and to explicitly unfold the heterogeneity of approaches and put them up for discussion. Accordingly, the volume is divided into four parts, which are now concretised as follows.

1.4.4 Structure

The first part provides ‘Basic Research’ (Chaps. 2, 3, and 4) and discusses the contested meaning of values from an interdisciplinary perspective, searches for the political use of the concept of values in the European Union from the perspective of cultural history, and researches the importance of religion in the religious and moral spheres of Europeans from a general empirical perspective. Accordingly, the contributions provide a conceptual clarification of the concept of values, including results from the debates among our team of authors and experts and approaches from different academic disciplines of values research (Regina Polak, Vienna/Austria); a cultural-historical examination of the use, content, and impact of the term ‘European values’ in EU institutions (Wim Weymans, Louvain-la-Neuve/Belgium); and a sociological overview on the transformation of the impact of religion on moral values and attitudes with the example of ‘end-of-life’ values in the last 30 years (Loek Halman & Inge Sieben, Tilburg/The Netherlands).

The second part (Chaps. 5, 6, 7, and 8) presents results from four ‘In-Depth Analyses’ based on the EVS data. First, a comparison between political culture and democratic values across Europe is provided, including the analysis of the significance of religious values for political values under conditions of advanced secularisation (Susanne Pickel, Duisburg-Essen/Germany & Gert Pickel, Leipzig/Germany). Second, the impact of religiosity on political values is investigated with the example of the attitudes of Europeans towards immigrants and Muslims, as these are crucial for liberal democracy and a focal point of conflict on values, politics, and religion (Regina Polak, Vienna/Austria & Dirk Schuster, Krems/Austria). Third, as solidarity is one of the core European values, an empirical overview on attitudinal solidarity among the European population is offered (Markus Quandt, Cologne/Germany & Vera Lomazzi, Bergamo/Italy). Fourth, a special focus is put on the political and religious values of the social class of the poor and marginalised – the ‘invisibles’ – who are rarely at the centre of values surveys (Pierre Bréchon, Grenoble/France).

In the third part (Chaps. 9, 10, and 11) exemplary ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ are provided. Three selected disciplines of values research reflect the relationship between values, politics, and religion: social ethics, economics, and law provide theories, arguments, and practical experiences by which the empirical results can be discussed in an interdisciplinary perspective. First, the concept of European values is explored from the perspective of social ethics, arguing that these values should be understood as normative political values for Europe as an ‘imagined community’ (Christof Mandry, Frankfurt am Main/Germany). Second, cognisant the origin of the concept of values in economy, the importance and relevance of (normative) values in companies and management is shown, in particular documented by the importance companies should attach to human rights as a universal catalogue of values (Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi, Vienna/Austria). Third, a legal approach shows that legal debates and conflicts could support a better understanding of the circumstances and contingencies of the creation of (religious) values and norms (Christoph Konrath, Vienna/Austria).

The fourth and last part (Chaps. 12, 13, and 14) aims to provide ‘Future Prospects’ based on the discussions of the previous parts and developing them further from different angles, with a special focus on empirically observed future challenges and practical conclusions, consequences, and challenges. First, three main social and political challenges in Europe and the role values and religion play in them are identified from a sociological point of view (Wolfgang Aschauer, Salzburg/Austria). A religious-pedagogical perspective identifies the contributions religious pedagogy can provide to the current values discourses in Europe (Bernhard Grümme, Bochum/Germany). Finally, conclusions from the contributions and the research process are drawn, and consequences and challenges for different areas – including tasks for EU politics, religious actors, and communities, for the EVS and for interdisciplinary values research – are formulated.

Thus, the volume does not offer a comprehensive synthesis, but aims to explicitly recognise the plurality and complexity of approaches to the subject matter in an explorative way, in order to better name and reflect on the tensions and contradictions of interdisciplinary values research and thus to be able to better deal with them in the future (see Polak, Chap. 14, this volume). This also corresponds to the self-conception of practical theology, which above all raises the diversity of perspectives on the object of research synthesis on an inductive basis, in order to enrich the scientific and public discourse. Moreover, the differences between disciplines are also recognised as the central place to identify future challenges for practice and scholarship (see Polak, Chap. 14, this volume). Therefore, this volume does not offer a universal theory on the triad of values, politics, and religion, but aims to provide readers with different disciplinary and methodological perspectives by means of which the complex topic can be reflected on the basis of our research questions.

1.4.5 Research Process

In keeping with the exploratory nature of our project, we deliberately refrained from providing the authors with a normative-analytical theoretical framework for the triad of ‘Values – Politics – Religion’ or with definitions of terms that go beyond the EVS and to which they must all submit. What we predefined when starting the project with our authors were the concepts of the EVS, the respective research questions concretising the meta-theme of the volume, and the task of transparently demonstrating and justifying the terminology and the theoretical and methodological approaches the authors chose to use. We also asked our authors to establish cross-references to other contributions, which were also considered critical.

In this way, we wanted to stimulate an interdisciplinary dialogue around the EVS and to ensure that the diversity of disciplinary approaches was as visible as possible. The research results were not to be restricted by an overall standardising theoretical and conceptual framework, but were to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the EVS as deeply as possible and to answer the research questions in the most plural way. Furthermore, we aimed at making optimal use of the expertise of our authors, so that the widest possible space for interdisciplinary discourse was opened up within the team of authors. We therefore defined interdisciplinarity not only as multiperspectivity on the research subject, but also as a communication process between the authors, which was to be reflected in a research process in which the editors defined themselves as leaders and moderators.

As authors of the volume, the following researchers participated in this process (in alphabetical order):

  • Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Aschauer (Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Salzburg/Austria)

  • Prof. em. Dr. Pierre Bréchon (Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Sciences po Grenoble/France)

  • Mag. Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi (Sustainability Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers Vienna/Austria)

  • Prof. Dr. Bernhard Grümme (Chair for Religious Pedagogics and Catechetics at the Faculty for Catholic Theology, Ruhr-University Bochum/Germany)

  • Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Loek Halman (Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University/The Netherlands)

  • Dr. Christoph Konrath (Constitutional expert and political scientist in the Austrian Parliamentary Administration, Vienna/Austria)

  • Ass.-Prof. Dr. Vera Lomazzi (Assistant Professor in Sociology at the Department of Management at the University of Bergamo/Italy)

  • Prof. Dr. Christof Mandry (Chair for Moral Theology and Social Ethics, Department of Catholic Theology at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main/Germany)

  • Prof. Dr. Gert Pickel (Chair of Sociology of Religion and Church at the Department of Sociology of Religion at Leipzig University/Germany)

  • Prof. Dr. Susanne Pickel (Chair of Comparative Politics at the Department of Political Science, University of Duisburg-Essen/Germany)

  • Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Regina Polak (Head of the Department of Practical Theology at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Vienna/Austria)

  • Dr. Markus Quandt (Senior Researcher and Team Leader at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne/Germany)

  • Mag. Patrick Rohs (University Assistant (pre-doc) at the Department of Practical Theology at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Vienna/Austria)

  • Dr. Dirk Schuster (University Assistant (post-doc) at the Center for Museum Collections Management at the University for Continuing Education Krems/Austria)

  • Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Inge Sieben (Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Tilburg University/The Netherlands)

  • Prof. Wim Weymans PhD (Chair in European Values at UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve/Belgium)

At the beginning of the project, the authors each received their specific research questions and were invited to choose the exemplary data as well as the theoretical framework necessary for the evaluation for the in-depth analyses or the theoretical approach for the hermeneutic contributions themselves. The challenge was to relate the concepts of the EVS to theories that correspond to the scientific status quo. In the case of the concept of values, the need for a fundamental reflection on this concept and its strengths and weaknesses for political discourse quickly became apparent. In the case of the concept of politics, theoretical concepts of liberal democracy emerged as the guiding paradigm. The concept of religion revealed for the EVS the urgent need to focus not only on individual religiosities, but to take better account of the complex embedding of religiosity in social, political, cultural, and historical contexts and to further develop the leading paradigms of modernisation and secularisation theory in the future. Moreover, it was necessary for the sociological contributions to answer the research questions using exemplar data and topics. We also left it to the sociologists of the in-depth analyses to select the countries to be considered in each case. The authors selected the focus on certain countries based on the criteria defined by them. Therefore, in most of the empirical chapters, individual countries were also combined to form clusters of regions. Here, too, the editors refrained from a uniform specification. An overview of the individual country abbreviations (which follow the ISO-3166-1 alpha-2 code) and the assignment to the respective regional cluster can be found separately in the ‘Front Matter’ section of the book.

For joint discussions on the chosen theoretical and methodological approaches, all authors of the volume met in three half-day workshops – on 26 November 2020, 10 February 2021, and 7 May 2021. These meetings were held online because of the pandemic. In each case, the authors presented the current status of their contributions, received feedback from us and from each other, and then finalised their contributions in multiple feedback loops and in consultation with the editors. The in-depth analyses were completed first, and the authors of the other sections were then encouraged to refer to them in order to strengthen the internal cohesion of the volume. This process fostered dialogue between empirical and non-empirical researchers and allowed for mutual critical queries and the identification of issues for interdisciplinary values research. The discussion results were then taken into account in further processes by the authors and in the development of future perspectives.

Furthermore, a half-day workshop with external experts from academia, EU policy, and religious communities took place on 1 June 2021. These experts received the in-depth analyses and selected hermeneutic texts and were asked for feedback, which they discussed with the authors. The experts were asked to identify particularly noteworthy findings and to interpret them from their respective scientific and professional perspectives, to reflect on the possibilities and limits of the concept of values in political and religious discourses, and to name concrete practical challenges that arise for politics, society, religious communities, and education in view of the scientific findings.

The participants in this expert workshop were (in alphabetical order):

  • Dr. Jehoshua Ahrens (Central Europe Director of the Center for Jewish-Christian Understanding and Cooperation; member of the Orthodox Rabbinical Conference, Germany)

  • Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Heiner Bielefeldt (Chair in Human Rights and Human Rights Politics, Institute of Political Science, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg/Germany)

  • Prof. Dr. Sophie van Bijsterveld (Chair in Religion, Law and Society, Department of Empirical and Practical Religious Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen/The Netherlands)

  • Dr. Vincent Depaigne (European Commission, Coordinator for Dialogue with Churches, Religious Associations and Communities, Philosophical and Non-Confessional Organisations, Brussels/Belgium)

  • Prof. Jonathan Fox PhD (Yehuda Avner Professor of Religion and Politics, Department of Political Science, Bar Ilan University Ramat Gan/Israel)

  • ao. Prof. Dr. Christian Friesl (Head of the Research Network ‘Interdisciplinary Values Research’, Vienna/Austria)

  • Mag. Eduard Hulicius (Member of the Cabinet of Vera Jourová and Commissioner for Values and Transparency in the European Commission, Brussels/Belgium)

  • Dr. Harald Jauk (Policy Advisor for Foreign and Social Affairs to Othmar Karas [Vice President and Member of the European Parliament], Vienna/Austria)

  • Prof. András Máté-Tóth PhD (Professor for Study on Religions, University of Szeged/Hungary)

  • Prof. Dr. Manfred Nowak (Professor of International Human Rights, University of Vienna/Austria; Secretary General of the Global Campus of Human Rights)

  • Assoc.-Prof. Dr. Gergely Rosta (Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest/Hungary)

  • Prof. Dr. Linda Woodhead (FD Maurice Professor and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London/England)

With the permission of the experts, we were allowed to take up their ideas, suggestions, critical comments, and questions in anonymised form as inspiration. In particular, the discussion with the experts made it necessary to present those problematic issues that are associated with the use of the concept of values in political and religious policy areas in the ‘Basic Research’ section, which discusses the understanding of ‘values’. The concrete practical suggestions of the experts are reflected in the identification of conclusions, consequences, and challenges, and have been further elaborated independently by the editors.

This complex, multi-loop interdisciplinary research process means that the present study is characterised by a plurality of perspectives, high complexity, and also contradictions, and sometimes raises more questions than clear answers. This deliberate keeping open of perspectives may be irritating from the point of view of a classical social-scientific and also an ethical approach to the discourse on values in the context of religion and politics; however, it reflects not only the complexity of the negotiated topic, but above all the status quo of interdisciplinary research on values, which in the future will face the task of developing a qualified meta-theory as well as methodology, which this volume cannot and does not provide. Rather, the research process of our study has revealed that the various disciplines of values research are still working largely independently of each other at the present time and that there is a great need for mutual understanding and deeper cooperation. At the same time, this explorative study has opened up a space for a qualified scientific discourse on values, as the editors would also like to see happen for public and political debates, religious communities, and the education system, in which plurality, contradictions, and tensions are just as evident – only rarely reflected. This volume aims to tame the associated discursive arbitrariness of public and political values discourses based on scientific findings and to cultivate them in the direction of qualified plurality. It became clear that no discipline of values research can sufficiently explain this complex phenomenon without interdisciplinary dialogue. Empirical studies such as the EVS can present value landscapes descriptively and interpret them in sociological terms, but must be subject to questioning with regard to their hermeneutical and ethical foundations and consequences; the hermeneutical disciplines, in turn, must be prepared to be critically questioned as to what is the empirical basis on which they make claims about values and value developments in the population in the context of politics and religion.

1.4.6 Goals and Target Groups

This brings the goals and target groups of the volume into view. In addition to the scientific goals – analysing the international dataset of the EVS with a focus on political values and their relationship to religion from empirical as well as theoretical perspectives along the described questions and from an interdisciplinary perspective – this volume aims primarily to make a scientific contribution to the current public and political discourses on values and to provide empirical and hermeneutical foundations for this purpose, and to formulate normative as well as practical future prospects for society, politics, and religious institutions. In this way, the values of the European Union – especially liberal democracy, solidarity, and tolerance – are to be promoted and the value conflicts between Western and Eastern Europe are to be understood in greater depth and made easier to deal with. The volume is therefore not only of academic relevance, but also aims to make a practically oriented contribution to values debates and to improve their standard and impact. Through the exploration of the possibilities and boundaries of the concept of values in political and religious discourses, the presentation of empirical foundations and the interdisciplinary discussion of the triad ‘Values – Politics – Religion’, the quality of values discourses as well as the values education of the population shall be improved and stimulated. Thus, the volume hopefully represents a first and inspiring step and a mine of ideas for further projects for interdisciplinary values research.

The target groups of the volume are therefore not only peer academics of different fields of values research (for example, social sciences, political and cultural studies, economic studies, philosophy, ethics, pedagogy, theology, law), but also stakeholders in society, politics, education, and religious communities on the national and EU level. Besides, the volume is also suitable for graduate students as an introduction to interdisciplinary values research.

1.5 Summaries

Finally, we will now present the most important findings and results of the individual contributions to our study along the lines already described.

Part I: Basic Research

In her contribution, Regina Polak (Vienna/Austria) deals with the polysemy of the concept of values. She justifies the relevance of the EVS for interdisciplinary values research, but also identifies the critical questions to be asked of empirical values research: the question of the normativity of values, that is, whether there are ethical and unethical values; the question of universal values and their relationship to particular values; the question of the ambiguous understanding of ‘European values’ and the values of the European Union; the question of the political functions of values and the deeper understanding of values conflicts. Despite the conceptual chaos that becomes apparent in the course of this problem outline, the author considers the concept of values as a good possibility for pluralistic societies to assure themselves of their ethical orientations in the political discourse, if criteria such as its historical connection or the necessity of ethical reflection are guaranteed. Similarly ambivalent is the relationship between religion and values, which the author discusses further, especially when, for example, religion becomes an identity marker in the context of political discourse or, conversely, values become a kind of ‘new religion’. After exploring the complexity of the issues discussed, the article further offers an overview of the genesis of the concept of values as well as the understanding of values in selected scientific disciplines of values research, and identifies their respective contributions to a responsible use of the concept of values, with particular attention paid to the social scientific, ethical, and theological contributions. Nevertheless, even a scientific approach does not allow for a consensus on what values are.

Wim Weymans (Louvain-la-Neuve/Belgium) examines how the use, content, and impact of the notion ‘European values’ in European institutions has changed over time and describes in which contexts and with which arguments the term has been used throughout the development of the European Union. He distinguishes between a conservative Christian definition of the term originating in the Cold War era and a more inclusive secular understanding. While values were not prevalent in the early days after the Second World War, the invocation of European values has increased since the 1990s. The latter, more secular definition of values arose after the end of the Cold War, when European institutions and politicians increasingly started to use ‘European values’ to legitimise the European project after rival notions such as that of a ‘European identity’ or a ‘social Europe’ proved less useful. The author also shows how some of today’s tensions surrounding the concept of European values can be explained by these historical developments as a tension between the new, more abstract version of European values and their conservative origins. Furthermore, he critically examines the Catholic and Protestant influence on European values. Finally, he provides a possible way out of the predicament.

In their contribution, Loek Halman and Inge Sieben (Tilburg/The Netherlands) investigate value transformations in the religious and moral landscape of Europe within the past 30 years to examine the impact of religion on values. In particular, they focus on moral values and explore the linkage between so-called ‘end-of-life’ morality (such as the acceptance of abortion, euthanasia, and suicide) and religious indicators at a contextual level, that is, in countries in defined regions, and at the individual level. Therefore, they distinguish between the effect of religious practices and religious beliefs on people’s moral views. They show that institutional religious engagement is a stronger predictor of rejecting abortion, euthanasia, and suicide than religious beliefs, although the relation is not that strong. At the country level, higher levels of secularisation go hand in hand with greater permissiveness towards those ‘end-of-life’ issues. While Europe has become more permissive regarding ‘end-of-life’ morality in the last three decades and traditional moral values are still connected to religious practice and religious beliefs, the influence of religion on moral values seems to weaken.

Part II: In-Depth Analyses

Susanne Pickel (Duisburg-Essen/Germany) and Gert Pickel (Leipzig/Germany) examine how political culture and democratic values compare across Europe and what the significance of religious values is for political values under conditions of advancing secularisation. They further question whether the democratic political culture remains stable in Western and Eastern Europe’s democracies and whether religion and religiosity act as obstacles to anti-democratic developments or combine with often traditionalist-oriented positions of right-wing populists and anti-democrats. Although the European Values Study confirms that a high level of legitimacy is still attached to democracy, there are massive differences in support for the current democratic system, with a strong openness to alternative anti-democratic systems in Eastern Europe which helps right-wing populists to gain influence and power. Massive differences in satisfaction with democracy can be observed, and these show the fragility of the legitimacy of democracy. Prejudice and collective defence provide a bridge between right-wing populists and religion. But religious ideas work in two directions. While religious commitment and a social religion prove to be a bridge to civil engagement and civil society, a strongly individualised, traditionalist religiosity tends to create a separation from other social groups and people as well as from democracy and its values.

In their chapter on religious and political attitudes, Regina Polak (Vienna/Austria) and Dirk Schuster (Krems/Austria) investigate the effect of religiosity on political attitudes towards immigrants and Muslims in Europe, as the acceptance of cultural and religious plurality and tolerance are crucial for liberal democracy and a focal point of conflicts about values, politics, and religion. The authors critically discuss selected theories about secularisation, individualisation, and pluralisation of religion to outline the development of religion in Europe and its role in the political arena, by presenting a theoretical model of the phenomenon of the religionisation of politics and the politicisation of religion. They also analyse the effect of religiosity in relation to sociodemographic factors and distinguish different socioreligious types, and provide theoretical interpretations of the results, concluding with the importance of taking other variables such as age, size of town, country-specific constellations, political discourses on migration, and the cultural and historical contexts into account. Furthermore, a plea is made for a multi-perspective pluralisation approach to religion which focuses on the interplay between the individual and politics. Based on their results, the authors assume that conflicts over religious values might be ignited based on the differences between those who are highly religious and those who are not very religious, between generations, between the rural periphery and the urban centres, and finally between groups of different income levels. In all those conflicts, religiosity could be politically instrumentalised.

Markus Quandt (Cologne/Germany) and Vera Lomazzi (Bergamo/Italy) discuss solidarity as one of the core European values described in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000/2016) and the Treaty of Lisbon (TEU 2007/2016), and ask who, why, how much, and under what conditions solidarity is offered. In contrast to earlier research, they focus on the attitudinal perspective on solidarity, not behavioural or policy-preference perspectives. They discuss possible antecedents to solidarity levels as well as questions such as the prevalence of solidarity attitudes among European populations, the degree to which the declared norm is shared among these populations, and whether solidarity attitudes have changed with consecutive crises in Europe. Distinguishing solidarity by close and universal scopes, they find that both are associated with the identification of citizens with communities at different levels and that European societies display a good degree of homogeneity and stability, with levels of close solidarity higher than levels of universal solidarity in most European countries. The religious composition has stronger associations with universal solidarity, while high religious diversity within a country has a very distinct negative effect on both forms of attitudinal solidarity, indicating that religiosity might play the role of an identity marker.

Pierre Bréchon (Grenoble/France) sheds light on the values of the ‘invisibles’, the social class of the poor and often marginalised, and analyses if there are differences in the value patterns of this group compared with others, especially in religious and political values. The precarious tend to be more individualistic and less individualised. They also seem to be less politicised and more dissatisfied with those in power, mobilising less strongly in public action such as voting or social and political protest. In particular, the precarious are less attached to democratic values and show greater levels of xenophobia and nationalism, which means they share many features of populism. Concerning religion, a slightly greater importance is attached to religious attitudes by the disadvantaged categories of the population, though differences are generally quite small. This can be explained by their more traditional and conventional value systems, with weaker propensity for change and slightly stronger conformism.

Part III: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Discussing the questions that arise when an ethical concept of values is transferred from the individual to a political community from the perspective of social ethics, Christof Mandry (Frankfurt am Main/Germany) states that European values should be understood as political values that form the absolute political and ethical foundation for responsible and liberal politics in Europe as an ‘imagined community’. Based on the argument that in the context of European integration the question of European values is about the identification of the citizens with the ‘project’ of European unification, he demonstrates that value semantics can be interpreted as the solution to the political problem of how the European Union can function as a democracy without being a state in its own right. By describing the historical-political process, which in the twentieth century led to the establishment of value semantics as the central expression of European identity, he argues that European values took over a bridge-building function between different historical experiences and cultural imprints of European communities. From an ethical view, this function must be reflected within the tension of the universality of European values, including the generality and abstractness of their normative expectations, and their particular implementations in specific history and institutions.

Barbara Coudenhove-Kalergi (Vienna/Austria) deals with the importance of values in economic contexts, particularly in companies, and discusses the handling of values in management and communication. With a normative approach, she points out the relevance of normative values for business which influence corporate governance and interaction with business stakeholders. She shows how the concept of values originated in the economic sphere and also included the idea of ideal values, as they establish and regulate social relationships. Furthermore, she shows why an ethical approach to corporate values, based on the normative stakeholder view, is necessary for values to fulfil their orienting function. She also deals with the debate on the responsibility of companies to uphold and protect human rights. Therefore, she examines why human rights as a universal catalogue of values are relevant for companies, and how they affect corporations and challenge their handling of values on different levels. Religion, however, does not play a significant role in these debates, occurring when it does primarily on the individual level.

Christoph Konrath (Vienna/Austria) states that despite the fact that human rights and the rule of law are integral to value debates in Europe, the latter are rarely connected with discourses about the law and legal practice. He argues that neither the role of value concepts in legal discourses nor the impact of personal attitudes and values conceptions in legal practice are reflected. Simultaneously, a growing judicialisation of politics and the promotion of constitutional courts as safeguards of rational debate, equality, and human rights can be observed. In this context, the author discusses the social functions of law and the self-conception of legal institutions and people within them. Guided by an interdisciplinary ‘law in context’ approach, he reflects on the conception of the institutional basis of the rule of law by legal scholars in relation to value debates, and demonstrates how and why value debates have gained influence over recent decades, which is connected with a technical understanding of rights, laws, and the rule of law. The author observes that politicians and political debates increasingly aim at enshrining values in constitutions and laws – a tendency that the author argues with a narrative on the preconditions of the modern state and its being used to promote certain value sets. Using practical examples, he illustrates how these developments result in values conflicts that are brought before courts and describes how people, who aim to defend their rights and religious, cultural, and moral views, mobilise the law with a focus on conflicts about migration and religion in the public sphere. Based on his analysis, he argues for a better connection between legal and values debates while respecting the tension between them. In turn, the tension between laws and values can be perceived as a source for strengthening the role of the rule of law, human rights, and legal discourse as safeguards of human dignity, social diversity, freedom, and justice.

Part IV: Future Prospects

Wolfgang Aschauer (Salzburg/Austria) examines current social and political challenges in Europe and the role that values play in them by focusing on three aspects. First, concerning distributional conflicts and the ongoing need to create a higher social balance between classes, he asks if European citizens are still in favour of a higher appreciation of the welfare state. Second, concerning identity conflicts between opting on the one hand for societal closure and approval of a multicultural society on the other, he examines if European citizens generally adapt to the reality of cultural diversity. Third, concerning environmental awareness, he investigates if the increasingly intense climate debate is leading to a focus on protecting the environment. Therefore, he provides an empirically based distinction between major value cleavages in Europe and clarifies potential differences in causal relations, separately analysing the dynamics in major European regions to assess long-term developments regarding perceptions of central social challenges and to detect the drivers for achieving a broader scope of solidarity. While concerns about climate change are more likely to cross the threshold of heightened attention in flourishing economic times, the willingness to spend a part of income on the environment has decreased significantly in almost all Western countries. The gaps between political liberalism in Western Europe and neo-conservatism in Eastern Europe probably further inhibit the defining of a common strategy of sustainability within the EU. The existing cleavage between conservative values and liberal world views (partly) influenced by religion still has a lot of power to explain current perceptions of an ethnic threat versus approval of multicultural society or environmental concern.

Bernhard Grümme (Bochum/Germany) contributes to the volume with a religious education perspective. He discusses what contribution religious pedagogy can make to the current discourse on values in a late-modern society and also discusses the question of the imparting of values. He examines the possibilities and limits thereof as well as the normative and hermeneutic implications. He clarifies the concept of values led by a pedagogical interest and develops a profile of values education which is defined with examples from the research on the European Values Study and the religious pedagogical model of compassion education. Although religious education is not identical to values education, it can make a critical and productive contribution to the current discourse on values because of its specificity regarding the idea of God and its integrative, politically dimensioned concept of education. Therefore, religious values education emphasises the importance of internally guided understanding, experience-based reflection, and critical self-reflection.

Finally, Regina Polak (Vienna/Austria) draws exemplary conclusions and identifies consequences and challenges based on the results of the volume and its research process. She highlights four thematical areas that call for practical consequences in society, politics, education, and research. In light of the background of the diagnosis of the crisis of liberal democracy, she argues for strengthening subsidiarity in political values communication and underlines the need for debating the tensions between universal and particular values, with a focus on the value cleavages between Western and Eastern Europe, but also on significant groups in Europe who do not feel represented in the dominant political discourses. Regarding the role of religion in values discourses, she discusses how religion can be both a problem or a component for solving the crisis of liberal democracy and lists challenges for both political and religious actors and communities. Moreover, she highlights the importance of values education, for younger and older people, and argues that society, politics, and religious communities should attach greater relevance to religious education, as it is of public and political concern. Finally, she summarises future challenges for both the European Values Study and trans- and interdisciplinary values research that have emerged during the research process of this volume.